Five of our cutting-edge MARS stars are landing on Aotearoa! With our show The New Now, these innovative voices each speak to our global present.
Telly Tuita
Navigating diaspora and cultural memory, New Zealand-based Tongan artist Telly Tuita presents for the first time internationally his performative portraits embodying and celebrating the figure of Mai, the first Polynesian to visit Europe in 1774. Known for his charm and sophistication, Mai challenged European stereotypes of Polynesian people. Telly styles Mai as an influencer, exploring the connection of past histories to the present delving into the ideas of celebrities and myth-making.
Kenny Pittock
Uncovering unexpectedly poetic everyday moments, Kenny Pittock uses ceramic to memorialise discarded shopping lists found in Auckland and Wellington. Kenny finds both the humour and the human in the seemingly mundane—collecting and recasting these discarded moments, These hand sculpted ceramic shopping list sculptures are an intimate time capsule, creating a permanent tribute to a fleeting moment. Despite their anonymity they’re extremely intimate, providing a unique insight into the people we pass in the aisles
Miranda Hine
Brisbane-born, London-based Miranda Hine presents Things in the canal from my walks, a series leaning into forms of personal collecting and documentation. Drawing from her camera roll, Miranda retrospectively seeks out patterns, allowing images that seem disparate to become connected and take on new meaning. The series brings together moments of the bucolic and the scuzzy under a broad, arbitrary categorisation, collating scenes from walks along canals in East London. Following Miranda's sellout show at Sydney Contemporary 2025 as featured in Art Collector, this new body of work continues her investigation into forms of cataloguing and curating experiences of the world as a way of making sense of it.
Painter Tony Lloyd presents work from the series Deep Time, a response to his time walking through the monumental beauty of New Zealand's South Island. Spending a month hiking around Arthur's Pass, Otago, Aoraki National Park and Fiordland, Tony's process starts in walking, allowing one to gain an intimate understanding of the landscape. Immersed in these vast natural wonders, Tony's paintings attempt to translate the profound feeling of being overwhelmed before the magesty of Aoraki or the panorama of the Darran mountains—places far beyond the human scape, embedded with deep time.
The Huxleys
Globally celebrated artist duo The Huxleys use photography to champion joy as a radical act, two queer flowers blooming in a dark world.
Together, these MARS artists form a dialogue with our contemporary moment—globally fluent and urgently attuned to The New Now.
