John Hurrell – 7 January, 2026

Four sets of initially ‘incongruous’ sculptural objects are presented on the Auckland Art Gallery’s northern projecting terrace, intended to be viewed from the Gallery interior (through glass) and (outside) via the nearby park. These linked-up Ammon Ngakuru works are made in cast bronze, cut metal sheets or carved stone, depicting a curtain, a flower, a mini flour store, and a group of house flies.

You might wonder, thinking about the title, whether this reviewer has (in his apparent dotage) forgotten how to count properly, or does the discussion depend on what a ‘scene’ consists of-that possibly being plural in its contents?

Looking like an elegantly austere Puritan barn, the horizontal flour store on the low wall is a long simple building with 12 window/doors. It doubles as a potential bird-feeding house, though here it is clean and unused by local avian friends or ornithology-besotted gallery staff/artists.

On the other hand, the two tall black vertical ‘curtains’ that dominate the terrace are solid obstacles, rumpled, ominous, glossy and ugly, while three black flies sit humping on a large horizontal oval block of white limestone Dove soap. Disgusting ‘contamination’ intrudes, being presented within a luckless ‘sea’ of purity.

A cluster of translucent pale pink florets diagonally resting on the outer low wall of the terrace introduces a delicate ‘sensitive’ ambience in the bright sunlight, counteracting the presence of sinister ‘evil’ from the theatrical melodramatic curtains normally used for concealing. The bunch of ethereal petal-less stalks is about to topple off the building and over into space.

This is an intriguing ambiguously-symbolic show from Ngakuru, loaded with interacting black and white (or pink) sculpture, wide in speculative interpretative possibilities and (unsurprisingly) poetically alluding to the politics of race relations in Aotearoa.

John Hurrell

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