CHRISTOPHER BRADDOCK

A Time of Waiting (2025)

31-07-2026

Lessons in Waiting (2025)

Chris Braddock, Lessons In Waiting (2025). Cotton, wool, foam, nylon, live performance, and kahikatea fallen in Cyclone Gabriel in 2023. Textile fabricators Arlo Pavlovich and Briar McGlynn. Performers acknowledged on performance scores. Part of the exhibition, A Time of Waiting (2025) at Ngutu Kākā, Auckland.

For Lessons in Waiting, participants are invited to activate Chris Braddock’s performance-prop-sculptures. Braddock’s work takes the form of aprons, hoods, cushions, bolsters, and quilts, and in this way seeks to invite participation, through activities such as resting, stopping, contemplating, or being silent. Some ‘props’ are wearable, while another forms a mat or quilt around the central column of the gallery, providing cushioned supports for sitting on or leaning against. Colours conjure up, for example, the orange of workwear/overalls, the yellow of security alerts, and the ubiquitous grey of institutional furniture, suggesting urgent work to be done, but in the ironic arena of slowing down and taking time out.

Braddock’s practice draws on a rich history of performance art as well as histories of meditation practices, including monastic attire and Sufi mysticism. The performance scores, including phrases and actions spoken by participants while activating the props, also draw on common commands or requests to wait, as well as some existential literature including Samuel Beckett’s Not I (1973). Through mining an array of traditions that contrast with the demands of contemporary life, Braddock seeks out positive attributes of pausing and waiting in such a way as to both participate in a rich tradition of performance art, while resisting a pervasive over-professionalisation and rigidity that has become a feature of the increased rise of performance-based practices across the globe. While also exhibited as sculptures, Braddock’s work evokes a provisional quality of earlier modes of performance, requiring us to return at set times for viewing performances, involving ourselves in realising the work through a participatory relationship, and sometimes involving pedagogical workshop sessions as performance.

For more information, see the full exhibition catalogue below.

A Time of Waiting (2025) exhibition catalogue Ngutu KākāDownload

Invitation to Dialogue (2018 – ongoing)

13-04-2022

Artworks

Chris Braddock with dialogue group, Invitation to Dialogue, 2018–ongoing, In How To Live Together, AUT ST PAUL St Gallery, 2019, curated by Balamohan Shingade. Photos by Emily Parr.

On the occasion of How to Live Together, Chris Braddock invited a group to come together every Wednesday afternoon to dialogue in a manner proposed by quantum physicist David Bohm. The number of sessions totaled thirteen, mirroring the duration of Roland Barthes’ lecture course titled ‘How to Live Together’ and recalling the first session in which he said, “We’ll have to hold onto the unsustainable for thirteen weeks: after that, it will fade.”^[1]

Braddock designed a shoes-off installation space involving rolled out carpet and modular cushions that developed a life of its own during the three-month exhibition. This is a profoundly transdisciplinary project between visual arts installation, performance art and collaborative design processes. As part of this process, artist Emily Parr photographed the project as an ongoing participant so as to avoid forms of external ‘documentation’. The images are therefore a collaboration with Emily.

Over the course of the exhibition a core group of dialogue participants emerged meeting every Wednesday. Following the ideas of David Bohm, a dialogue group tries to talk together without hierarchies. There are no leaders, no agenda or appointed topics of conversation, and no conclusions for the group to arrive at. Participants try to suspend their beliefs, opinions and judgements in order to shift the emphasis from the content of thoughts to the process of thinking. This might be a ‘movement of thought’ that emerges from a field of discontinuous and entangled experiences, fears, histories and stories. The intention of a dialogue group is to unravel the view that an individual’s thinking is all their own, singular and fragmented, as if “the one who thinks (the Ego) is at least in principle completely separate from and independent of the reality that they think about.”^[2] As Chris Braddock writes in his email invitation to dialogue, remembering David Bohm, “Love will go away if we can’t communicate and share meaning…. If we can really communicate, then we will have fellowship, participation, friendship, and love, growing and growing.”^[3] Learning from quantum entanglement, dialogue groups aim at opening up potential for what Bohm calls ‘participatory thought’, the possibility of a ground of being that never began or ends, and which unfolds from the environment.[4]

^[1] Éric Marty, ‘Foreword’, How to Live Together: Novelistic simulations of some everyday spaces, notes for a lecture course and seminar at the Collège de France (1976–77) by Roland Barthes, ed. Claude Coste, trans. Kate Briggs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), xii.

^[2] David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge, 1980), xi.

^[3] From Chris Braddock’s second email invitation to dialogue, received 12 June 2019. David Bohm, On Dialogue (London: Routledge, 2014), 54.

[4] Bohm, On Dialogue, 96-9, 103.

Animism in Art and Performance

07-12-2018

Writing

Braddock, Christopher (Ed.). 2017. Animism in Art and Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Animism in Art and Performance explores Māori indigenous and non-indigenous scholarship corresponding with the term ‘animism’. In addressing visual, media and performance art, it explores the dualisms of people and things, as well as ‘who’ or ‘what’ is credited with ‘animacy’. It comprises a diverse array of essays divided into four sections: Indigenous Animacies, Atmospheric Animations, Animacy Hierarchies and Sensational Animisms. Cassandra Barnett discusses artists Terri Te Tau and Bridget Reweti and how personhood and hau (life breath) traverse art-taonga. Artist Natalie Robertson addresses kōrero (talk) with ancestors through photography. Janine Randerson and sound artist Rachel Shearer consider the sun as animate with mauri (life force), while Anna Gibb explores life in the algorithm. Rebecca Schneider and Amelia Jones discuss animacy in queered and raced formations. Stephen Zepke explores Deleuze and Guattari’s animist hylozoism and Amelia Barikin examines a mineral ontology of art. This book will appeal to readers interested in indigenous and non-indigenous entanglements and those who seek different approaches to new materialism, the post-human and the anthropocene.

To order the book please visit www.palgrave.com

ISBN: 86907031

Performing Contagious Bodies: Ritual Participation in Contemporary Art

07-11-2012

Writing

Resetting the Coordinates: An anthology of performance art in Aotearoa New Zealand

31-07-2026

Texts, Writing

Braddock, Christopher; Gordon-Smith, Ioana; Waerea, Layne; and Wynne-Jones, Victoria (Eds.). 2024. Resetting the Coordinates: An anthology of performance art in Aotearoa New Zealand. New Zealand: Massey University Press.

The first anthology/reader of performance art of Aotearoa New Zealand, Resetting the Coordinates offers a lively, 50-year critical survey of Aotearoa New Zealand’s globally unique performance art scene.

From the post-object and performance art of the late 1960s to the rich vein of Māori and Pacific performance art from the early 1990s, its 18 chapters by researchers and practitioners is a major reference for art and performance communities of New Zealand, Australia and further afield.

It discusses the influential work of Jim Allen, Phil Dadson, Peter Roche and Linda Buis, performance art initiatives in post-earthquake Christchurch and queer performance art, among many other topics.

Available here: https://masseypress.ac.nz/products/resetting-the-coordinates

Collaborative efforts in recent performances and participatory artworks (2025)

31-07-2026

Texts, Writing

Braddock, Chris; Shingade, Balamohan. Collaborative efforts in recent performances and participatory artworks. Journal of Visual Art Practice Volume 24, 2025 – Issue 1-2: “Between Hawaiki Nui and the Liquid Continent: Art Practices from the Pacific” edited by Amanda Watson. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/14702029.2025.2506898

This essay considers collaborative methods from the perspective of an artist and a curator. Our reflections stem from within creative practice processes as a way of exploring modes of knowledge interactions, learning, and collaboration. We reflect on performances and participatory artworks that involve complex social interactions across their planning, making and realisation, and draw on conversations to reveal the volatility and changeability of artworks and curatorial strategies. We emphasise that collaborative, cooperative and participatory methods in visual arts projects are inextricably social and political. We discuss two visual arts performance and participatory projects – Invitation to Dialogue (2019) and Conversation Mat (2022) undertaken at AUT ST Paul St Gallery (renamed Te Wai Ngutu Kākā Gallery) in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, aimed at transforming the artistic, curatorial and participatory ego through an exploration of voice. In so doing, we question artistic, curatorial, and participatory ownership and/or dominance. We explore distinctions between project-time and use-time as a way of contrasting designed aspects of collaboration with those that go beyond the control of makers in risky ways. We draw attention to art/life orientations which generate many modes of collaboration. We discuss an attentiveness necessary for attending to the differing speeds of participants.

Open access: https://doi.org/10.1080/14702029.2025.2506898 or download from the link below:

Collaborative efforts in recent performances and participatory artworks Download

Free Public Sauna: Sweaty Conversations in Ngāmotu (2022)

31-07-2026

Artworks

Chris Braddock and Layne Waerea, Free Sweat Cushion-bags (2022). Cotton, nylon & salt tile.

**Layne Waerea and Chris Braddock, Free Public Sauna: Sweaty Conversations in Ngāmotu (2022)**

Curated by Simon Gennard at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and in public sites around Ngāmotu between August and November 2022.

On Saturday 10th September and Saturday 17th September, Layne Waerea (Te Arawa, Ngāti Kahungunu) and Chris Braddock invited participants on excursions with sweaty conversations around central Ngāmotu. Offering Free Sweatsuits and Free Sweat Cushion-bags, the artists led participants in a series of gentle exercises, designed to generate perspiration, while at the same time combining conversation around Ngāmotu’s coastal location, the culture of public sport, and questions around the use, ownership and guardianship of natural resources—including fresh and salt water.

The artists employ humour, collaboration and conversation to explore how social and legal norms determine behaviour and relationships, and where opportunities for thinking and relating otherwise might emerge.

See: https://govettbrewster.com/exhibitions/2022/public-relations-a-performance-series

Moana Nui Social Art Practices in Aotearoa

07-12-2018

Texts, Writing

Vea, John; Braddock, Chris. Moana Nui Social Art Practices in Aotearoa. DATJournal Design Art and Technology, [S.l.], v. 3, n. 2, p. 291-324, Nov. 2018. ISSN 2526-1789. Available at: https://ppgdesign.anhembi.br/datjournal/index.php/dat/article/view/95

This article discusses emerging methodologies in Moana Nui a Kiwa (MNak) (Pasific Peoples) performance art practices in Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ). It explores the ways in which artistic research guides research questions and final research outputs within the context of a practice led PhD degree. John Vea’s (Tonga/NZ) underlying research methods reference Timote Vaioleti’s work on ‘talanoa’ as a MNak notion about respectfulness in personal encounters with people. Vea’s performance practice engages with MNak minority groups — exploring tropes of migration and subsequent interaction with hegemony — where ‘co-operations’ with collectives and small groups challenge some traditional research models of leadership and authorship. These indigenous approaches encourage a different reading of theorists such as Chantel Mouffe and her ideas of navigating artistic activism and agonistic spaces of shared cooperation.

Rehearsing Practice as Research

07-12-2018

Texts, Writing

Webb, Olivia; Braddock, Chris. Rehearsing Practice as Research. DATJournal Design Art and Technology, [S.l.], v. 3, n. 2, p. 325-352, Nov. 2018. ISSN 2526-1789. Available at: https://ppgdesign.anhembi.br/datjournal/index.php/dat/article/view/92

This article explores ways that artists work with people in forms of social performance art practices. Approaching, directing and organising people involves an ethics of attentiveness, including modes of listening, that allows for diverse research outcomes. In this context, Lisbeth Lipari’s 2014 book Listening, Thinking, Being: Toward an Ethics of Attunement discusses philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’ notion of the face-to-face encounter with another as a meeting that must embrace difference. Practices of listening and attunement play a critical role in Olivia Webb’s PhD project at AUT University where her art practice engages participants and diverse communities in music and song. For these projects Webb draws from her experience as a trained choral singer and performance artist and asks how listening is translatable across different cultural groups. These practice-led methodologies, based on ideas of participation, actively amend and redirect her projects.

Skull Acoustics (2017)

07-12-2018

Artworks

Chris Braddock & Olivia Webb, Skull Acoustics (collaborative live performance), 12:00pm, 7 October 2017, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, New Zealand.

Skull Acoustics is a performance artwork made in collaboration with Olivia Webb. Performers face each other and are joined by a PVC acoustic hood-like device that sits over their heads. This acoustic hood references the artwork First Workset (1963- 1969) by sculptor Franz Erhard Walther. By leaning back slightly and pulling the hoods taut, the performers negotiate a balance between both their bodies and the object. Maintaining an equilibrium, they simultaneously hum one note at the pitch of their own speaking voice for a 30-minute period. Humming the sound of your own voice was a direction given by musician, composer and musicologist Pauline Oliveros when teaching participants in her own works how to ‘listen deeply’.

In connecting two hummed notes by way of a physical hood/object, and one that captures and transmits sound waves through its materiality (the type of PVC fabric it is made from), the performance demonstrates a social exchange of sound and voice through physical sculpture and performance.

Skull Acoustics was first performed as part of PSi#22 in Melbourne, Australia in July 2016.

Review of Skull Acoustics by John Hurrell, EyeContact.

Skull Acoustics (2016)

15-08-2016

Artworks

Chris Braddock & Olivia Webb, Skull Acoustics (collaborative live performance), 12:30-13:00, Thursday 7 July and Friday 8 July, University of Melbourne Law Quad, Melbourne. Performance Studies International PSi#22

Olivia Webb is a Ph.D. candidate at AUT University. Her research combines her experience as a choral singer with various time based art forms.

Olivia and I had been discussing the First Workset (1963- 1969) of 58 objects by the sculptor Franz Erhard Walther. He was creating objects from fabric and other materials that spectators could interact with, sometimes in pairs or groups. We were looking with interest at a long fabric ‘hood’ that covered the heads of both participants. At the same time we heard news items about how the Queen’s plastic umbrella ‘acted like a satellite dish’ and amplified her rebuke of ‘rude’ Chinese state officials, reported by Australia’s Daily Mail on 12 May 2016. Apparently, her majesty was clutching a clear plastic brolly in the drizzle which amplified her comments and sent them towards a sensitive directional microphone belonging to her BBC cameraman. An insider told the Telegraph: “Because it’s plastic, it reflects the sound like a satellite dish.” Olivia and I went immediately to Smith & Caughey’s department store on Auckland’s Queen Street and tried out identical clear plastic umbrellas imagining that we might use them to reflect the humming voice in Skull Acoustics. They didn’t work! It was not the umbrella! But what transpired was a hybrid of a Franz Erhard Walther First Workset object and the Queen’s umbrella.

A Time of Waiting (2025)

Lessons in Waiting (2025)

Invitation to Dialogue (2018 – ongoing)

Chris Braddock with dialogue group, Invitation to Dialogue, 2018–ongoing, In How To Live Together, AUT ST PAUL St Gallery, 2019, curated by Balamohan Shingade. Photos by Emily Parr.

^[1] Éric Marty, ‘Foreword’, How to Live Together: Novelistic simulations of some everyday spaces, notes for a lecture course and seminar at the Collège de France (1976–77) by Roland Barthes, ed. Claude Coste, trans. Kate Briggs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), xii.

^[2] David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge, 1980), xi.

^[3] From Chris Braddock’s second email invitation to dialogue, received 12 June 2019. David Bohm, On Dialogue (London: Routledge, 2014), 54.

[4] Bohm, On Dialogue, 96-9, 103.

Animism in Art and Performance

Performing Contagious Bodies: Ritual Participation in Contemporary Art

Resetting the Coordinates: An anthology of performance art in Aotearoa New Zealand

Collaborative efforts in recent performances and participatory artworks (2025)

Free Public Sauna: Sweaty Conversations in Ngāmotu (2022)

**Layne Waerea and Chris Braddock, Free Public Sauna: Sweaty Conversations in Ngāmotu (2022)**

Moana Nui Social Art Practices in Aotearoa

Rehearsing Practice as Research

Skull Acoustics (2017)

Skull Acoustics (2016)

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