When you arrive at Les Grandes Locos at the 18th Biennale de Lyon in France, you’re confronted with John Miller’s triptych, Honour The Treaty (2001), displayed on three billboards. A line of policemen stands firm in the face of protesters holding a long banner. It’s a remarkable work: what’s more remarkable is that it came to be at Lyon at all.
Ten artists from Aotearoa are represented at the biennale: the largest and most diverse showing of contemporary New Zealand art outside the country in years. Along with Miller, there are established artists including Maureen Lander, Rangi Kipa and Fiona Clark, as well as mid-career artists like Berlin-based Michael Stevenson and London-based Sriwhana Spong. There are also emerging artists, including Ashleigh Taupaki and Yana Nafysa Dombrowsky-M’Baye.
It’s wonderful – and also the result of some deliberate moves, reports Stephanie Post, director of the Office for Contemporary Art Aotearoa (OCAA), part of a contingent who facilitated and fundraised for the New Zealand showing at Lyon.
Since Covid – when the domestic art scene boomed with money trapped in the country and we all turned inward – we’ve got out of the habit of showing internationally. Post, along with others, is determined to change that. “We’re an island connected to the rest of the world by this thing called the Pacific Ocean,” she says. “What happens overseas matters here, and what happens here, matters there.”
In May 2025, Australian-born, Berlin-based Catherine Nichols visited New Zealand, as the recently announced curator of the Biennale de Lyon. She worked with OCAA, the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and Artspace Aotearoa to put together a research itinerary of studio visits. Her exhibition, To Pass from One Dream to Another, would have an Oceanic focus – including 10 artists from Aotearoa.
What followed was a wonderful example of New Zealand hustling on the smell of an oily rag: the supporters secured money from Creative New Zealand for some of the commissions and to ensure the artists could travel to Lyon to install their work, with the rest coming from private patrons, the Waipareira Trust, Motion Sickness, the Govett-Brewster Foundation and MFAT’s Cultural Diplomacy International Programme. Many works were new; others travelled for the first time – including whalebone taonga by Rangi Kipa, which needed export and import permits and had never left New Zealand.
In the end, 50 or 60 New Zealanders turned up in Lyon, including the Ambassador to France and the chair of Creative New Zealand. On the preview day for professionals, Tamahou Temara – Tumu Whakarae General Manager of Toi Māori Aotearoa – led a procession of more than 200 people, including ambassadors, artists, curators and the French press, through the spaces. “This is not a moment for only Aotearoa,” he told Post. “It’s a moment for all Oceanic people. We are guests of the French, and we enter with appropriate gratitude and grace.” They hadn’t practised it. Post: “We were doing it on the fly – but Tamahou knew what he was doing. And it was amazing.”
Fiona Clark
Cosmetic Women, Clark’s colour photographs of sales assistants and mannequins in 1970s Auckland shopping arcades, is shown at full scale for the first time. Also showing is a Polaroid archive of introduced pests trapped and shot on her land in Taranaki.
Ngahina Hohaia (Taranaki Iwi, Te Atiawa, Ngāti Ruanui, Ngāti Mutunga, Parihaka)
Manawa Whenua takes its title from a Māori cultural concept describing an underground spring, the source of whakapapa. The central imagery is of the restorative waters that flow from the artist’s ancestral mountain, Taranaki.
Rangi Kipa (Te Āti Awa, Ngāti Mutunga, Ngāti Tama)
Twenty years of ritual objects carved from the teeth and bone of stranded whales honour the whale as ariki of its domain. Kipa carved on site at Les Grandes Locos during a 10-day residency.
Maureen Lander (Ngāpuhi, Te Hikutū)
Kit-Set Whanaungatanga is a grid of flat-packed harakeke kete that can be assembled, dismantled and rebuilt anywhere. It is a meditation on relationships made through choice and collaboration rather than blood.
John Miller (Ngāpuhi)
Miller has spent six decades photographing Māori protest, from the 1975 Land March to the 150th anniversary of Rangiriri. His 2001 Waitangi Day triptych of demonstrators under HONOUR THE TREATY banners has been blown up to billboard scale.
Yana Nafysa Dombrowsky-M’Baye
This Paris-based Aucklander’s new film follows 19th-century gum arabic from northern Senegal along colonial routes to Lyon’s silk industry. It centres on the Signares, women of African and European descent who became powerful traders on the Senegalese coast.
Sriwhana Spong
Voile-voilà is a pair of stitched silk curtains dyed with American Fanta. Their stepped profile charts 16 years of the London-based artist’s KiwiSaver fund, mirrored to recall a candi bentar, the Balinese split gate.
Michael Stevenson
Serene Velocity in Practice links three classrooms by a walkway. Two restage John Wimber’s 1980s Signs & Wonders seminary course and Peter Thiel’s 2012 Stanford startup class. Seven collapsing wineskins cast democratic institutions as old vessels burst by new wine.
Ashleigh Taupaki (Ngāti Hako, Ngāti Rangitihi, Ngāti Kahungunu)
In the artist’s first international show, Dacrycarpus Dacrydiodes lays 60 one-metre lengths of timber end-to-end as a fallen kahikatea at full height. A sound piece, The Usual Cries of Welcome, sets a karanga against synchronised gunshots, retracing Ngāti Hako’s 1879 stand against land surveying.
Luke Willis Thompson
Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa Trilogy is three films, the first two imagining state broadcasts from an Indigenous-led near future: Aotearoa as a Māori plurinational state, and a second Dawn Raids apology. The third and most recent film, new for Lyon, brings us to present-day Kanak independence campaigners in New Caledonia.
Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon
Until 13 December
Lyon, France
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