INFO
| Name | The Nervous System |
| Year | 1995 |
| Start Date | 9 September 1995 |
| End Date | 29 November 1995 |
| Names of Artists | Shane Cotton, Luise Fong, Jacqueline Fraser, Denise Kum, John Lyall, Dennis O’Connor, Ani O’Neill, Michael Parekowhai, Michael Shepherd, Yuk King Tan, Sanjay Theodore, Leon van den Eijkel |
| Curator | Allan Smith |
| Organiser / Venue | Govett Brewster Art Gallery and City Gallery Wellington |
| Artform | Visual arts |
| City | Pōneke Wellington, Ngāmotu New Plymouth |
ABOUT
The Nervous System was a 1995 exhibition curated by Allan Smith, which featured artists exploring “cultural and ethnic identity in change and crisis”. This included Aotearoa Asian artists Luise Fong, Denise Kum, Yuk King Tan and Sanjay Theodore whose work was exhibited widely and frequently during this time. Commissioned by the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, the exhibition was displayed in Ngāmotu New Plymouth before being shown at City Gallery Wellington, where Smith had taken up a curatorial position during the development of the show.
The exhibition illustrates the curatorial currency that contemporary artists working with concepts of multiculturalism and identity wielded during this period. Many of the artworks toyed with and reworked cultural tropes such as Chinese fans, dragons, lei and Cuisenaire rods. Even Dutch-born Leon van den Eijkel exhibited a work that played on acupuncture traditions drawn from East Asian medicine. City Gallery’s own retrospective account emphasises it as “an identity-politics show: “Ethnicity is foregrounded. The catalogue lists the heritage of each artist.”
Several reviewers were critical of the show’s curation. Justin Paton wrote of the show as “a grab-bag of artists” while Louise Garret described the exhibition’s approach to ethnicity as “too facile.” Like Paton, Anna Sanderson viewed the selection of artists as “stock figures” in group exhibitions of the time, and like Garret noted “the feel of official multiculturalism”, which was “paradoxically colourful but dull.”
The title of the exhibition was drawn from an influential collection of essays by anthropologist Michael Taussig, which had been published in 1992. In a footnote in the exhibition catalogue, Smith credited Taussig for “the manic brilliance and richness of his writing on images and identities in crisis”. Using language such as “volatile”, “dislocated”, “shocks” and “crisis” in his exhibition essay, Smith draws our attention to the degree to which multiculturalism in Aotearoa still felt uncertain and unsettled during the 1990s — not long after changes to New Zealand’s immigration system had been introduced.
LINKS
Key works / presentations
9 September–23 October, 1995
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Ngāmotu New Plymouth
31 October–29 November, 1995
City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi, Pōneke
