2 October – 26 October 2024
Opening 2 October at 6pm
My cruel enemy grazes on my pain and feeds herself
Frances Libeau
My cruel enemy grazes on my pain and feeds herself is a multimedia inquiry into biopolitical relations that course through Aotearoa’s agricultural history and one of its knowledge-producing organs: the archive. Bringing a scavenger methodology, Libeau submits various media to remediatory processes that seek to highlight and upset normative notions of animacy and reproductive flow. Notably featured are film and audio from the National Film Unit (documenting agricultural processes in the early/mid twentieth century) along with other, “minor” sculptural materials. Archival offcuts and debris are read (as Ann Laura Stoler implores) against the grain, while possibilities for their fragmented refiguration are conceived from the angled view/s of the inverse/queer body.
Technical errors, material decay and ephemeral detritus (the sound of the projector whirring; an unexpected VHS soap opera taped over by an officially-archived item) yoked to found sound and image lend a hauntological cast to the audiovisual registers. This is amplified by an idiosyncratic disjunct between the aural and ocular, calling to Michel Chion’s en creux (phantom sound; translating directly as ‘in the gap’).
The voice of Alessandro Moreschi, the last known castrato singer (and the only to ever be recorded) — captured on wax cylinder in 1902 singing with the Sistine Chapel choir — cuts through mid-frequency sonic snow of the phonograph with a bitterly mournful madrigal lamenting a vampiric relationship. Through multimedia interferences, My cruel enemy grazes on my pain and feeds herself probes at notions of capture, reproduction and biopolitical inscription, as well as possible gestures towards refuge and intimacy.
Frances Libeau is an artist and writer from Tāmaki Makaurau. Their sonic compositions, sound designs, and writing feature across diverse platforms of music, art, film and theatre, often exploring material and semantic possibilities of queering sonic compositional and archival practices. They have previously collaborated on works with Sriwhana Spong, Owen Connors, Selina Ershadi and George Watson. My cruel enemy grazes on my pain and feeds herself is their first solo exhibition.
This work was made with the support of Creative New Zealand and the Karekare House Artists’ Residency. Installed with thanks to Sam Longmore and the Audio Foundation.
This work contains images and sounds of hunting and animal processing.
2 October – 26 October 2024
Opening 2 October at 6pm
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Dream of Roads
Gryffin Cook, Peter Derksen and Levi Kereama
Aotearoa
is a long road of many bends, breezes, and towns, where our roots thread through the land, tangling us in shared histories.
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Dream of Roads is an exploration of longing, movement, and the call of the horizon. Featuring a selection of paintings, prints, and woodfired ceramics, the exhibition considers our deep yearning for the road—both literal and not.
Gryffin Cook, Peter Derksen and Levi Kereama bring together works that reflect this journey; teasing apart the knots of lineage, carving out a place to call home, and capturing the tension between a need to leave and longing to return. The dream of the road also holds space for rest and contemplation, before and after the journey. Through these varied mediums, the works evoke both the opportunity and isolation of the road, inviting reflection on our own paths— travelled or untaken.
