Ashleigh Taupaki and Tristen Harwood

Gun, Paper, Obelisk

14 Aug — 04 Oct

Tristen Harwood, research image, 2026.

Ashleigh Taupaki and Tristen Harwood
Gun, Paper, Obelisk

14 August – 4 October
Opening Thursday 13 August at 5.30pm

Curated by Jane Wallace

Gun, Paper, Obelisk brings together the work of Ashleigh Taupaki and Tristen Harwood. The exhibition’s title riffs on the hand game rock, paper, scissors to echo the tripartite nature of the colonial project: militarism, administration, and extraction. Taupaki and Harwood’s intervention and reinterpretation of public records in Aotearoa and Australia indexes the material conditions and spatial encounters of the late 19th century. Through this research, Gun, Paper, Obelisk articulates ideas of colonial ambivalence, ideological justification, and Indigenous self-identification.

Ashleigh Taupaki (Ngāti Hako) is a multidisciplinary artist who works primarily in object, drawing, and research. She has recently completed a PhD in Fine Arts at Elam School of Fine Arts and Design. Her work investigates complex relationships between knowledge systems and cultural understanding through visual and conceptual frameworks.

Tristen Harwood is Indigenous Australian and he works with text. He lives on unceded Wurundjeri Country in Melbourne, where he lectures at the Victorian College of the Arts. Tristen’s art criticism has been published in ArtReview, Memo, Artlink, The New York Times, Overland Journal, Un Magazine, The Saturday Paper, Art Monthly Australasia, Art + Australia, and elsewhere. He is a senior editor at Memo Review and has recently published a chapter in 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art and co-authored the book Variations: A More Diverse Picture of Contemporary Art. His work concerns words; their textual form, theoretical and fictional content, and the materials by which they are transmitted.