Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland is located within a significant volcanic field, encouraging inhabitants and visitors alike to stay attuned to a sense of deep time. Made up of around 50 volcanoes, the field enables a connection that extends all the way to Mataaho, kaitiaki of the Earth’s secrets; to te iwi Māori who have lived and continue to live here; to the complexity of urbanisation, with many of these sacred sites having been mined for the city's infrastructure. Deep below this isthmus is an undercurrent that every once in a while bursts through the mantle, ensuring we remember that indeed, the Earth is alive. As a site full of intensity, Tāmaki Makaurau provides an effective lens to consider history as an essential framework for reckoning with the here and now, prompting the questions: which parts of society gather pressure when issues are not tended to? What necessary conversations burst through, fundamentally changing how we live and relate to each other?

As potent voices of their generation, Gordon Bennett’s and Emily Karaka’s work bursts through the status quo. Both artists address the impacts of colonisation on themselves as individuals and the communities they belong to. Their visually divergent but equally propulsive practices can be characterised as history painting inviting new readings of contemporary society by opening up the nexus of politics, visual culture, and the deeply personal. The divergence in their practices creates a powerful friction in the exhibition, amplifying the implications of a fulsome scrutinisation of history. Friction is also evident in their shared approach to working in a highly embodied way by employing scale, dynamic surfaces, and even the inclusion of their whakapapa or themselves. By leaning into friction these artists shatter narrowing expectations of how a contemporary artist who is Indigenous should work and contribute whether in Aotearoa, Australia, or beyond.

Emily Karaka’s vibrant paintings have a pulse. Unashamedly she is an abstract expressionist, largely self-taught. She powerfully activates, line, colour, and language. Like the isthmus Tāmaki Makaurau, Karaka’s current deviates from standard temporal delineations as she engages with kōrero from her tupuna, from today, and tomorrow. As an artist-activist Karaka describes her work as political landscapes. The artworks in the exhibition insert an Indigenous, full body analysis into the subject within the frame. The Hawai’i suite originally commissioned for Hawai’i Contemporary 2025 displays her dedication to sovereignty and the role that primary sacred sites play within her practice. LAW A? (2026), commissioned for this exhibition, takes the basic requirement for survival—land, air, water—as its starting point. Karaka scrutinises the conglomerate agency LAWA (Land, Air, Water Aotearoa), made up of various council, government, education, science, and private sector groups that measure the health of these resources. While the data may be practically useful, it is notable that a Māori voice is not visible. She subtly draws our attention to the way kaitiakitanga plays out in the current environment where transparency around participation and knowledge sharing is more urgent than ever.

Gordon Bennett came to prominence in the early 1990s in Brisbane after graduating from art school as a mature age student. He played a key role in the Brisbane community where as an artist of Indigenous Australian and Ango-Celtic heritage he actively contributed to reshaping conversations on coloniality and identity. Bennett strode into a post-modern conversation, his practice emerged as incisive, confronting, and was often laced with a humorous undercurrent. The artwork in the exhibition captures the breadth of his practice: painting, printmaking, performance, video, and writing. Study for Possession Island (1991) is indicative of his early work which deploys appropriation to address the skewed way that the settlement of Australia has often been portrayed. As he grappled with the physiological toll of working with the weight of violent subject matter, his work embraced more definitively abstract methods. Throughout his career he tested expectations of the artist’s role in the post-colonial conversation, including withdrawing his engagement with media. The ongoing impact of these expectations within and beyond the artworld is further revealed in the writings and video on display, capturing the mutli-faceted lens through which he worked, spanning the raw, fragile, and overtly punk.

This exhibition tracks undercurrents that span a long arc of time and connects Aotearoa with its neighbour Australia. In the current geo-political climate conversations on how we relate to each other in daily and in administered life are often bluntly wielded with little or no consideration of “which history?” Both Bennett and Karaka create a platform for these tensions to play out through their vivid artistic languages. As they produce vernacular history painting, they draw out the complexities innate in common narratives. In taking bold friction-making positions as artists and participants in society they produce a release valve. By releasing tension in this way, their reflections on the world around them bursts forth rather than building up deep below the surface. They offer audiences a pathway to a maturing conversation on our histories and an expansive view of time in order to imagine our futures, together.