Natalie Cooper, Delaney Sturrock and C Miers
Navigate

10 April – 4 May 2024

Navigate explores relationships between the route that is mapped, the route that is traversed, and the route that is constructed or directed.

Natalie Cooper, Delaney Sturrock, and C Miers each use a sense of navigation to form their distinct practices. Each artist explores the literal navigation of the urban infrastructure and the abstract navigation of ideas that underlie this environment. These explorations are presented through material realities, aiming to prompt the viewer’s navigation of this material within a gallery context.

Iterations of grid, line, and industrialism can be seen across the wide range of media presented. This shared visual language alludes to how each artist incorporates the idea of ‘navigation’; seen literally through Natalie’s walks to RM to collect data, audio and discarded objects, indicated through Delaney’s sculptures inspired by architectural structures and embodied through C’s methodology around the painting process.

The ongoing changes in infrastructure surrounding RM bring a new material reality with implications on navigation through the immediate surroundings and the wider structure of Tāmaki Makaurau.

Images by Ardit Hoxha

Benjamin Ord, Salome Tanuvasa, and Uniform
A Dance But No Figure

6 March – 30 March 2024

Featuring a new film combining Super 8 and 4K digital footage by Benjamin Ord, Bathing Solo (1, 2, 3) re-stages a three part dance solo inside a steam room, allowing the heat and humidity inside the bathhouse to damage the film stock and obscure the view of the dance. The film probes the limits of the camera’s ability to capture a live body, where the fleeting, impermanent nature of steam stands in opposition to the camera’s ability to capture it. In evoking what is seen and unseen, choreographic form is both partially erased by and embedded within the materiality of the film itself. As it moves fluidly through temporal states of past, present and future, the work is simultaneously a document, performance and score.

The opening night of the exhibition features a live sound performance by Uniform in response to the film. The recording of this improvised act is later installed into the gallery space and left as an intermittent looping presence throughout the exhibition. Salome Tanuvasa simultaneously performs the making of a series of gestural drawings that respond to the audience as they are submerged in the soundscape of Uniform’s performance and the visual field of the film. These drawings act as recordings of liveness which are abandoned and left to remain in the space for the following weeks of the exhibition. Holding space as both objects for now, and scores for future iterations, the live event and choreography are contained within a constant process of rematerialisation across multiple forms.

Stemming from research into the global resurgence of public bathing, the exhibition explores ideas of communal embodiment inherent to these radical democratic practices of anti-competition, anti-hierarchy, and anti-privatisation. By taking choreography as a tool for self-enactment, where the creative act relates to a group as opposed to the self-contained individual, the exhibition aims to consider art making as an activity rather than a finality or production line. In perpetual slippages between abstraction and representation, the internal and external, body and object, A Dance But No Figure stages artworks which are continually lost, held and reformed in subtle gestures towards futurity.

Images by Ardit Hoxha

Tarika Sabherwal
Ragini and her nine wives

6 March – 30 March 2024

Ragini is an unexplored part of the self, the protagonist and the voyeur of her own existence. She is the fantasy and the reality, she’s a reimagined past and a reincarnated future. Exploring moments that just don’t seem like they would be associated with Ragini but why not?

Traditionally Ragini is understood as the feminine counterpart to the masculine Raga, often intertwined with the world of music and melody. This connection extends to the Ragamala miniature painting series, where a visual narrative is weaved around musical elements.

In an alternate reality where collective memory is rewritten, Ragini exists as a soft dyke, reincarnated alongside her nine wives as they live out their nine lives. It is the channelling of dyke, what would that version of Ragini look like?

The exhibition follows these manifested alter egos in their search of love, lust, learning, longing, liberation and healing.

Images by Ardit Hoxha

Daniel Chong
The silence between echoes

31 January – 24 February 2024

Sometimes I wonder if I’m a product of my state. Is subtlety fear?

Is it better not to rock the boat, to live in the familiar – to hide. Or is subtlety a form of oppression? Am I living a conditioned lie? But yet I find such comfort in its language. As a gay man in conservative Asia, nuance and subtlety is a language I learned to survive. It is a lexicon that has bled into my practice in ways that I can never understand.

I wonder if subtlety is the language of the othered. In a world where so often we find success in mere speaking, literally breaking from being silenced. We often communicate in coded gestures folded between speech. Those moments, within the cracks of conversations represent those background conversations, guarded yet ongoing they exist in the silence between echoes.

The exhibition is one chapter of my ongoing exploration of subtlety and queerness. Expressed in traces, rot, and tension, it cuts across a range of materials hoping to express itself in a unified affective landscape. It invites audiences to dwell, listen and more importantly, find and hold space for these subtleties to reverberate and be heard.

Images by Ardit Hoxha

Wesley John Fourie
HYPERBALLAD

31 January – 24 February 2024

Part cathartic rambling, part karaoke goodness, in the Hyperballad series Wesley John Fourie takes on the role of the jester, the popstar seeking their two minutes of fame, the performer.

In a series of works straddling voyeurism and confessional modes of expression, the artist invites us into a manufactured world of vulnerability and Tumblr Girl style confessionalism, set against a pop music beat.

Wesley John Fourie is a multi award winning artist based in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Their work processes experiences of love, loss, and queer sexuality, often in relation to the natural environment.

Their work has been presented in artist run spaces, commercial galleries, and public institutions across Aotearoa, Asia, and Europe.

Images by Ardit Hoxha

Elijah Broughton
DUEL

31 January – 24 February 2024

Read the exhibition text.

Images by Ardit Hoxha

Yana Nafysa Dombrowsky-M’Baye
seuteu

22 November – 16 December 2023

Hands turn slowly, releasing the sole recording of his voice into the air—Glimpses of what a mother saw through the viewfinder of her 8mm camera as she filmed her daughters in the years following their father’s departure—Daughters, aglow in a purple afternoon, picking flowers amid the brush—The Mediterranean sea, golden—The Atlantic sea, blue—Hands, revealing a silvered talisman—The Moon, who has been watching—The Sun, who has been watching—The inexplicable softness with which things occur once the Sun has passed the horizon—Voices, telling stories, singing, calling for her as she searches for traces of her grandfather in present-day Sénégal.

Filmed across Tournon-sur-Rhône, Aix-en-Provence and Dakar, Dombrowsky-M’Baye’s Seuteu unravels an archaeology of her matrilineal ancestry. Carried by the air, we drift in and over homes, bodies of water, landscapes and atmospheres – contemplating the space between memory and lived experience.

Images by Ardit Hoxha

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