Cornelia Parker Tickets

Based in London, Parker is renowned for her large-scale installations which push the boundaries of what art can be and how it might function in and impact on the world. She often uses found or discarded materials, which are variously squashed, exploded, shot, burnt, broken, suspended, inhaled, exhaled, chewed, spat, stained or cast from cliffs—subjected to often violent processes of transformation through which they become something other or opposite.

Driven by curiosity and often made in collaboration with others, Parker’s work is one of reversals and inversions. Her acts of unmaking, remaking, and reassembly are thrillingly subversive, recalibrating our understanding of a material, an object, or the histories and possibilities they embody. Ever alert to the urgencies of our time, Parker spins the familiar into incisive and witty metaphors for the political, intellectual, and cultural conditions that shape our world.

This is Parker’s first solo public gallery exhibition in Aotearoa New Zealand, and the first survey of her work since the landmark retrospective at Tate Britain in 2022 that cemented her status as one of Britain’s most celebrated contemporary artists.

Taking over the entire gallery and extending out to an offsite location, this exhibition features over fifty artworks, and includes sculpture, installation, video, works on paper, photography, photogravures, and a new series of paintings made on glass. It brings together Parker’s era-defining suspended installations Thirty Pieces of Silver (1988), Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991), Perpetual Canon (2004) and War Room (2015) with a number of more recent projects, focusing on work made since the Tate retrospective. Stolen Thunder (A Storm Gathering) (2025) turns found field recordings of thunder and lightning gathered from the four corners of the earth into an immersive, apocalyptic vortex of light and sound. The video installation THE FUTURE (Sixes and Sevens) (2023) is made with and gives voice to a group of school children contemplating their futures amid political instability and climate crisis.

The exhibition maps a new configuration of Parker’s art by bringing these and other recent projects into dialogue with her iconic works to generate new resonances and readings. It offers a rare opportunity to encounter the full scope of her practice: poetic, political, and relentlessly inventive.

The exhibition is curated by independent London-based curator Andrea Schlieker and City Gallery Wellington curator Aaron Lister. Schlieker was previously Director of Exhibitions and Displays at Tate, where she curated Parker’s retrospective.