Mahitahi  – Te Uru x Whitecliffe
20 JUN - 23 AUG 2026

Each year, Te Uru extends an invitation to a tertiary art institution in Tāmakai Makaurau. It is an opportunity to encourage early career artists to develop and present their ideas in a gallery context. This year, the post graduate students of Whitecliffe have developed three distinct interventions: Opening the Fridge, Re_Collection and Dry Run.

Opening the Fridge

20 June – 4 July

Alicja Gear, Emma Hercus, Karlaise Horstmans, Sujin Lim, Harry Lowe, Lauren Simons, Sheryl Steens

To open the fridge is an act of familiarity, a small everyday gesture often reserved for those who feel at home. Inside are traces of care, routine, nourishment, relationship and memory. A quiet archive of daily life.

This exhibition begins with that gesture and expands outward to consider home as more than a physical dwelling. Home can be a feeling of belonging. It can offer refuge and connection, but it can also hold tension, distance, longing, or absence.

This group of seven artists respond to the idea of home through the lens of their own practices and lived experience. Each work offers a personal point of reference while inviting viewers to reflect on their own relationship to home.

Re_Collection

8 July – 18 July

Monique Barnett, Kathryn Carter, Kayla Kasarherou, Fiona Lees, Renee Ma, Kiki Ou, Nicole Zhao 

Re_Collection brings together seven artists whose practices explore time, space and body. This exhibition is a collective inquiry into how memory is gathered, held and reshaped through personal histories, ecological relationships and traces of the past.

Working across diverse approaches to making, the artists reflect on the spaces we remember and the environments we live within, considering how these places continue to shape our sense of self, culture and connection.

As writer and critic Susan Sontag reminds us, memory is never fully fixed or shared in the same way by everyone. Re_Collection invites viewers to consider memory as something active, fragile and changing.

Dry Run

22 July – 23 August

Dry Run Collective

Dry Run
noun [ C ] /ˌdraɪ ˈrʌn/ 

as in rehearsal
a private performance or session in preparation for a public appearance.

“We had time for just one dry run of the play before opening night.”

 With an emphasis on the title Dry Run, the exhibition operates as a series of experimental encounters, focusing on collaboration, a plurality of approaches, and cross-pollination between artists and the Dry Run collective. 

The works presented are not necessarily understood as finished outcomes; instead, the space harbours collaborative experimentation where works can be installed, adjusted, and reimagined in dialogue with one another. By occupying a conventional  gallery environment and entering into a conversation beyond the studio walls, the exhibition functions as a kind of dress rehearsal moving toward an imaginary  opening night, generating new curatorial possibilities through the process