PA2026 REVIEWS: Calling Us Forward

Reflections on The Performance Arcade 2026 By Mrittika Ghosh

I arrive at the grassy patch behind Te Papa just in time for the opening ceremony, and already the festival is buzzing. There is perhaps no better venue for this year’s Performance Arcade core concepts—wāhi huihuinga, diaspora, and moana—than the Wellington Waterfront. 

As children run on and off the stage during introductory speeches, founder and director Sam Trubridge remarks that some members of the team and artists participating in the programme this year, now in its sixteenth iteration, were once young children running around the festival themselves. The Arcade is a living, breathing institution sustained by the community’s dedication to returning each year as it evolves. It is less a fixed event than a rhythm in the city’s cultural life, having never skipped a year since 2011. 

There is a multigenerational ease here, a recognition that the public sphere of art is also a playground. One of the container works, Daniel Beban’s PET Sounds, is an installation of plastic bottles made of single-use PET (polyethylene terephthalate) arranged like instruments throughout the space. Suspended, sculpted together, and arranged to be struck and shaken, they transform industrial waste into creative potential. Early in the evening, this installation attracts several children experimenting with the bottles as instruments, approaching everyday objects with curiosity and reimagination. 

Similarly using play and participation as an entry point to considering larger existential concepts, Slovak artist Katarina Balunova’s container work, Mapping the Memory, is full of fragmented vintage maps to be drawn on freely and layered onto the walls of the container. The first time I walk by, I see children delighting as if in an art classroom, layering messy drawings and inchoate handwriting over the carefully deliberated borders of world maps. Once I find a moment to duck inside and take up a marker myself, I am struck by how transgressive it feels to colour across such authoritative drawings as maps. In a festival celebrating diaspora, the work invites me to consider how movement and bodies have been controlled and defined throughout history by these bits of paper. When I return a few days later, the walls have been papered over in denser layers, a collective project of revising lines for ourselves.

With the concurrent live performances, sonic installations, and interactive experiences on all sides during opening night, I am perpetually catching the tail end of one work while being called toward another. During a break between performance artists, I duck into Bikka Ora and Alexa Wilson’s installation container, The Sky is Performing. This container has a live projection of the moving sky on the ceiling, encouraging participants to lie down and watch the live-feed simulating the experience of looking up while in a kayak. In the midst of an urban arts festival, surrounded by human-made creative endeavours, Ora and Wilson’s installation is a grounding reminder that simply looking up is its own disarmingly simple artistic experience. The capricious Wellington skies are not just the backdrop to the festival, but a collaborator.

In introducing the Te Ara Moana Moves series, guest curator Tupe Lualua notes that some artists have travelled across continents to present their work here, while others live a few streets away. Diaspora is more than a theme; it is a logistical feat accomplished by the team, enacting transoceanic connection in just the fact of gathering. The result is that art-curious Wellingtonians can cross the ocean as easily as crossing the waterfront path to connect with ideas and performances that span hemispheres.  

The pop-up bookstore nestled near food and drink carts is a sheltered container that invites a slow, cozy browse, complete with a reading nook. Here, tomes of South Asian anti-caste literature courtesy of “other kitaab ghar” are shelved beside Aotearoa-made zines and books provided by Book Haven and Rebel Press. The booksellers offer a thoughtfully curated selection of companion texts for the ideas unfolding outside, extending the festival’s concepts from visual experiences into print.

When I return for a second visit to the Arcade, long past sunset with less generous Wellington weather, I am there to see Jang Huddle’s video, Baptized in a Public Bathhouse, in full. The meditative video immerses viewers in a humid, empty bathhouse with close-up shots of the narrator performing cleansing rituals. Within the festival’s diaspora-themed context, the narrator’s repeated refrain, “they said I could be reborn,” feels like an echoing ache reflecting on how such intimate rituals are stretched across future generations and geographies.

Studio Kiin, the collective which put together Black Salt, Black Stone, articulates a futurism that is specific to Black Oceania. The container is at once minimalist in design and enveloping. Upon entering, you are met by long strips of shimmering pink streamers hanging from the ceiling. At first glance, it feels celebratory and festive. The strands brush your body as you walk through the space, making your movement a part of the work. The brightness of the confetti is in stark contrast to the walls of the container, scattered with black sheets of paper bearing white printed text. Reading the text (poetry, excerpts, political statements) anchors your walk through the container; the fragments all point to a vision of emancipatory Afro-futurism. One particular sheet encapsulates a sentiment whose resonance can be found throughout the festival:

“There is often a feeling that comes first, a feeling that moves the body toward

Another body, across oceans, through a shared understanding of the struggles and possibilities of liberation calling us forward.”

Ornella Mutoni (Black Salt, Black Stone)

The Performance Arcade 2026 does not offer the tidy package of a gallery or museum show. Instead, it stages diaspora and moana as they are lived: abundant, non-linear, joyful, and always calling us forward.

Mrittika Ghosh (she/her) is an arts journalist, communications strategist, and bookseller living between Chicago, Illinois and Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington), New Zealand. She holds an MA from the University of Chicago and received her BA from Mount Holyoke College, where she focused on Francophone and South Asian postcolonial art and literature.