Echo
Erika Holm, Ngaroma Riley, Tarika Sabherwal
Erika Holm, Apology, 2025. Detail.
This exhibition features painting and sculpture by three emerging artists from Tāmaki Makaurau. These artists have created works referencing personal, cultural, and fictional narratives that explore the purposes and possibilities of storytelling and mythologies in our lives. Like Echo, the character from Greek mythology who is cursed to only repeat the last words spoken to her, these artists seek to break the curse of repetition in order to create new, future-oriented traditions.
This exhibition is presented with the support of our strategic partner the Chartwell Trust.
Biographies
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Erika Holm is an artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Her work explores desire, the feminised excess of ornamentation, and objects as vessels of memory. With a background in furniture-making, she incorporates wood and metal, as well as bodily matter, into her sculptures. Holm has worked at Apartmento Contemporary Furniture and is currently a workshop technician at Auckland University of Technology. Her work has been shown at Grace Aotearoa and Michael Lett, with a forthcoming exhibition at Ivan Anthony later this year.
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Ngaroma Riley is an artist, curator and organiser of Te Rarawa, Te Aupōuri and Pākēha descent. A founder of Te Ana o Hine, a carving shed led by women based at Te Tuhi in Tāmaki Makaurau, Riley began her carving journey making buddhist statues while working in Japan. Since returning to Aotearoa in 2020 she has completed a Certificate in Whakairo at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa and has exhibited with Season Aotearoa in Tāmaki Makaurau and Te Ara i Whiti as part of Te Tairāwhiti Arts Festival.
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Tarika Sabherwal is an artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau who explores ways to narrativise personal relationships and landscapes within a South Asian mythological framework. Exploring how ancient stories can be reflected in our current lives, Sabherwal’s work primarily uses an airbrush technique and has been experimenting with deconstructing the canvas, drawing inspiration from South Asian textile traditions. Sabherwal has had exhibitions with Khōj in New Delhi, Season Aotearoa and RM Gallery in Tāmaki Makaurau, and Jhana Millers Gallery in Te Whanganui-a-Tara.
Events
In focus with Biljana Ciric and Trần Lương: Learning and unlearning spaces
Question time: A lecture by Yolande van der Heide
Artist talk with Erika Holm, Ngaroma Riley, and Tarika Sabherwal
Audio Described Tour
Deep dive: Lecture by Kairauhī Curator Robbie Handcock
2025 programme
Each year we set one question which our exhibitions and events orbit in the company of artists and audiences. Across the year, we explore what this question offers us and what artworks and their authors can weave together. In 2025, we ask “is language large enough?” You can think of this as one exhibition in four parts, as a score played across a calendar, or maybe even as a forest. Join us.
Lubaina Himid
Michael Parekōwhai
Ethan Braun, Lina Grumm
Darcell Apelu
Martha Atienza
Heidi Brickell
Buck Nin
Yee I-Lann
Erika Holm
Ngaroma Riley
Tarika Sabherwal