Alison Leauanae, Gary Silipa, Linda Va’aelua and Siliga David Setoga
WE WERE HERE
26 April – 20 May 2023

Gentrification has and will continue to change the face of our city, whether for better or worse.

‘Samoa House Lane’, speaks of a people’s presence from times past. The heart of first-generation migrants. A thriving Urban Polynesian village for church, shops, markets, and gatherings.

We Were Here is part nostalgia, part commemoration.

What happens when the colour and heart is steadily pushed out to the furthest bounds of the city?

Alison Leauanae, Gary Silipa, Linda Va’aelua and Siliga David Setoga, all second-generation Samoan migrants to Tamaki Makaurau Auckland, explore the importance of K’Rd and its surroundings as their peoples first landing place.

Connah Podmore
THE ROOM WHERE YOUR BROTHER WAS BORN
26 April – 20 May 2023

“The homeliest tasks get beautified if loving hands do them.”
Alcott, Louisa M. 2013. Little Woman. Sovereign. 425.

The room where your brother was born is an exhibition spanning drawing, weaving and photography by Connah Podmore.

Inspired by the memory of her family’s first home, this exhibition reflects on motherhood and domestic work. True to the act of caregiving, Podmore’s method of working is repetitive and generous; expansive, yet very ordinary. Electrical sockets, walls and curtains are all built through time consuming processes of drawing and erasure, or weaving by hand.

Central to this exhibition is a personal search for meaning and support through the work of authors whose writing likewise explores the roles of artist and mother, and gently challenges perceptions around where importance is placed and how self-worth is measured.

Sophie Sutherland
HOT WHEELS 3000
22 March – 15 April 2023

Hot Wheels 3000 invites participants to race an option of three remote control cars in Samoa House Lane, adjacent to RM gallery. This project is a sculptural and interaction conception of competition, expectation, play, and comradery. So, do you think you can drive?

Photography by Ardit Hoxha

Juliana Durán
TROPICAL DEBRIS
22 March – 15 April 2023

The tropics have long been associated with exoticism, lushness, and excess. As Nancy Leys Stepan shows in Picturing Tropical Nature, “The ‘tropical’ came to constitute more than a geographical concept; it signified a place of radical otherness to the temperate world, with which it contrasted and which it helped constitute”.

Tropicality, although a concept that first appeared with colonisation, is deeply rooted in pre-hispanic ways of life, where resourcefulness and creativity were essential for survival. By embracing these values, these works pay homage to the real legacy of the tropics. Being exotic is not a quality of the object, person, or place itself, but rather a feeling or reaction that the observer experiences temporarily.

Tropical Debris is not only a collection of upcycled objects but also a statement of identity and a challenge to cultural assumptions and stereotypes associated with the concept of tropical. By giving new life to discarded materials, the pieces defy the absurdity of a society that often prioritizes waste over resourcefulness.

Photography by Ardit Hoxha

Aliyah Winter
OCTOBER 1935
22 March – 15 April 2023

October 1935 takes its name from the first poem of the series Six Memorials by Ursula Bethell. These poems are a mourning for the woman Bethell called her consort, Effie Pollen, written on anniversaries of Pollen’s passing. While they lived together for 30 years, they were careful about their relationship in public.

October 1935 enacts a private ritual of mourning that works with and against language, and the demands of intelligibility. Taking up a constellation of references, the work plays with obscurity as a poetic strategy and a kind of shield, embracing Tiffany Page’s concept of a vulnerable methodology. Page writes in relation to the ethics of telling the stories of others: “as well as exposing the fragility of knowledge assembly, a vulnerable methodology might be closely positioned with questioning what is known, and what might come from an opening in not knowing.”

Photography by Ardit Hoxha

Hana Carpenter, Chantel Matthews, Tony Guo and Erich Roebeck
THE DINNER PARTY
22 February – 11 March 2023

Dinner parties can bring the unlikeliest of guests together from the awkward first “hello” bonding over the mundane to discreetly exiting stage left. Whether they are our beloved ones or those we no longer speak to, ‘the dinner party’ offers an unexpected yet intimate gathering of works that seek connection, love and acceptance. From figurative painting and abstraction to interaction and installation, although these artists are diverse in medium and conceptual thought, they all advocate community by embracing the multiples through a space of convivial sharing and unity.

Photography by Ardit Hoxha

Josh Carlier
ENTANGLEMENT
22 February – 11 March 2023

Entanglement (2022) is an exploration of the extended self, and the objects that appear within this space, be it sound, light, thought or sensation. The project primarily engages with water, the various forms it takes, and the places it resides. It began as an investigation into the sources of Auckland’s water supply, before shifting into a more general inquiry into the state of the environments surrounding Auckland’s reservoirs. Entanglement examines human interventions and their ecological impacts, and reflects on how we are all physically involved as consumers of water produced in the Hunua and Waitakere ranges.

Photography by Ardit Hoxha

Gabi Lardies
TEAM OF 45 MILLION
11 January – 4 February 2023

In December, while visiting family in Buenos Aires, I found the city in a football world cup frenzy. Shops shut during matches, and people would gather around screens, either in homes, bars, shop windows or in the public fan zones where supersized screens were set up in plazas and parks. It seemed most of the population was Messi, adorned in blue and white stripes and a bold 10 on their backs.

The recent history of Argentina is marred with chronic economic crisis, ever rising inflation and constant political corruption. In general, people don’t feel proud of their nation – they feel it could have been great, it was once great, but in the last 100 or so years its potential has been squandered. Football is the exception. The national team garners fervour across political and class divides. Here is a break from everything that sucks – instead there is joy, social unity, morale, and Messi, to whom they bow.

To the Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges, the dogmatic nationalism stirred by this mass mania was problematic. “Nationalism,” he wrote, “only allows for affirmations, and every doctrine that discards doubt, negation, is a form of fanaticism and stupidity.” He followed with “football is aesthetically ugly… it is popular because stupidity is popular.”

After the world cup final, millions crowded the streets. “Somos campeones” (We are champions) echoed through the media and into the celebrations.

Photography by Ardit Hoxha

Jermaine Alhambra and Liam Mooney
SUB(SEQUIN)CE
11 January – 4 February 2023

replace or to be replaced; alternate.
a small tiny piece of metal or plastic used as an ornament.
coming after something in time; reflecting.

sub(sequin)ce explores a shared embodied process of making that allows both Jermaine and Liam to touch on elements of their Asian and queer identities using mass-produced and variety store products. The artists allow the qualities of such materials to hold agency within a space by manipulating them in response to their own experience and creating profound objects that portray specific personal encounters.

Photography by Ardit Hoxha