Massey University Press and Letting Space welcome you to the launch of Urgent Moments - Art and social change: The Letting Space projects 2010–2020 at Objectspace.

After first occupying vacant spaces in post-stock-market-crash Auckland in the mid-1990s, public art curators Letting Space re-emerged in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis. Confronted by the thin net of social welfare, the waste of the capitalist system and the climate emergency, it brokered spaces for artists to think and act radically, outside gallery walls.

Edited by Mark Amery, Amber Clausner and Sophie Jerram, this book chronicles the projects those artists drove. From a grocery store where everything was free to an ATM for depositing moods and a citizens’ water-testing lab, they added to the civic dialogue at a time when public space and media were increasingly commodified and under surveillance.

Join us to hear from publication contributors, including Objectspace Director Kim Paton, and the publication editors and publisher. In Letting Space spirit, performances will roll out over the night.