International curator and festival director Juliana Engberg resolves to “continue to enable, craft, produce and exhibit work by artists so that we can all go on discovering who we are and what we care about”.

From her partial lockdown in Auckland, away from home in Australia, she is shocked and challenged by the predicament of festivals, museums and theatres, but determined to find ways for these places to continue, to operate and thrive.

“I realise why I continue to work with art, in all its forms - musical, movement, literary, visual - because it’s a means by which we step out of the commonplace into a suspended moment of encounter, so we can contemplate and release our emotions and curiosity. Art might be surprising, confusing, strange, delightful, inspire love or disgust; it helps us move through our lives in all their dark, light and unstable passages. During these dark lockdown times, it’s art that makes me completely forget I am just a lump of chemical and biological processes that could catch or infect another with Covid-19.”

Image: Juliana Engberg (Credit: Kay Campbell) Show less