The inaugural Aotearoa Contemporary exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki features 27 artists who haven’t shown at the gallery before. Gabi Lardies picks five favourites as a taster.

Aotearoa Contemporary opened on Friday with mini pies, hot DJs and dancing – a change from the usual cheese, mingling and speeches. It’s a new, free-to-visit triennial which showcases a “new and current” generation of artists. This time there are 27 of them from around the motu. It’s running alongside the exhibition for the Walters Prize, our biggest and most prestigious contemporary art award, and acts as a sort of hectic expansion – if you want to know what’s happening in Aotearoa art right now, this is your one-stop shop.

It’s a lot to take in. There are videos, painting, textiles, sculpture, ceramics, photography and dance-based performances. The gallery’s senior curator Natasha Conland says she tried to pick out thematic threads in the eclectic ensemble and came up with “ritual and storytelling, mythology, rhythm, indigenous space and materials”. But perhaps what’s best about the show is that it’s like a lolly scramble – there’s all these different treats scattered throughout the gallery, many of them wrapped up in shiny colourful things. Here are five I enjoyed.

The Killing – Imaginary friends

The Killing are a five-strong collective based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Their collaborative practice began through friendship and continues to be playful. They’re best known for immersive large scale installations which explore queerness, identity and naivety.

‘Imaginary friends’ has been given an entire, almost enclosed room in the gallery, which has become a plush playground. A giant spider stands in the corner with hundreds of plastic teddy bear eyes, a bunny with velvet droopy ears you can drape around yourself as a blanket leans against the wall, a double-headed swan reaches the ceiling, and a reptile claws at the pink carpet with spiked metal studs. Each creature is wonderfully crafted with lush materials and cute details that feel like winks from the artists. The giant squishy friends come with an invitation to rest, play and hug, without fear of wear and tear – after all, “to be loved is to be changed,” wrote the group on their Instagram. When I visited, adults and children alike were taking them up on the offer.

George Watson – Brand I (heart) and Brand II (Cross)

George Watson’s (Ngāti Porou, Moriori, Ngāti Mutunga) wrought iron brands lie on a concrete platform in a small light-filled room. There are two, each about the length of a forearm. They’ve been stamped into the white walls, imprinting on and burning the surface. Watson’s practice is tightly aestheticised, turning the legacies of colonialism into a visual language. There’s often white paint, picket fences, weather boards and flourishes which could be equally read as kōwhaiwhai or colonial architectural detailing. Under her gaze, everyday New Zealand objects, like an old villa, turn into decaying monuments to colonisation. Watson’s practice often explores ideas of ownership, nationhood and the legacies of colonialism – all deftly portrayed in the branded walls.

Qianhe Lin and Qianye Lin – The Good You

In a small darkened room in the depths of the gallery, the Lin siblings present a new three-channel film. In the printed catalogue, it’s described as a “stylised fantasy family epic”. It brings together many of the themes their practice has grappled with for years – the art of telling fables, the slippery mythology of family history, their own stories and the places and cultures they belong and yet sit outside of. It adds a new motif, fish, and strips back the pair’s digital aesthetic in favour of hand-drawn animations.

‘The Good You’ follows a narrative, voiced over by an unnamed narrator, who often addresses “you” – likely an ancestor. The narrator recounts how this “you” studied freshwater fish farming even though “there is no fresh water here”. The narrator seems both annoyed and amused when the studies culminate in a hobbyist’s fish tank. Though the film is slick and epic, it has moments of levity, like one of the artists flapping their way across the screen.

Te Ara Minhinnick – Ki tua o Rehua

The cubes of whenua that Te Ara Minhinnick (Ngaati Te Ata) has lined up on the gallery floor smell. It’s not a bad smell, but it’s definitely an outdoor smell. In fact, it’s the smells of the three waterways – Te Awa o Waikato, Te Maanukanuka o Hoturoa and Te Tai o Rehua – that surround her ancestral home of Waiuku, where she gathered the materials. Putting whenua in galleries is an act she calls “re-representation,” one which invokes a whakapapa that begins in the land and extends out to herself and her whānau in a statement of tino rangatiratanga. To Minhinnick, whenua is a “site of evidence, a source to remember, and a place of obligation to all”. There’s a sense of the blocks being an archive – the whenua holding histories we should not forget. Out of one block, three tender green stems are growing.

Ruth Ige – Garden (midnight)

Three square paintings, about an arm’s width wide, emanate rich blue tones in a hallway-like space. In ‘Garden (midnight)’, faceless figures wear pale dresses that glow. It’s the work of Ruth Ige (Nigeria, New Zealand) and there’s something magical, Octavia Butler-esque, about it. Ige, like many contemporary artists, is grappling with visibility and representation, particularly as it relates to Black life. Ige immigrated from Nigeria when she was 11, and has previously recalled experiences of racism here. In her figurative representations, the people, all Black, are anonymous. They hold a myriad of lives, representations that are dynamic, rather than fixed, stereotypical and restrictive. It’s expansive and protective portraiture.

Aotearoa Contemporary is on at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki until 20 October. Entry is free.