Strange encounters

Every two years, the Walters Prize asks New Zealanders to take a leap into the contemporary art unknown. The safety harness comes in the form of four jurors, who select the finalists under near-academic conditions of confidentiality and rigour, as a way to build an often-sceptical public’s trust that what they’re being offered really is the best.

And yet a defining pattern across the past few Walters Prize exhibitions is how quickly they end up looking like tightly curated shows rather than competitions: the internationalist hipsterism of 2012, for example, won by Kate Newby, or the narrative-focused, moving-image oriented reflections on colonialism, Māori identity and place in 2016, won