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Ruth Buchanan is an artist and uri of Taranaki who runs her studio out of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland and Berlin. She works across exhibition making, writing, design, publishing, and teaching. Her work draws out the contested and dynamic relationship between the body, power, language, and the archive. She gained a BFA from the Elam School of Fine Art, Auckland, an MA (Fine Art) from the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, and was a fine arts researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht.

She has realised major commissions in a variety of contexts including Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart; Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth; Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo; MASP, São Paulo; Toi o Tāmaki Auckland Art Gallery; Gwangju Biennale; Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Tate Modern, London; and The Showroom, London.

She has contributed to group exhibitions at KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin; Remai Modern, Saskatoon; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; Kunsthaus Bregenz; Arnolfini, Bristol; If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and others.

In 2018 she received the Walters Prize, Aotearoa New Zealand by judge Adriano Pedrosa. She has held a guest professorship at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm, assistant professor in the class of Prof. Judith Hopf at the Städelschule, Frankfurt and has taught at, amongst others, the Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, and Hidesheim Univeristy. She publishes regularly and is currently co-editing the collected works of Aotearoa author J.C. Sturm.

Buchanan is Kaitohu Director of Artspace Aotearoa, Tamaki Makaurau Auckland.

Portrait by Jonas Häggi