The 2020 Arts Foundation laureates have been selected, awarding seven outstanding artists who represent the diversity of New Zealand and the arts in Aotearoa right now.

The past nine months have not been easy for artists all around the world. In New Zealand, lockdowns and financial disruption caused by Covid-19 have put a lot of the mahi our artists do on hold or cancelled altogether, and in a recession, it’s often the arts that suffer first. The arts are integral to giving us a greater sense of wellbeing and connectedness in our communities. Now, more than ever, it’s crucial that we celebrate those who have made outstanding contributions to their artistic discipline.

The 2020 Arts Foundation Laureate Awards were announced in September which for our artists are symbolic of the heights that can be scaled as a creative in Aotearoa. For the Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi, they are a recognition of those who are outstanding in their fields and have made an impact on New Zealand. 

Names like Michael Parekōwhai, Barry Barclay, Lisa Reihana and Dame Jane Campion are among the 100-strong award winners of the past 20 years, representing not just the height of their craft, but their own unique backgrounds and the diversity of the arts in Aotearoa. This year the awards highlight another seven New Zealand artists who have made an impact on the many fields they all sit in.

Arts Foundation chair Garth Gallaway says this year’s group of laureates represent a unique time in history, one that hopefully inspires even more from the artists among us. “In the current climate – which has devastated New Zealand’s creative industries – the Arts Foundation believe it is more important than ever that we continue to celebrate and empower our most outstanding artists, especially those whose practise has a significant impact on Aotearoa.

“We’re incredibly proud to see such a diverse group of recipients, who individually stand out in their respective fields and within their communities. Collectively these artists help make up the rich cultural fabric of our country. We can’t wait to see how they continue to mark their mark.”

Introducing the seven 2020 Arts Foundation Laureate Award recipients:

Tusiata Avia MNZM, Christchurch: Poet, Writer, Performer

Receiving the Theresa Gattung Female Arts Practitioners Award 

The Ōtautahi born-and-raised Sāmoan poet, performer and writer redefines what it means to be a Pacific New Zealander with her poetry.

She has travelled the world performing her one-woman poetry show Wild Dogs Under My Skirt, authored four critically acclaimed poetry collections including her forthcoming publication The Savage Coloniser Book, and won countless awards for her poetry including the 2013 Janet Frame Literary Trust Award and was on the shortlist for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. 

On top of this, Avia has established her place as a leader in the Christchurch community, responding to the earthquakes and recent terror attack with powerfully uniting literature. She draws on her Pacific Island whakapapa in her work, examining the sometimes uneasy relationship between New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, and exploring the nuances of that relationship between place and identity.

In January, Wild Dogs Under My Skirt made its American debut at the Soho Playhouse in New York, for which Avia won the 2019 Outstanding Production of the Year and this year she was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to Poetry and Arts. 

Poet and novelist Sia Figiel says: “Tusiata Avia’s poetry is quite revolutionary in the sense that, not only does it define the face of Pacific literature in New Zealand, but it redefines the face of New Zealand literature itself.”

Shayne Carter, Dunedin: Musician, Author

Receiving the award for music and literature

Known for his involvement in the post-punk music scene in Dunedin during the Flying Nun years, Carter has inspired many generations of musicians with his lyrical prose and beautiful compositions. 

Carter has had a lengthy career in the music industry, beginning at local Dunedin radio stations 4XO and Radio One, and then in 1983 forming the band The Doublehappys with friends Wayne Elsey and John Collie. In 1985 he formed iconic New Zealand band Straitjacket Fits and over the next nine years won various awards, including best album for Blow, and top male vocalist in the 1994 New Zealand Music Awards. 

He then formed the group Dimmer, in 1995, which once again won a string of awards and more recently released a piano-based album named Offsider in 2015.

Writer and musician Nick Bollinger said of Carter’s Dunedin music career: “There were some other brilliant musicians, don’t get me wrong. But Shayne was different. Shayne was a rock star, and he knew it. He was actually aware of his charisma and what it meant to be a performer.”

Carter’s prolific career as an energetic, hard-working performer has helped to shape the emotional landscape of New Zealand music, and a recent foray into non-fiction novel writing with Dead People I Have Known earned him both the Royal Society Te Apārangi Award for general non-fiction and an Ockham New Zealand book award.

Ahilan Karunaharan, Wellington: Actor, Writer, Director, Producer

Receiving the Sir Roger Hall Theatre Award 

Karunaharan’s goal to create diversity in the theatre and amplify the voices of those who are often unheard has earned him acclaim both here and abroad throughout his career as an actor, writer, director and producer. 

UK-born, New Zealand-raised and of Sri Lankan Tamil descent, Karunaharan draws on his rich cultural background in the work he does, in his words “to break boxes that [minority voices] are put into and collaborate with those who don’t get the centre stage often.”

In 2012 he founded theatre company Agaram Productions, one of the most important development theatre companies in the country, which founded and produced the first ever South Asian Writers’ Festival in Aotearoa. 

Throughout his extensive career as a playwright and director, Karunaharan has tutored and inspired many to use their voices, and in 2018 won the Bruce Mason Playwright award for his work as an outstanding New Zealand dramatist.

Yuki Kihara, Auckland/Sāmoa: Interdisciplinary Artist

Receiving the My Art Visual Arts Award

Interdisciplinary artist Yuki Kihara wears many different hats in the Aotearoa art space. A dancer, visual artist and curator, she draws on her background as a Sāmoan-New Zealander, producing work that explores Pacific cultures and how post-colonial history intersects with race, gender, spirituality, ecology and sexual politics. 

In 2008 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City acquired her works after presenting a solo exhibition of highlights from Kihara’s artistic practice, entitled Living Photographs. Her art also lives in the collections at Te Papa, the Queensland Art Gallery, the British Museum and Giorgio Armani and has been shown in countless exhibitions and biennale around the world. 

She’s worked with some of the most notable galleries in the world as a curator and content director, and holds a place not just as a shining star of New Zealand art, but internationally. In 2019, Kihara was chosen by the Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa as the New Zealand artist representative for the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, 2022.

Moss Te Ururangi Patterson, Auckland: Choreographer, Artistic Producer

Receiving the Burr/Tatham Trust Award

A renowned Māori choreographer and dancer, Patterson is known by those who have worked alongside him for bringing humility and integrity to every job he does. Held in high regard by his peers for his passion and immense skill as an artist, his career has sent him all over the world as a sought-after artist in the indigenous dance space. 

With more than 17 years of experience creating and delivering powerful performances, he has worked on performances across a diverse spectrum of artistic taste, from a series with the Auckland Philharmonic Orchestra to co-choreographing the opening of the Rugby World Cup in 2011. 

Patterson led the Atamira Dance Company as artistic director from 2010, becoming the first artistic director and leading the company to international recognition. In 2013 his works Moko and Haka were selected for presentation at a prestigious international dance festival Jacob’s Pillow, in the US.

Working in the dance space, Patterson is committed to incorporating Māori culture into what he does, and in 2018 was commissioned to produce a te reo Māori interpretation of a work for the Royal New Zealand Ballet. “That’s what really fires me up, being able to work on something that has ancient roots but at the same time is fresh and new,” he said of the opportunity.

FAFSWAG, Auckland: Interdisciplinary Arts

Receiving the award for interdisciplinary arts

FAFSWAG hit the New Zealand arts scene with force eight years ago when it was established as a safe space for queer indigenous creatives, activating public spaces and pushing new ideas into the public realm about what it means to be queer, brown and taking up space.

Since then, it’s become a community of some of Aotearoa’s most talented filmmakers, artists, musicians, dancers and more, and is well-known for their annual voguing contest, the FAFSWAG ball. They have carved a space for artists who may have previously felt left out or even unsafe in predominantly white arts spaces. 

Pati Solomona Tyrell, an artist from FAFSWAG, says his creative process is all about challenging the “norms” society has created. “Queer, indigenous and Pacific would probably be the three main words I’d come up with to describe my work. Storytelling obviously, definitely identity and looking at those intersections as queer, indigenous, Pacific people, and then creating new counternarratives.”

Ariana Tikao, Wellington: Singer, Composer, Taonga Pūoru Player

Receiving the Jillian Friedlander Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa Award 

Tikao is a singer and composer, and is part of the revival of the practice of taonga pūoro playing. Using her music to recreate stories from her tīpuna, Tikao draws on her Kāi Tahu whakapapa to explore themes relating to identity and mana wahine. 

With three solo albums, Tikao has become known for her captivating live performances and involved with many collaborative projects over the years, including a 2015 commission by the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra to compose the first concerto for taonga pūoro Ko te tātai whetū. 

In 2019 she toured with Atamira Dance Company for their performance of Onepū, the original story of which was written by Tikao’s great-grandfather about wahine atua of the wind and other elements. “We see these atua and this story as being able to connect us with our environment and whakapapa [which is] very important in this day and age… that we remember we’re connected to our environment and not separate from it,” she said of the show. 

Her music has featured on many New Zealand television shows, films, theatre performances and online media and she uses her knowledge of taonga pūoro to teach the beauty of Māori arts.

Covid-19 taught businesses that one workplace doesn’t fit all employees. Ben Fahy learned about what flexibility really means in a modern office. 

Vaughan Fergusson, the founder and director of retail software company Vend, lifts up his laptop and gives me a glimpse of Vend HQ a few days after the second lockdown was eased in Auckland. 

“It’s tumbleweeds in here,” he says. 

In the Before Times, around 150 people were beavering away in this office every day. But for Vend, along with an increasing number of businesses forced to head for home in recent months, there’s been a realisation that work is not just a place you go, it’s a thing you do. 

Previously, Fergusson says the company had a reasonably flexible but fairly organic policy on working from home. If someone asked they’d generally be able to, but the expectation was that everyone would work together in the office most of the time. But after experiencing the other extreme during lockdown, he says the exec team decided to get everyone together, question everything, figure out what did and didn’t work and settle on its long-term flexible working principles. 

One of the big outtakes of this forced experiment – and something Fergusson talks about as if it was a major blind spot – was that everyone had a different preferred style of working. Introverts loved working from home, extroverts loved working from the office and the ambiverts liked a bit of both. 

“Our office is completely open plan so we had basically been expecting everyone to be the same and work the same way. A lot of people realised that they liked working a certain way. They had just never had the opportunity to work that way before.”

Businesses are designed to be efficient. Everyone working the same hours in the same office is a blunt but understandable corporate instrument, and it’s become the default because having different rules for different people is so much harder to manage. But companies manage some very complicated things, Fergusson says, so if they truly believe that people are their most valuable asset, then they will be able to figure out a way to do it. 

“There isn’t a simple blueprint we can apply because when you throw in all the variables of people’s lives, whether it’s kids, flatmates, commutes, and all their different working styles, you just need to adapt and have a flexible policy so people can work the way they feel most productive and safe.” 

Vend christened its policy the “omniwork style”. 

“In retail, there’s a thing called omnichannel and our first principle, just like retail, is that we value interpersonal connections. That’s how you build culture – in person – so where possible, we’re going to do that. Even though we’ve said we’ll have a flexible working style, there will be two days a week we need to be together. Every Thursday is company day and we all come into the office and each team decides on another day that suits them. There was some debate about whether mandating specific company days was too inflexible, but six months ago everyone was in the office every day.”

Eating their own dog food

It was inevitable, really. For many, “you’re on mute” has become the breakout phrase of 2020 and Jodie King, Vodafone’s freshly installed chief people officer, couldn’t see or hear me at the start of our video meeting where we were meant to be discussing the future of work. 

“How ironic!” she typed in the chatbox before we ended the meeting and started another successful one. Fortunately, King, who spent around seven years at Air New Zealand before resigning in January, has become very well-accustomed to the awkwardness of meeting new people on a screen. 

“I transitioned to Vodafone during the first lockdown,” she says. “All of my induction was facilitated online, I did my pepeha, my mihi to the entire organisation online. I met all the exec team and my own team online. I was really impressed at how smoothly it ran.”

Vodafone has always pushed a “mixed modality of working” and while they weren’t preparing for a societal meltdown like Covid-19, the flexibility that had been built into the business over many years and the digital tools it had developed meant it was able to very quickly get its staff working from home and could continue to function during lockdown.  

“We did that a lot earlier than other organisations and that put us in good stead when it ramped up. Our employees felt like we cared and weren’t putting them in any danger because we connected with our sister companies overseas, and we moved fast with a strong people-first principle.”

Just as Amazon trialled its cloud server system on its own business before rolling it out to customers, Vodafone also decided to “eat its own dog food” and, after proving that its suite of road-tested products and processes was able to keep its staff productive and healthy – and keep the business humming – it’s now offering that package to other companies as part of its modern workplace strategy. 

All well and good

In his book Messy, economist Tim Harford shares examples of disorder creating the momentum needed for necessary change. Many businesses were shocked into action when Covid hit and were forced to quickly roll out tech solutions (and sometimes roll out desks and comfortable chairs) to enable their teams to keep working. But just as the productivity gains of electricity took decades to kick in because factory owners and managers didn’t know how to get the best out of the technology, there’s still a lot to learn when it comes to flexible working. 

At the office, King says good managers are likely to notice signals that all is not well or that someone’s burnt out, but a more proactive approach is required when you can’t pop by their desk for a chat. To deal with that, Vodafone created an app called Vlife, which asks employees questions about where they will be that day and how they’re feeling.

“Every morning we have to check-in, say whether we’re coming into the office, whether we’re healthy and happy, and whether our whānau is healthy and happy. And if not, we have the ability to do something about it, so our people know the questions are coming from a good place.”

King says compliance with the questions is close to 100% and, pleasingly, despite the changes to working situations and the stress of a raging global pandemic, she says the range of efforts to manage wellbeing remotely has avoided a spike in terms of the numbers of employees accessing its assistance programme. 

With the separation between home and work erased, boundary setting and expectation management are also crucial, she says, and that often comes from the top. 

“Jason [Paris, Vodafone’s chief executive] would say to the team ‘I’m taking an hour out now to take my kids for a bike ride’ and then post a photo of it”, which showed people that it was okay to do the same. The exec team also did live streams and tried to normalise their own personal struggles. 

King says she had a lot of feedback about how draining it was to be in back-to-back video meetings, so Vodafone instituted a “no meeting lunch hour” policy to encourage staff to take rest breaks and asked managers to check in with their teams by text or phone to make sure everything was okay. 

“When people were struggling, particularly when they had young kids, it was just about cutting them a bit of slack, and showing that you knew it was hard and allowing them to reconnect later.” 

Having spent her career in HR, it’s perhaps not surprising that King loved getting a peek into other people’s lives (turns out she has the exact same piece of Australian Aboriginal art as the CFO and the CIO, which she finds very strange). But for Fergusson, he says he was struck by how working from home suited some but not others. He was lucky enough to have a home office, but lots of his co-workers were sharing space with flatmates or had young kids at home, and that enhanced his empathy and showed him why some people were so keen to get back to the office.

“There were a surprising number of people who were working from wardrobes,” he says. 

Culture makes the yoghurt 

While businesses that embrace digital technologies are proven to be more productive, there are often unrealistic expectations placed on the tools being able to fix problems. King and Fergusson both say it’s more about learning how to use them and how to complement them.

Google’s Project Aristotle research tried to zero in on what made an effective team, and one of the main findings was that it’s not necessarily who’s on the team, but how the team works together. As a cloud evangelist, Fergusson says they were able to “pick up their laptops and move to a different place” pretty easily, but the company had spent years developing its “Slack etiquette” and figuring out the best way to use that platform to communicate with each other. 

“There’s no rule book. It needs to adapt to your culture and how you work. And it’s taken a lot of time and experiments to get it to work for us.”

“That’s been really enjoyable because we’re getting all these tech guys saying ‘it’s all about the culture’, and I’m saying ‘yes, you get it!’” adds King. “That’s why my product team is getting me to spend so much time speaking to other leaders. Technology is an enabler. And technology will fail if you don’t know how to use it or create the environment in which it’s used.”

Hear our voices, we entreat 

Successful flexible work policies often boil down to trust – and good measurement. King believes a lot of the more conservative workplaces were surprised at how smoothly the shift to remote working went, perhaps disproving the common managerial paranoia that workers will take the piss when they mostly just want to do a good job. But the question she gets asked the most from other business leaders is how to prove that productivity hasn’t decreased when you can’t see your staff. 

“If you’re hitting your numbers, and if people are delivering their outcomes and KPIs in their roles, I don’t give a scooby whether they’re doing it from their bedroom in their slippers. It’s all about whether they deliver. And we’re not seeing any reduction in productivity so it’s working for us.”

The employees seem to agree: when surveyed, almost 90% of Vodafone’s staff thought they were just as, or more productive, at home than they were in the office. A recent Otago University study also showed that 89% of workers wanted to continue to work from home at least some of the time, paradoxically showing that lockdown was a liberation of their time rather than an impingement on their freedoms. And now, just as purpose is becoming an important recruitment issue, so too is flexibility. 

“It’s staggering,” says King. “Around 70% of millennials and the younger workforce would rather have flexibility than a pay rise. And when I do interviews for our senior leaders, it is a topic for all of them … The best employers are always employee-led and I would be really cautious about ignoring requests for more flexibility because you’re going to lose talent.”

Short-term pain, long-term gain?

So is this a flexible blip born out of necessity, or a fundamental shift that could be the greatest productivity boost in a century? Fergusson’s cynical view is that if a vaccine is created we’ll gradually go back to the old ways of doing things because we’re creatures of habit, likening the spike in ecommerce to the spike in remote working. 

“As soon as we leave lockdown, everyone’s back into the retail stores. We had these weird waves of pent-up demand for the office, then everyone drifted away, then people started coming back, the office got quite busy, then we had the next lockdown, and now it’s tumbleweeds again. We’ve been working really hard to get comfortable with the ambiguity of what could happen.” 

But the longer that ambiguity exists, the more he believes we’ll develop new muscle memory and the more questions businesses will ask about whether they really need the long commutes, expensive office space and rigid hours. 

While the technologists tend to believe their solutions will always “make the world a better place”, efficiency isn’t everything and some things just can’t be replicated online. A company is basically a collection of humans rallying around an idea and Fergusson believes that maintaining a culture does require real human contact and an understanding of intangible value. 

“I talked a lot with Ryan [Baker, the co-founder of software company Timely],” says Fergusson. ”They’ve always been digital-first and focused on remote working, but one of the first things he shared with me was that being 100% remote doesn’t work. You need to have the culture, you need people coming together and sharing things. I didn’t really appreciate it at the time, but having had the experience, that stuff is hugely valuable and it’s the stuff we miss the most. We celebrate birthdays with cake. We do a Friday wind-down, where we all collectively breathe a sigh of relief. That’s the stuff that keeps the company glued together.”

King agrees and says her job is all about building trust and deep relationships, and that comes with time and genuine connections. 

“We don’t want to have a 100% remote workforce because you miss those corridor conversations, the spontaneity, and the opportunities to nurture young talent. We are social beasts and I will always try to break bread with someone. That’s my way of showing them I care about them.” 

The concepts of the two-day weekend and regular paid leave have evolved over time as workers demanded better conditions. Both are now (depending on the job, of course) completely accepted and King thinks this could be the moment flexible working starts its journey towards normality.  

“I really don’t think this is going to die off,” she says. 

“The companies that use their product suite better and really see this as an opportunity are going to leapfrog their competitors. There’s been a seismic shift in the way we work. And if people are resistant to that you’re just not going to get the best out of your people.”