A large portion of the space is devoted to the artwork Black Market

The exhibition Made Active, curated by Natasha Conland from the Chartwell Collection, is on at the Auckland Art Gallery until July 15. It features more conceptual artworks.

I relished one of my regular visits to the Auckland Art Gallery, still so new that the rooms are a surprise. The top floor, level two, has several wings devoted to the Chartwell Collection on long-term loan.

The Chartwell Collection is an interesting thing in its own right, founded in the early 1970s in Hamilton, and has more than 1000 artworks. The Chartwell wing frequently changes its works, arranged in curated exhibition themes.

Made Active is a perfect tableau for a curator, particularly one who likes writing, to pick through.

It explores ideas about movement, something possibly that seems at odds with art being something that most would think of as static. But ideas involving activity can be found in all manner of things. There are the obvious video works and things with engines that twirl and spin.

There is the very neat addition of some paintings by the late Allen Maddox, New Zealand's best example of an action painter.

His wild gestural crosses are always great works to study.

A large portion of the space is devoted to the artwork Black Market Next to My Name, 2007, by Daniel Malone, which consists of the contents of the artist's flat with a year's accumulation of general dross and litter. Arranged in five themed rooms, it has a special boardwalk, so you can make your way through.

Large partitions are arranged at weird angles, so outside this enclosure there are odd, thin tunnels that you are not sure you are meant to use for passage through. I guess this is about disarming the viewer.

This is played with in many artworks – one where a bucket moves around on a tabletop (are we to wonder what is underneath?); high-heeled shoes on a skateboard (a double sense of balance required here); an open carton of eggs balanced above an aluminium door frame (is the artist daring me to walk through?).

There are a lot of works where, if you hung them upside down or back to front, few of us would have noticed, but you can suddenly get stuck on something you do find profound, such as Equilibre IV, 1992. It's a simple assembly. A boom stands straight up on the gallery floor, on which is balanced a pulled-out coat-hanger with a candle on one end and a bell on the other. It is a quiet, elegant-looking structure (when many of these in the gallery are plain ugly) but more so the concept.

If you lit the candle, it would burn and become lighter, causing the rod to move and trigger the bell to ring. The work "allows us to hear the sound of light". Really, it's combustion, rather than light, but let us not be particular.