Anna Sisson
Forgotten Altar

22 November – 16 December 2023

Anna Sisson exposes the closet in this collection of works. She is challenging the queer and female freedom of expression to showcase this concept. Forming a moral space. A dream. Surreal and spiritual – possibly a utopia. A place where people are protected and accepted. Where disdain turns to delight and disgust to innocence. As the world gets more polarized the norm becomes stronger; to counteract this Anna attempts to reform this closeted space, creating something more tangible. Reinforcing this space, this concept of the closet as our own place, a paradise instead of a prison.

Images by Ardit Hoxha

Karen Rubado
detours and daydreams

18 October – 11 November 2023

Detours and daydreams embarks on an introspective journey, weaving together memories, ancestries, and experiences to examine the terrains of identity, origin, and belonging.

Taking as its starting point the artist’s emigration from New Zealand to the U.S. and back again, the exhibition interrogates the tenuous connection between physical spaces and the psychological construct of belonging. This history echos a contemporary diasporic experience and the ambivalence of being neither fully here nor there, caught in the liminal spaces of origin and adaptation.

Recent DNA revelations contribute to the narrative, complicating the perceptions of self. As identities remain in flux, shaped by every new discovery, the exhibition examines the dynamic and ever-evolving nature of individuality.

Images by Ardit Hoxha and Karen Rubado

Jo Burzynska
Hyphal Space

18 October – 11 November 2023

Hyphal Space is a multisensory meditation on mycelial knowledge at a time of environmental and existential crises. Ideas branch into different zones, fusing with each other, and their audience, through human-hyphal interfaces. Understandings are transmitted via sensory interactions and active collaboration with the mycelium that forms and inspires the fungi-fabricated, sonic, scented, and tactile works of this exhibition. Hyphal Space invites the formation of symbiotic relationships between local fungal and human communities. These connections both highlight practical solutions to current environmental issues, and suggest more collaborative, non-binary, and non-territorial ways of thinking, sensing and being in an undivided and undivisible world.

Dr Jo Burzynska is a multimedia artist-researcher, and writer. Her initial practice in sound spans sonic art to multisensory installations, regularly using her own field recordings. With a background as a wine writer, her work in both areas has converged in the production of works that often combine sound, taste, touch, and the scents she often distills herself. She is actively engaged in research into sensory interactions and their creative application, pioneering a practice she calls crossmodal art. This research has been informed by collaborations with psychologists, sensory scientists and anthropologists, and was the focus of her practice-led doctoral art research at UNSW Art & Design. She is currently interested in exploring the different connections and understandings that can be made between people, culture, nature, and place through a focus on embodied and nonvisual sensory knowledge and aesthetics.

Images by Ardit Hoxha

EunSun Heo
a piece of cotton

8 November 2023

EunSun Heo is a Korean visual artist who strokes emotions with performance. She is mainly interested in bringing out the age-old emotions in the space experienced in the everyday life of the past and expressing them as visual images. She participated in a number of group exhibitions and festivals in Japan, Thailand, Taiwan, Belgium, and Germany with the start of the PANASIA Performance Festival in 2014, and she continues to work on videos, installation, and photography, focusing on performance work, along with various experiments covering complex genres.

In the past, there was a custom in Korea where a woman made a blanket to cover with husband when she got married. My grandmother also made a blanket for marriage by herself. I have often used the cotton blanket I received from my late grandmother for performances, and after the performance, I have continued to wash and transform the used blanket to express it in a different form of artworks. An old blanket symbolizes a woman’s life. There are many old feelings in it. The performance shows the social gaze that can be commonly felt in everyday life as a woman and the weight of life accordingly. At the end of the performance, the blanket used as an object is washed again and modified into another form to be preserved.

EunSun Heo was funded and supported by Performance Art Week Aotearoa for their tour of New Zealand.

Images by Tom Shackleton

박성환 Sung Hwan Bobby Park
BTM 92-6

13 September – 7 October 2023

박성환 Sung Hwan Bobby Park shows his third solo exhibition with his BTM series. Made from dirt, clay material continues to be the main exploration. This fragile and vulnerable material is also strong and versatile. Sung Hwan’s interest in the parallel qualities of human bodies deepens his interest and love for clay.

BTM 방탄모 scrutinizes the homophobic policy of Koren military law article 92-6. While constitutional law requires all males to serve (the definition of ‘a male’ has a monumentally detrimental impact on transgender and nonbinary people) it is an institutional entrapment. Sung Hwan explores his relationship with the article 92-6 having served in ROK Marine Corps.

BTM Platoon May 2019 at Rayner Brothers Gallery in Whanganui featured the first ceramic only group. The use of materials and the art form has extended beyond clay. These materials explore the history and modernity of working with ceramics. It is a celebration of individuality.

박성환

Images by Ardit Hoxha

Leitu Bonnici in collaboration with Alitasi Fatu, Denise Roberts and Moira Roberts
Lomiga Tasi: Folasaga Lona Lua … Ata Tifaga

13 September – 7 October 2023

‘Lomiga Tasi: Folasaga Lona Lua … Ata Tifaga’, translating to ‘Issue One: Second Introduction … Film’, is an experimental hybrid of documentary and publication shown via multi channel projection, created across Naarm, Kombumerri Country and Tāmaki Makaurau.

The work both documents and extends upon the making of the webpage for ‘Lomiga Tasi: Folasaga Lona Lua’. The informally created online resource acts as a basic introduction to gagana Sāmoa (Sāmoan language) and fa‘asāmoa (the Sāmoan way), while using digital filters to investigate feelings of cultural disconnection and lack of representation on the web (and elsewhere).

This exhibition is part of the first issue in the ongoing project ‘Afa‘afakasi, an experimental publishing series that promotes visibility and reclamation of gagana Sāmoa through a critical, collaborative and playful approach.

@lephemera

@l31tu

Images by Ardit Hoxha

Darcey Bella Arnold, Fernando do Campo, Sebastian Moody, Mitchel Cumming, Aaron Perkins, Emmalyn Hawthorne
KERNING

9 August – 2 September 2023

Read the exhibition essay

The typographic process of kerning ensures the readability of a text by adjusting the space between its individual letters. In a well-kerned text this process is invisible; it simply ‘looks right’. Yet we live in an age when what ‘looks right’ has often been insidiously engineered to remove any space for interpretation or nuance.

Bringing together text artists from Naarm, Meanjin and the Gadigal and Bidjigal lands of the Eora nation, Kerning navigates the spaces between letters, words and sentences to consider with both scepticism and wonder the spaces within language.

@darceybellaarnold
@ferdocampo
@sebastian_moody
@mitchel_cumming
@ey.ey.ar.oh.en
@emphaticallyem

Darcey Bella Arnold, Sebastian Moody, and Fernando do Campo are represented by Reading Room, Onespace, and Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert respectively.

@areadingroom
@onespace_au
@onespace_au
@gallerysallydancuthbert

Images by Ardit Hoxha

Luke Shaw
SLEEPWALKER

9 August – 2 September 2023

Luke Shaw is an artist and musician that lives in Ōtautahi. His work is primarily sound-based and stretches across the fields of music, installation, performance and video. Recent exhibitions include The Mist and the Horizon with Nathan Pōhio at CoCA (2021), Cross Modal at the Audio Foundation (2021) and Somewhere Between Nothing and Nowhere with Phoebe Hinchliff at Blue Oyster Art Project Space (2021).

Sleepwalker is a speculative video work that explores fluctuating levels of clarity within memory, pitch and language. Drawing from an archive of found images and using processes of re-recording, the sleepwalker is imagined as a spectral figure that is able to manoeuvre between memories and cinematic planes. In doing so, Sleepwalker reconsiders the archive as something malleable, and susceptible to the reshuffling and expanding of its framework. The work features a soundtrack by the Opawa 45s.

Images by Ardit Hoxha

Anton Maurer
CARE

5 – 29 JULY 2023

Legislative inequalities in the Accident Compensation Corporation, under resourcing of District Health Boards and the punitive nature of Work and Income, led to the production of Care.

Autobiographical in nature, Care presents correspondence and documentation of asking the Crown for help, due to living with a rare disorder. Exposing webs of relationships between colonisation, neoliberalism, the western medical industrial complex and Westminister politics.

Images by Ardit Hoxha

Lily Worrall
SHE FEEDS THE BIRDS

5 – 29 JULY 2023

She’s feeding
She fed
She will feed
she feeds the birds, imagines a dystopian future where seagulls have usurped the human dominion, reigning over their new subjects, who are divided in set and rigid classes. In this short fiction, Lily Worrall combines the traditions of NZ Goth with the speculative potentials of science fiction, coining what she terms, a ‘glum sci-fi’. A gesture of genre-bending that looks forward to haunt backwards and vice-versa.

The film follows an unnamed feeder, tasked with different districts in Tāmaki where she is to feed the birds. While on the job, a minor discretion sees her abandon the role; fleeing into the deserted city centre to take refuge. Here, she comes across the former havens and grottos of the flâneuse, a spectre of the past who once botanized the asphalt. Glimmers of these former dreamscapes collapse into the nightmarish horizons of a new world. Where laneways, the ruins of a fashion house and the site of a former arcade-cum-theatre; atrophy and congeal.

35 mm B&W Photographs, Digital Projection, Duration: 7 min

Writer + Director – Lily Worrall
Starring – Bonnie Harvey + Amanda Lane
Photography – Ardit Hoxha + Lily Worrall
Soundtrack – Peter Worrall + Lily Worrall
Editor – Lily Worrall

Lily Worrall is an artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau, whose practice explores cinema, the family archive, digital/found materials and feminist film theory.

lilyworrall.com

Images by Ardit Hoxha