December 4th-14th 2020

“The very classification “amateur” has an apologetic ring. But the very word  – from the Latin amator, “lover” – means one who does something for the love of the thing” – Maya Deren

Amator is a collaborative and open-ended moving image and text project by mother and daughter Azita Chegini and Selina Ershadi.

When plans to accompany her mother on a recent trip to Iran to make the film fell through, Selina asked Azita to take her handycam with her on her 3 week trip back home to record walking through the Alborz mountains that surround Tehran. What emerged from this seemingly simple task is a series of fragmented glimpses into Azita’s experience of grappling with what it means to be a cameraperson and what it means to document one’s own lived experience, questions intensified by a setting in which the boundary between the private and public is starkly defined.

After years of being the one in front of the camera’s lens, Azita is now the one looking through it, capturing what she sees. Her camera enacts a kind of flanerie that shifts between the interiors and exteriors of both places and bodies across space and time. Over the stream of images, Azita reads her own diaristic text that drifts in and out of the present and the past, moving between the act of recording what one sees and what one remembers.

Iranian oral storytelling has its own version of the phrase ‘once upon a time’. Persian stories often begin with the words ‘yeki bood, yeki nabood’ : ‘one was, one was not.’ It is a phrase that holds space for what has been carved away; a reminder of the untold that always shadows what is told. The ambiguous words question the notion of a singular truth. By including the fractured construction of Azita’s own story – its attempts, its ‘failures,’ its intent – the film strives for narrative multiplicity.

Amator circuitously continues on from Selina’s inter-textual film Hollywood Ave (2017) and its mirror text Notes for 3 Women. The work challenges mastery, singular authorship and resolution, instead embracing minor forms of storytelling that dwell in places of uncertainty and daydreams. It is a project that is slowly, intuitively and imperfectly pieced together by love.

Casey Carsel
Shum Klum
November 6th – 23rd 2019

Garlic is historically tied to Jewish culture as a symbol of celebration and good health. Garlic is also bound to anti-Semitic propaganda within the concept of foetor Judaicus—‘Jewish stink’. In Shum Klum Casey Carsel explores Jewishness and garlic, from the sweetness of tradition to the stench of hatred, and considers the allium’s journey from an everyday marker of Jewishness to nothing at all.

Two texts relate to this project:
Quishile Charan
Garlic and a whole lot of lovin’
and
Casey Carsel
Allium Olere (garlic scent)

Areez Katki
Some Retained Delights
October 9th – 26th
Implementing work within the parameters of 20 odd square pieces of found cloth, each between 400-600mm, Katki embroiders a series of useful textiles yet again; handkerchiefs – found in his late-grandfather’s vanity chest drawer; stolen from the purse of an octogenarian matriarch or two; sourced from a Khadi vendor down the road from his ancestral home; found at a flea market in Athens; joyfully discovered next to the home of Mario Praz in Rome; taken from the kitchen of Pierre Jeanneret’s villa where Katki spent one restless night in Chandigarh. These squares serve as his ground for intimate mark making. Synesthetic responses to heuristic, contemplative thought contemporaneously sit upon & beside the ephemera of remembrances. Addressing how certain evocative gestures, whether grand or minute, may be preserved for one’s pleasure. 
_
Some Retained Delights 

simultaneously investigates the realms of experiential & historic matter. Participating in elegiac processions through the lush grounds of a Zoroastrian sky burial site; revisiting childhood tropes of lost and found objects; contemplating the joys of Mughal gift giving; distantly observing the linear relationships between bodies as they lean against one another
barely
touching.
Fragmented assemblages of embroidered forms have been placed in grid-like compositions to evoke the collectability of thought and form. Allowing some to undulate and metamorphose, recorded through needlework markings contained within windowpane checks of hand woven cloth. Addressing the fragmentary nature of (an often collective) memory, Katki’s new works rest between the genres of storytelling and historicising_i – executed by reviving a cluster of humble textiles. In the process of encountering, acquiring and citing textual stimuli, he has borrowed iconography from Parsi poet Gieve Patel _ii , ideologies around the importance of tactile memory imbedded in objects _iii from Edmund de Waal’s nonfiction writings and the principles of quality, nature & definition_iv from Annie Beasant, with further applied theosophical discourse in essays by H.S Olcott_v. Having formulated and executed these works between May–October 2019; over his summer residency in Athens, a brief sojourn in Rome and remaining months during a revisitation of his home in Mumbai. Gleaning from various sources of mark making, presented forth is an intimate space where one may reflect & perhaps appraise their associations with memory and time. 

_

i Cullinan, Nicholas. In Part: Fragments of Modernity. (2015). Quaderno #2. Fondazione Prada: Milano.
ii Patel, Gieve. How Do You Withstand, Body. (1976). Clearing House: Bombay.
iii De Waal, Edmund. The Hare with the Amber Eyes. (201o). Chatto & Windus: London.
iv Beasant, A. Leadbeater, C.W. Thought Forms. (1910). The Theosophical Publishing House: London.
v Olcott, H.S. Applied Theosophy and Other Essays. (1975). The Theosophical Publishing House: Madras. 

Wild flowers spilling into the earth

Spilling into the woods

Wild spirits spill into our hands

Into our feet

A weakened dark in the deepest deepest blue

Ancestors calling from our stomachs

–

Mediate your intentions

Shall we learn about our relationship with ourselves first, before we learn to place stones.

We must acknowledge that we don’t exist without our relationship to space. Is it that our separation from our place in nature is causing disruption.

Caitlin and Arwen have been investigating how to place intentions carefully. Through returning to spaces they find significant, they have been transforming their experiences of these places to find new meaning, where memory becomes the thread to bring you deeper into yourself.

They invite the viewer to slip back into childhood and to explore the rope of the immaterial world through how our human intentions affect spaces.

We welcome you to come, renew your thread, and start a ripple.

OnlyFans
Robbie Handcock
with publication by Simon Gennard (download PDF here)
August 14-24

For OnlyFans, Robbie Handcock draws upon an ever-evolving archive of amateur pornography to develop a queer visual language in painting. Domestic in scale, Handcock’s works situate queerness as at once a matter of sexual desire and gendered performance, and an orientation towards decoration and ornamentation, transmitted through gossip, hearsay and tacky objects of visual culture. Rendered with haste and flippancy, refusing mastery and refinement, Handcock proposes painting as an erotic practise, able to make contact with moments of sexual possibility in the past, and imagine altered forms of intimacy in the future.

Accompanying the exhibition is a publication produced by Simon Gennard, titled Hatefucking. Taking visual cues from queer liberation magazines from the 1970s and 80s, Hatefucking traverses the author’s personal sexual misadventures as well as the political history of queer activism in Aotearoa, arguing for sex as a profoundly ambivalent force–capable of animating a desire for a more just future, and liable to be swept up in an anaemic liberal logic of inclusion.
OnlyFans and its accompanying publication have been made possible with the generous support of the Emerging Artists Trust and RM.

24th July- 10 August
Opening 6pm 24th July

“There is nothing inherently unusual about the notion of not working while at work; people commonly look at Facebook on their phones or seek other distractions during work hours… “[But] appearing as if you’re doing nothing is seen as a threat to the general working order of the company”” (How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell).

I Lean You My Support is a group show by three artists that engages with the idea of teamwork in business environments: sharing ideas, problem solving and working together.
Floorsheet PDF – download here

Virginia Were 
Working Together Can Lead to a Miraculous 
Outcome
A Review of I Lean You My Support
Download PDF here

12-29 June 2019
Amy Unkovich is an Auckland based artist. She works primarily with materials associated with construction and renovation. Amy makes architectonic sculptural installations that use colour and tactility to play with notions of interior treatments and architectural tropes.

GOLDKORP
22 May – 7 June
Mark Schroder

WE HAVE REVIEWED THE SYSTEM OF INTERNAL CONTROLS OPERATED BY THE RELEVANT DEPARTMENT OF THE COMPANY AND CARRIED OUT SUCH TESTS AS WE HAVE CONSIDERED NECESSARY. FROM OUR EXAMINATIONS WE ARE OF THE OPINION THAT THE RELEVANT DEPARTMENT OF THE COMPANY HAS PROPERLY MAINTAINED THE BALANCE FOR THE MONTH OF [DATE].

GOLDKORP repurposes RM as head office of a confident and seemingly sophisticated gold holdings company.

What could possibly go wrong?
Don’t miss out.
Invest today!

Mark Schroder creates amalgam-installations of aspiration and disappointment. Recent projects include: it’s only a scratch, play_station, Wellington, 2018 and NEW GOLD MOUNTAIN, Blue Oyster Art Project Space, Dunedin, 2018.

Photos by Sam Hartnett.