Party & Protest, an exhibition

Britomart and Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland Museum are celebrating Pride with a photographic survey of queer activism!
For Auckland Pride 2025, you can enjoy Party & Protest, a free exhibition of photographs from the museum's archives that look back on two pivotal decades of queer activism in the city.
      
Late last year, Britomart's Jeremy Hansen worked with Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland Museum's Tumu Whakarae Chief Executive David Reeves and Curator Pictorial Shaun Higgins on the idea of creating an exhibition that reminded people of the decades of collective advocacy, protest and, yes, partying that forged a path towards greater queer liberation. Graphic designer Marc Conaco helped select these images and translate them into a striking presentation for Britomart's Pavilion Panels on Te Ara Tahuhu and Galway Street.

The photographs that make up the exhibition came from two tranches of photographs in the museum's archives: Gil Hanly's tireless documentation of protest actions in the 1980s, particularly those related to the battle for Homosexual Law Reform, as well as the parades of the 1990s and early 2000s; and Becky Nunes's photographs of early Hero parties, the groundbreaking statements of queer pride held amid the wreckage of the AIDs crisis in the early 1990s.  

The title of the exhibition, Party & Protest, came from David after reviewing the archives, prompted by the realisation that, while protests were an obvious tool to agitate for queer rights, parties were also powerful statements of pride and visibility that helped to instigate change and greater acceptance.