_{Image: Chris Braddock, Mat of Silence Activation,  2025. Courtesy of the artist.}

Wednesdays 16 April, 30 April, 14 May, 21 May 2025
12:15 - 12:45pm

Saturdays 19 April, 26 April, 03 May, 10 May, 17 May 2025
1:30 - 2pm

Auckland University of Technology
Level 1, WM Building
40 St Paul Street

For Lessons in Waiting, participants are invited to activate Chris Braddock’s performance-prop-sculptures. Braddock’s work takes the form of aprons, hoods, cushions, bolsters, and quilts, and in this way seeks to invite participation, through activities such as resting, stopping, contemplating, or being silent. Some ‘props’ are wearable, while another forms a mat or quilt around the central column of the gallery, providing cushioned supports for sitting on or leaning against. Colours conjure up, for example, the orange of workwear/overalls, the yellow of security alerts, and the ubiquitous grey of institutional furniture, suggesting urgent work to be done, but in the ironic arena of slowing down and taking time out.

Braddock’s practice draws on a rich history of performance art as well as histories of meditation practices, including monastic attire and Sufi mysticism. The performance scores, including phrases and actions spoken by participants while activating the props, also draw on common commands or requests to wait, as well as some existential literature including Samuel Beckett’s Not I (1973). Through mining an array of traditions that contrast with the demands of contemporary life, Braddock seeks out positive attributes of pausing and waiting in such a way as to both participate in a rich tradition of performance art, while resisting a pervasive rigidity that has become a feature of the increased rise of performance-based practices across the globe.

<sub>Chris Braddock, artist and writer, is professor of visual arts at AUT University, Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland. He is director
of doctoral studies and co-leads the Art & Performance Research Group. His work explores themes such as: animism, dialogue, material trace, ritual, silence, spirituality, Sufism, participation and performance.

His most recent book Resetting the Coordinates: An Anthology of Performance Art in Aotearoa New Zealand (Massey University Press, 2024)—which he co-authored and edited with Ioana Gordon-Smith, Layne Waerea and Victoria Wynne-Jones—is the first anthology of performance art of Aotearoa.</sub> 

_{He is editor of Animism in Art and Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and author
of Performing Contagious Bodies: Ritual Participation in Contemporary Art (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). His performance and installation works have been included in Public Relations at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, curated by Simon Gennard (2022), How To Live Together at AUT ST PAUL St Gallery, curated by Balamohan Shingade (2019), and Material Traces: Time and the Gesture in Contemporary Art curated by Amelia Jones in Montréal (2013). In 2011 he represented New Zealand in Prague’s Veletržní Palace (Museum of Modern Art) for the PQ11 Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space.}