The Vernacular Lounge

Due to the growth of the collection, its widening scope and planned projects, the Vernacular Lounge has shifted to the premises of its parent gallery . For additional information please contact  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

In 2011 Satellite Gallery became home to the Vernacular Lounge, an intimate living room where the influences that shape New Zealand’s distinctive cultural identity as defined by its art, architecture, literature, film and other cultural forms, are discussed, debated, explored and celebrated.

The ‘lounge’, while not peculiar to New Zealand, is traditionally and typically the social hub of the New Zealand home and it is in this spirit and form that the Vernacular Lounge will host and initiate presentations, exhibitions, happenings, recitals, screenings, concerts and performances that explore and develop our cultural vernacular.

It is a living community space in which to also acknowledge and celebrate those Cultural Icons who have significantly contributed to and who enliven and enrich this vernacular.

“Vernacular… belonging in place, knowing your own stories, realising your own potential. Being yourself rather than trying to be someone else” Tony Watkins

“Cultures are not manufactured by artists or declared by committees. They are the responses of peoples, in a particular time and a particular place, to that time and that place…They are not shaped by social revolutions but by a continuous accumulation of personal rebellions. They are enriched by the tensions of challenge. They are about difference more than they are about sameness” Hamish Keith