Photo: Ngaroma Riley, Tihei... mauri ora!, 2025, elm, macrocarpa, mother of pearl, paua, hand drill, acrylic rod, LED, electrical components, 160 x 120 x 97 cm. Detail.
Courtesy the artist, commissioned by Artspace Aotearoa, 2025

I’m working from home on a Wednesday afternoon when a text pops up in the corner of my laptop screen. Rosabel Tan, Director of Satellites, is asking if I have a moment to jump on a call. It’s a little unusual – we usually just send each other unflattering photos of ourselves and our friends alongside gossip – but sometimes we pretend to be professional colleagues. I jump on the phone. Rosabel has a pitch for me, she’d like me to meet with a young writer who’s trying to develop arts criticism skills, with the possibility of extended mentorship through the Asian Artists’ Fund. I’m unsure what I have to teach a fledgling critic, being someone who adamantly describes themselves as “not a writer”, but I do have plenty of editorial experience, I suppose. I tell Rosabel I’m keen for an initial meeting at least.

Nabeelah Khan and I organise to meet on a Friday afternoon at Bestie. It’s low stakes – an initial hui to see if we gel – and the bustling crowd in St Kevin’s Arcade helps to dull the awkwardness of getting to know each other. Before the meeting, I read some of Nabeelah’s work online. Her clean and reporterly style belies journalism training, and when she asks how a writer can develop their personal voice, it makes sense to me. I also trained as a journalist, though a decade earlier than her, and I can see the teachings of ‘information hierarchy’ and ‘objectivity’ persist in her writing. While I see those skills as valuable for anyone hoping to develop a personal style and critical voice, there’s some unlearning to be done too. The coffee chat goes well, Nabeelah is open and sharp, jotting down notes and taking my recommendations for further reading. I head back to work, impressed by her eagerness to build into a space that’s notoriously dying.

Critical art writing has suffered greatly as the Aotearoa arts environment becomes increasingly difficult to practise in. Evidence shows that due to a perpetually shifting media landscape, stagnant funding and a dwindling pool of experienced writers or opportunities to develop such writers, “Arts criticism in Aotearoa”, as Sam Brooks says, “is comatose.” The run-on effect has also been detailed by practitioners such as Sam (multiple times) and even so far back as 1974, with complaints from Wystan Curnow (noted by Rosabel in The Critic in New Zealand in 2015). It feels like those in the arts have been saying this forever, so is anything really getting worse or do we just love to complain? While the latter may also be true, the industry struggle has been reported on extensively and highlighted most famously in a report commissioned by Creative New Zealand and penned by Rosabel Tan and Dr James Wensley – New Mirrors. Their findings? Basically, yes, we are in the shits now more than ever.

For the last (almost) four years, I have been the lead editor of an online arts and literature journal for LGBTQIA+ writers in Aotearoa, bad apple. It’s an entirely volunteer-run platform, both editors and contributors, and over those years, it’s become pretty well-known for publishing reviews and response pieces. At the time of writing, there are 146 pieces on the website. Now, I’d be hesitant to call all of these pieces arts criticism, as the nature of our arts environment makes it difficult for writers to genuinely write critically of people they call their friends and peers. Still, writers have been able to develop their knowledge and voice through years of working with bad apple.

For me, a benefit of a long-term editor-writer relationship in the critique space is the ability to build a writer's references through the plays you send them to, the books you ask them to read and the art exhibitions you have them attend. Critics need to be active participants in the arts communities they are writing about! This allows them to develop a personal voice and perspective, call back to other works, and provides context for why certain works are being created.

There’s a special relationship a writer develops with an editor over time. We editors get to know all your linguistic foibles, the turn of phrase you return to and the personal experiences you draw from. Writers, if they are open and accepting, bend to an editor’s punctuation preferences (closed em dashes for me, but not Gabi, apparently) and begin to trust our judgment on things such as structure. For emerging writers, this is an incredibly valuable relationship when developing their craft, and one that’s becoming increasingly rare, especially for critique.

How then do critics build up their practice if not through an ongoing relationship with an editor? In other arts spaces, mentorships, which follow similar patterns to the editor-writer relationship but with more altruistic intentions, are common occurrences. Naming a few, there is Tautai’s Faleship programme, the APRA Aotearoa Mentorship Programme, Auckland Theatre Company’s The Engine Room and Artspace Aotearoa’s The Chartwell Trust New Commissions Programme.

The latter, the New Commissions Programme, is a yearly mentorship programme that pairs emerging artists with senior artists and provides financial and mentorship support for the former to create new works for an exhibition at Artspace Aotearoa. The 2025 show, Echo, featuring Erika Holm, Ngaroma Riley and Tarika Sabherwal, is where Nabeelah and I begin our own mentorship. I’ve invited her along, hoping to open a door to an ongoing connection with the gallery. The show’s title feels serendipitous, considering we are about to embark on a journey that echoes the intentions of the programme.

On the day of the show’s press briefing, the gallery floor is full of new faces I haven’t seen at a briefing before, and there’s the awkward dance of small talk before things get underway. Nabeelah struggles with parking and is running late. It's still only spring, but Auckland’s soupy summer texture is starting to reveal itself. Kairauhī Robbie Handcock gathers the group and provides context for the programme, reiterating Artspace Aotearoa’s annual question prompt –  ‘Is language large enough?’ – and acknowledging the mentors, Judy Darragh, Nova Paul and Anoushka Akel for their support of the emerging artists.

Nabeelah arrives just as we are about to move to look at the first work – Erika’s somewhat macabre assemblage of wood, human hair, wool and cast bronze – and she’s quickly welcomed into the fold. After the briefing, I ask her how she found it, and we chat lightly about what we are drawn to. Later, I ask Nabeelah to offer her first impressions for this piece: 

“I was scribbling half-formed sentences on my Notes app about the exhibition because, in my frantic lateness, I had forgotten my pen and pad in the car. The space, although large, felt intimate. I slipped in just as Erika Holm was explaining the genesis behind her intertwined golden feet. Hearing the artists describe their work with such intricacy felt invaluable – compressing a year’s worth of mahi into a compact yet generous recital. The more I understood their creative process, the more deeply I connected with the pieces themselves. I felt especially drawn to Tarika Sabherwal’s Off Beat, where Sabherwal explores South Asian mythological art – a theme that resonated with me, as I am South Asian myself. The recurring ideas of chastity and lack of autonomy felt intimately familiar.”

These interactions are new for me. I’m accustomed to editor-writer relationships, and it’s taking some time to figure out how to stand in a mentor role. As an editor and arts facilitator, my own mentors have largely been friends I admire in similar spaces who have been forthcoming with time and advice. Formalising things feels clunky and unnatural to me, like the bureaucratic goal-setting activities with managers in corporate jobs. 

I find myself interested in hearing what the New Commissions Programme artists found valuable in their mentorships. I ask Erika Holm what it was like working with Judy Darragh. She says, “Working with Judy became an incredibly formative experience for my practice. She is very committed and thorough in her mentorship, which produced a fruitful dialogue between us and will continue to influence my work for a long time. Judy is a master at creating a sense of intimacy, no matter the scale. Her mentorship really helped me experiment with pushing my diaristic themes to a larger scale.”

To hear from Ngaorma Riley and Tarika Sabherwal, I tune into bFM’s Various Artists show. Sabherwal, working with Anoushka Akel, says “This mentorship programme was such a generous experience. I think it was such a privilege to be working with an artist of her calibre and… with an artist with such a critical eye, but also she was so considered in the way she would deliver feedback.” Riley shares that working with a fellow wahine Māori artist, Nova Paul, meant a lot of the heavy lifting of explaining cultural context wasn’t necessary and that she liked having the perspective of a non-carver. 

The importance of this mentorship programme can also be uncovered when looking at the unspoken elements. In the Echo exhibition, each artist has scaled up from their usual artistic presentations into a realm they’ve never had the chance to attempt before: Tarika offers wall-sized paintings that envelop those standing in their shadow, Ngaroma’s tekoteko carving stands at essentially the same height as her and Erika’s construction offers full-bodied interactivity..

I’m impressed at how Artspace Aotearoa, Tautai, APRA and many other arts organisations continue to provide sustained mentorship opportunities. There are many threats to these types of programmes' continuation: unstable funding climates, leadership changes, shifting board priorities and the possibility of diminishing returns on the investment. I’m envious and hope for significant developments in a critical writing space in the future – lest the practice fall into an unending coma that not even true love’s kiss (a massive monetary injection) can rouse.

My lamentations may be long and my survey of the industry bleak, but there are a few shining lights in the darkness. Sam Brooks is eternally committed to critique and provided some reviewing workshops at Basement Theatre in 2024. Auckland Arts Festival ran a Young Critics Programme in 2025 in which I was asked to help support and provide editorial guidance. The Asian Artists' Fund 2025 initially offered a Critic in Residence stream (which morphed into this mentorship due to a number of factors, including insufficient interest for feasibility). And, in late October, Artspace Aotearoa announced the Chartwell Trust New Commissions Writers Programme – a writerly interpretation of their artist programme. 

While it’s validating to see some institutional recognition of the importance of critique, ultimately, the media outlets in which to publish (and paid opportunities at that) continue to dwindle. It begs the question: Are mentorships in this space irresponsible if there is nowhere for the writers to pursue the craft afterwards? Is this a broader issue, one that stems from a devaluation of art in a Western cultural context? What is my responsibility as a mentor to Nabeelah in empowering her to write regardless? 

For now, I wonder what Nabeelah and I can achieve together and learn from each other. In conceptualising this piece, I proposed to her that she edit me before sending it off for publication. It’s perhaps a little bold to ask a mentee to edit their mentor, but I want to establish a shared level of respect and understanding – this is a partnership in which we are pursuing mutual trust for the betterment of the work. I also want to prepare her for a landscape in which there are few opportunities to be paid, and so being dynamic and flexible in the skills you develop is a boon. While I can’t assure her of a long, well-paid career in critical arts reviewing right now, perhaps I can help her to be prepared for when the tides shift, or for her to create waves in an ocean of her own making. We’ll start by making a splash.

Damien Levi (Te Āti Haunui-a-Paparangi, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāpuhi, Pākehā) is a publisher, editor and arts facilitator. He is the founder of Āporo Press, editor of the essay collection Tāmaki Makaurau 2025: Essays on Life in Auckland (2025) and was the lead editor for the online arts and literature journal, bad apple. His poetry and essays have been published online and in print.