The Auckland Pride Festival is back for the entire month of February 2024, providing an expanded opportunity for Takatāpui and Rainbow communities to come together. From today, Monday 2 October, registrations are open for events produced by artists, community organisers, and organisations.
 
Auckland Pride is committed to ensuring that Tāmaki Makaurau's Takātapui and Rainbow communities are not just surviving but thriving, and that Pride reflects the very best of rainbow Aotearoa.
 
Auckland Pride’s major events will return including the March and Party, Te Tīmatanga, and the Pride Elevates curated arts program.
 
This year the theme for Auckland Pride 2024 is Beyond Paradise, the theme was born out of rigorous conversation addressing the need for respite, for care, for rest and how this might be a way into building a new and better world together.
 
“This theme allows us to interrogate the current arts and political landscape, to look at the issues this election year has brought to the surface, and envision beyond the here and now. In doing so we invite our artists, organisers and communities into a Kaupapa Māori Envisioning of Queer Futurity. What is the paradise we are seeking? And how might we build it together?” says Hāmiora Bailey, Auckland Pride co-director.
 
Auckland Pride has been actively thinking about how the theme of Beyond Paradise can more cohesively tell the story of the Pride festival, as well as engage with more conscious programming, and invite our communities and artists to engage or respond to this theme and the festival as a whole.
 
Registrations to take part in Auckland Pride 2024 are now open atwww.aucklandpride.org.nz
 
An essay by Hāmiora Bailey, Julia Croft and Nathan Joe about the curation of the festival against the Beyond Paradise theme and a video work features a sneak peak into some of the artists that will be fully revealed as part of the Festival launch in November.
 
Auckland Pride invites Takatāpui and Rainbow communities to join in this much needed celebration, this reckoning, this invitation, this revolution and this moment of togetherness.
 
Pride is back. Let’s do this together.