Teowaina Te Rito – Tawhi, 2026. Tin type plate (Ferrotype), 10.6 × 12.7 cm. Kirsten Garner Lyttle.
ARTIST FLOOR TALK
SATURDAY 22 AUGUST, 2PM
Join artist Kirsten Garner Lyttle for a discussion of After Spectacle: Photography, Authority and the Archive. Lyttle will speak about the research and photographic processes behind the exhibition, which examines the historical representation of Māori through photography, archives and nineteenth-century exhibition culture.
Drawing on her own practice and whakapapa, she will discuss the ways photographs can move beyond their colonial histories and be understood through Māori ways of seeing, knowing and relating.
The talk will also reflect on the development of the exhibition, the relationships and conversations that have shaped the project, and the questions that continue to emerge from the research.
This is a free event open to the public.
Māori Tintype Portrait Sessions
SUNDAY 23 AUGUST, 10-5PM
Māori living in Narrm/Melbourne are invited to participate in a tintype portrait session with artist Kirsten Garner Lyttle. Using a historic photographic process dating to the nineteenth century, each participant will sit for an individual portrait made by hand on a metal plate.
Presented as part of the closing weekend of After Spectacle: Photography, Authority and the Archive, the sessions extend the exhibition’s exploration of photography, representation and the archive by creating new images grounded in the present.
The sessions centre Māori self-representation and offer participants the opportunity to contribute to an ongoing photographic project concerned with how Māori have been represented through photography.
Image courtesy of the artist
The artist talk and portrait sessions are free public program events as part of After Spectacle: Photography, Authority and the Archive, which has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia with the support of Blak Dot Gallery.