Living Halls was a collaborative archival project by artist Fiona Jack that engaged with ‘living memorials’ built following WWII, after the New Zealand Government offered subsidies for war memorials to be constructed as utilitarian community spaces. First presented at The Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in 2010, this project comprised paintings, drawings, honour boards, documents, database, photos, stories and audio recordings detailing the social, architectural and art histories of the War Memorial Halls of Aotearoa.
Join Jack in conversation with Living Halls contributor Bill McKay, for a discussion of the project through the lens of the architecture of memory. This conversation will be recorded with a transcript published on Gus Fisher Gallery’s website at a later date.
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Fiona Jack is an artist and educator based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. She is Head of School and Associate Professor at Elam School of Fine Arts, Waipapa Taumata Rau | The University of Auckland, where she has taught since 2007. Fiona’s artistic practice ranges from large-scale public commissions to collaborative projects grounded in social exchange. She draws on recognizable visual and textual languages to examine the systems, social movements, and politics of representation within spaces that hold collective memory.
Bill McKay is an author, historian and lecturer at the School of Architecture and Planning at Waipapa Taumata Rau | The University of Auckland. He is also an architectural critic primarily in Architecture New Zealand and a commentator with his own architecture slot on the country’s national public radio. His most recent books are Urban Aotearoa: The Future for our Cities (2024, Bridget Williams Books) and Worship: A History of New Zealand Church Design (2015, Random House New Zealand). He is currently working on several projects including studying for a PhD on war memorial community centres.
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Image: (1) Fiona Jack and Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Living Halls. Auckland, N.Z: Clouds, 2011. (2) Left: Fiona Jack, Right: Bill McKay.
