In this recording of the evening event called ‘Long exposure’, we hear the 13th Poet Laureate Chris Tse and fellow poets Mary Macpherson, Arihia Latham, Margo Montes de Oca, Ada Duffy, Simon Sweetman, and Jackson McCarthy move around the gallery reading new work alongside photographs of their choosing.

This event was developed in collaboration with the Alexander Turnbull Library and The National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa and recorded on 07 May 2025.

When looking at these photographs Stephens asks herself, is the person behind the camera a photographer or a kaiwhakaahua? This is a question of positionality for Stephens. In this talk, she considers what it might mean to decolonize the lens, how the language of photography might need to shift, and the impact this has on her own practice.

On the occasion of the exhibition A Different Light: First Photographs of Aotearoa, at Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery (1 February to 15 June 2025), this lunchtime talk was part of the series ‘Through a Contemporary Lens: Artists in Response’ developed in collaboration with artist and educator Caroline McQuarrie, and was recorded on 05 June 2025.

In the second episode of ‘In Response’, artist Matt Tini discusses the complex histories of tangata whenua in relation to photography, and recontextualises the ways we view such images – historic, present and future – through a te ao Māori perspective.

Tini asks such questions as, who were these images intended for? Who keeps the mauri alive of the tipuna represented in the early photographs? How are their stories being presented?

This episode is part of a series of recorded talks in response to the exhibition A Different Light: First Photographs of Aotearoa, at Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, from 1 February to 15 June 2025. The series ‘Through a Contemporary Lens: Artists in Response’ invited local artists to offer their response to particular photographs and was developed in collaboration with artist and educator Caroline McQuarrie. Recorded 17 April 2025.

In this episode, artist and educator Caroline McQuarrie, who helped develop the talk series, looks at Robina Nichol’s portrait of Amy Kirk yawning and considers what it might have meant to be an amateur female photographer in the late 19th century.

In the 21st century we have understanding of the gendered gaze in photography, and with this in mind McQuarrie explores what we can ask of these images, and of this photographer and how do we might locate her photographic practice now.

Recorded at Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, on 13 March 2025.

This episode is a recording of the public programme eventTūrangahakoa, Brook Konia in conversation with Rosalie Koko, 1.00pm, Saturday 24 August, Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, as part of the exhibition The buildings notice me, Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, 13.07.24–22.09.24.

In this political context and sitting amongst artist Matthew Galloway’s immersive project titled ‘The Power That Flows Through Us’, Galloway sat down with Professor of Politics and Māori Studies at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington Maria Bargh, to explore contemporary perspectives on the politics of resource use, with an eye on the past, present and future.

This episode is an edited recording of the lunchtime talk titled ‘Finding Ways Forward’ that took place on Wednesday 5th June 2024, in conjunction with the exhibition ‘Infrastructure: power, politics and imagination’, 20 April - 30 June 2024.

This historical era of cartooning is the starting point for this podcast episode, which is a recording of a panel discussion that took place on 14 May 2024 in conjunction with the exhibition Infrastructure: power, politics and imagination ,

Sitting amongst Galloway's project - and in particular, next to historical cartoons enlarged as life-sized sculptures - are the panelists: Sharon Murdoch, the first woman political cartoonist in the Aotearoa mainstream media; Sam Orchard, Assistant Curator for the Cartoon and Comics Archive at the Alexander Turnbull Library; and, cartoonist and researcher, Dylan Horrocks.

In this wide-ranging conversation, the panel explore such themes as: the importance of cartoons to the political imaginary; cartoons’ influence on public opinion; the politics of the 70s/80s generation of cartoonists; what political cartooning looks like now; and what it might be in the future.

This episode is a recording from a panel discussion featuring artists Taarn Scott and Raewyn Martyn in conversation with exhibition co-curator Su Ballard, which took place on 23 March 2024 as part of the closing weekend event for 'Folded Memory' titled 'Ki te Ngāhere: Conversations about time material and memory',

Tracing an ongoing thread begun in a previous exhibition — Listening Stones Jumping Rocks (2021) — this conversation considers the way narratives and materials are interchangeable containers of ecological memory. In Invasive Weeds Taarn Scott has rendered Hana Pera Aoake’s poetry material. In Greywacke love poems: returns Raewyn Martyn explored how mutable material can dislodge skewed histories. In this conversation with exhibition curator Su Ballard, Scott and Martyn brought their practices together to reflect on the transformational potential of material as stories and stories as material. Together we imagined new old ways to create survivable futures.

For Spoken Ecologies 2023/24 Tāhuhu Kōrero Toi Summer Scholar in Art History at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, Margo Montes de Oca brought together poets to share work in response to Folded Memory. Using their poetry to bear witness to the kaleidoscopic stories of geology and ecology of Aotearoa, these readers guide us through shifting landscapes of time, extending the tendrils of human language out towards the more-than-human. Featuring Joan Fleming, Ash Davida Jane, Ruben Mita, Niamh Hollis-Locke, Loretta Riach, and Hana Pera Aoake.

Thomas Voyce is a sound artist from Te Whanganui-a-Tara, who works primarily with field recordings and live diffusion. He has a particular interest in multi-element soundsystems, spatial audio and dub production techniques. Voyce has participated in sound art residencies in Aotearoa and South Africa, with fixed media work exhibited as part of Audiosphere: Sound Experimentation 1980-2020, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid (2020-21). With an enduring fascination with vintage audio technology, Voyce often performs with analog mixing consoles and electromechanical effects, creating work that highlights the marriage of source materials and the production methodologies employed.

Back of House, 12 August – 29 October 2023, Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery.

Cora-Allan is of Māori (Ngāpuhi, Ngātitumutumu) and Niue descent. A contemporary practitioner of the Niue tradition of barkcloth known as hiapo, Cora-Allan is credited with reviving the ‘sleeping artform’ which has not been practised in Niue for several generations.

In this conversation Sophie and Cora-Allan discuss the material processes of harvesting whenua paint and the materials science of producing natural dyes as they relate to Cora-Allan’s three works on hiapo, on display in ‘Aro Toi /Art Collection in Focus: A Gift, A Celebration, An Invitation’.

In this final session Tina reads an extract from the raw notes Wystan Curnow compiled about the performance by Peter Roche & Linda Buis in October 1982 in which they sit opposite each other raising their arms in a form of unrequited greeting at RKS Art in Auckland. She follows this by reading the published text, ‘A Fine How Do You Do’ Curnow wrote for the New Zealand Listener that gave a fuller account of the performance and was published on 26 February 1983. With grateful thanks to the author for allowing this reading.

In this session Tina reads three texts by Peter Roche & Linda Buis that describe performances at Auckland City Art Gallery (December 1981), Auckland Museum (March 1982), and Manawatu Art Gallery (August 1982), documentation of which is displayed in one vitrine in the Upper Chartwell Gallery. These three texts share a focus on the role of the audience in the unfolding of each work, proving how contingent each performance was on the actions and reactions of the people who happened upon or came to watch each piece.

In this reading Tina sat in the Lower Stairwell Gallery, the dimmest area of the exhibition where several works by Roche & Buis that played with light and dark, visibility and blindness were presented. She read Peter Roche & Linda Buis’s account of their performance at 100m2 which started at 10pm on 14 April 1981 and was illuminated only by candles and the ambient street lighting that entered the space once they had opened the doors to the old building in Federal Street. She also read accounts by two audience members, Wystan Curnow and Tony Green to give different perspectives on the occasion. She finished by reading an extract from a letter written by Wystan Curnow to Tony Green describing their performance at Space in Auckland on 27 January 1983. We are grateful to the authors for allowing us to share these direct thoughts with our audience.

Writers are inspired and challenged by the visual arts, whether it be for its politics, its abstraction, its humour, or through creative and productive friendships with the artists themselves. But what does ‘responding’ to an artwork really mean? What are a writer’s specific considerations for different commissions and publications? Beyond the essay, what is the potential of fiction, poetry, and other literary forms to respond to a work of visual art? And what is the role of the reader, as the third party in a collaboration between a writer and artist?

This episode was recorded at Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery on 24 May 2023, in conjunction with the CIRCUIT exhibition ‘Legacies: Five Short Films for Cinema’ by Edith Amituanai, Martin Sagadin, Ukrit Sa-nguanhai, Pati Tyrell, and Sriwhana Spong, 13 May - 30 July 2023.

A starting point for this kōrero is the accompanying Legacies reader edited by CIRCUIT’s 2022 Writer in Residence, Thomasin Sleigh. The conversation begins with Thomasin Sleigh inviting Tina Makereti to read an excerpt from her short story, Black Milk (2016), which is republished in the reader. This story was written in response to a photograph by Fiona Pardington and went on to be the Pacific Regional Winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2016.

Tina is joined in conversation by writers Gregory Kan and Gwynneth Porter to discuss their writing and its dynamic and evolving relationship to the visual arts.

Please note there is a brief microphone malfunction from 36-39 minutes.

In this reading Tina reads both Peter Roche’s and Wystan Curnow’s original notes written soon after the Night Piece performance, executed in the Old Gasworks in Freemans Bay in Auckland. This was undertaken in the dark without the permission of the site’s owners and entailed Linda crawling along the length of a 60-foot wall, a surviving fragment of a much larger structure, while Peter lit candles at points along the wall’s base. Wystan was the only audience member. The two accounts were later integrated and published in 1983 in the first issue of Parallax, a new journal dedicated to postmodern art and literature. We are grateful to both authors for allowing us to share these direct thoughts with our audience.

In this reading Tina reads Wystan Curnow’s original notes written soon after attending Peter Roche & Linda Buis’s Liaison performances at Real Pictures in Auckland in March 1980. This was the first time the pair performed together in public as an acknowledged duo. Tina uses the occasion to track the shift from live action to historical event by then reading the notes prepared for the exhibition as a foil to Curnow’s raw report. We are grateful to the author for allowing us to share these direct thoughts with our audience

In this reading Tina delivers artist Peter Roche's notes around the performances of Oh Shit No, On the Contrary, and offers insights into this part of the timeline, which is at the point where Linda Buis starts to play an active role that will lead eventually into a shared practice.

Please note that Peter Roche's use of expletives in his writing have not been censored in this recording.

This episode features Rachel O’Neill, a Pākehā queer filmmaker, writer and artist living and working between the Kāpiti Coast and Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa. Rachel develops screen-based projects, writes books and collaborates on cross-disciplinary projects, seeking out fresh ways to see and understand the human condition and to unearth the humour and strangeness that underlie experience.

On the 8th of March 2023 Rachel presented a playful and poetic discussion exploring the interpersonal tones and shifting arrays of voices that shape our day. During this talk, participants were invited to spend some time ‘listening to the voice’ of an artwork of their choice, exploring it in relation to self, moment and situation. It was hoped that these personal ‘found sounds’ might generate curious ‘chords’ of experience for private or group reflection.

The talk was an intriguing undertaking that provoked a unique reading of the exhibition. This episode is Rachel’s adaption for podcast, opening the experience to anyone, anywhere, anytime.

12pm 08 December 2022

Join us to explore some recent poems by writers who identify with or respond to the mermaid as a figure who slips between categories. Ōtepoti artist and poet, Jessica Hinerangi Thompson- Carr aka the Māori Mermaid, joins curator Megan Dunn to discuss their individual resonance with mermaid symbology. The Māori mermaid reads her own work and talks about the work of others from poetry to popular culture, shining light on the imaginative potential of the mermaid and its relevance to contemporary Aotearoa.

Jessica Hinerangi Thompson-Carr is Ngāruahine, Ngāti Ruanui, Ngāpuhi, and Pākehā. She is 26 years old and currently works as an artist, poet, and writer, often under the name Māori Mermaid (@maori_mermaid on instagram). Her inspiration comes from her whakapapa and she is constantly seeking more information about herself and her future through her poetry and art.

This is the third and final in our lunchtime talk series Bridging Worlds that ran alongside Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery’s exhibitions Lucien Rizo's 'Everything' and Megan Dunn's 'The Mermaid Chronicles'. These talks explore private obsessions in real world contexts and the ways imaginative personas enable slippage between identity categories.

12pm 01 December 2022

O’Brien held many roles during his long life – he had been a radar operator in the airforce, a businessman, a city councillor, and eventually the president of the World Peace Council. As a prominent politician he was elected during a time of change within both the Labour Party and within Aotearoa as a whole. In this lunchtime talk political historian, Jim McAloon, offers compelling insights into the social and political context in which Gerald O’Brien lived and worked.

Jim McAloon is a professor of history at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. He has a wide range of interests in the economic and social history of New Zealand and other places. For some years he’s taught a second year course in New Zealand political history, and has published a number of works in the field, including (with Peter Franks) Labour: The New Zealand Labour Party 1916-2016 (2016).

This is from our lunchtime talk series Bridging Worlds that ran alongside Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery’s exhibitions Lucien Rizo's 'Everything' and Megan Dunn's 'the Mermaid Chronicles'. These talks explore private obsessions in real world contexts and the ways imaginative personas enable slippage between identity categories.

We hear from Robert Short – mermaid tail-maker for Splash, Dr Jenny Kokai – author of Swim Pretty Aquatic Spectacles and the Performance of Race, Gender, and Nature, and Patricia Rozema - director of I’ve Heard the Mermaid Singing.

Lucien Rizos in conversation with Gregory O'Brien.

Gerald O’Brien was like a father to Lucien Rizos, yet throughout their time together O’Brien never mentioned his lifelong creative project which is featured in Rizos’s exhibition, Everything. Join Rizos in conversation with Wellington artist and writer Gregory O’Brien as they discuss and try to make sense of O’Brien’s life and the fantasy world he kept secret.

Gregory O'Brien is a Wellington poet, essayist and painter who curated exhibitions at City Gallery Wellington between 1997 and 2009. While there, he worked with Lucien Rizos on his 2005 exhibition Where I find myself. Gregory O'Brien's monograph on painter Don Binney is forthcoming from Auckland University Press in 2023.

Everything is a project by Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington-based artist Lucien Rizos. Over three years he has documented the possessions of his uncle, Gerald O’Brien (1924–2017), Labour Party MP for Island Bay (1969–78) and local businessman. Rizos has organised his documentation into more than 60 magazines that canvass everything O’Brien kept relating to his public and private life. He has also made detailed composite photographs of his uncle’s bookshelves as an extended portrait of someone he was close to and deeply admired. This exhibition brings Rizos’s large-scale photographs, magazines and scanned imagery together with actual artefacts from O’Brien’s archive. It focuses in particular on Rizos’s most startling find. This is his uncle’s secret art project worked on from childhood well into his adult life that invented a parallel world with an alternate geography, nation states, public figures and histories. The exhibition presents invented maps, lists, newspapers and hand-written histories as well as hundreds of his cut-out and hand-painted figures that represent named personages holding public office in his imagined world. Working with curator Robert Leonard, Rizos both offers up his uncle’s secret life to its first public scrutiny and tests the capacity of his medium to effectively tell O’Brien’s story.

This was the first in our lunchtime talk series Bridging Worlds that ran alongside Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery’s exhibitions Lucien Rizo's 'Everything' and Megan Dunn's 'the Mermaid Chronicles'. These talks explore private obsessions in real world contexts and the ways imaginative personas enable slippage between identity categories.

Developed as a partnership between Anna Miles Gallery, Auckland; Ramp Gallery, Hamilton, and Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, ‘Barbara Tuck – Delirium Crossing’ evolved as a conscious alternative to the conventional retrospective. For ‘Delirium Crossing’ paintings were chosen by fifteen writers and their texts collated in an accompanying catalogue, fulfilling the artist’s ambition to create a forum for thinking about her medium, as much as a tool to canvass her practice.

Listen here to editors, Christina Barton and Anna Miles, and Susan Ballard, Lachlan Taylor, and Hanahiva Rose, three of the fourteen writers included in the publication accompanying Tuck’s exhibition, as they discuss their approaches to writing about painting and to Tuck’s work in particular.

Susan Ballard is an Associate Professor of Art History at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. Her most recent book is ‘Art and Nature in the Anthropocene: Planetary Aesthetics’ (2021), and she recently curated the exhibition ‘Listening Stones Jumping Rocks’ at Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery.

Christina Barton is director of Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery and a curator and art historian with specialist knowledge of the history of New Zealand art, especially after 1960. She first encountered Barbara Tuck’s paintings in the early 1990s, including her in the exhibition ‘Surface Tension: Ten Artists in the ’90s’ at Auckland City Art Gallery in 1991.

Anna Miles is an Auckland art dealer and lecturer in visual arts at Auckland University of Technology Te Wānanga Aronui o Tāmaki Makaurau. She has represented the work of Barbara Tuck since 2006.

Hanahiva Rose (Ngāi Tahu, Te Atiawa, Ngāti Toa Rangatira) is a writer and curator based in Paekākāriki. She has held curatorial positions at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and Te Papa and is widely published for her writing on modern and contemporary art practices in Aotearoa.

Lachlan Taylor is a writer and curator living in Pōneke Wellington. He holds MAs in both Art History (2018) and Creative Writing (2022) from Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. In 2021 he took on the role of commissioning editor of the ArtNow Essays digital platform. Lachlan’s writing has been published in Art + Australia, Art News New Zealand, Art New Zealand, ArtNow, the Art Paper, and The Pantograph Punch.

Both works are on loan to the University Art Collection and have been lent by their owners because they want the paintings to be seen and enjoyed. Jane Campion and her mother Edith Campion deposited the Alexis Hunter painting in 1999 when the filmmaker was awarded an Honorary Doctorate for her already celebrated work. The gallery team were delighted to bring this painting to its now prominent location in the Maclaurin Lecture Theatre Foyer and into conversation with the recent loan of Seraphine Pick’s Easy Living I from the accomplished young actor Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie. Campion and McKenzie are both Wellington born and raised and both come from families prominent in the fields of theatre and film. We were thrilled that they agreed to talk about their paintings at a small event that launched the Adam’s contribution to the University’s 125 celebrations for Adam Art Gallery Patrons and Volunteers on the evening of 27 April. This is the recording from that event.

“I don’t come out with any specific answers, but really just the question: if we listen closely to the earth what do we hear? And for me, I hear whakapapa, I hear connection, and then it’s really up to the listener to find what they hear.” – Rachel Shearer.

Participants

Lawrence McDonald curated PALeo Neo Video - Chapters from the history of video art in New Zealand 1970-1990s which was a 1999 survey of New Zealand video art installed at the New Zealand Film Archive and around Pōneke. Four years earlier, he curated VDU: Video Down Under – Recent Video Art from New Zealand (1995) including a work by Lisa Reihana, whose work is also featured in Image Processors. McDonald is a writer, having worked as Editor of the film, television and theatre criticism publication Illusions Magazine.

Shannon Te Ao (Ngāti Tūwharetoa) has presented major exhibitions across Aotearoa and recently in Canada, with video and performance as consistent touchstones. He draws upon Māori knowledge systems and the linguistic customs of Te Reo Māori while exploring contemporary issues and culture. Te Ao is also a writer, and a Senior Lecturer at Whiti o Rehua School of Art, Massey University.

Nina Tonga is an art historian, currently working as Curator Contemporary Art at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. She specialises in contemporary Pacific art in Aotearoa and in the Pacific, with a particular interest in internet art from 2000 to the present. In 2018, Tonga curated Pacific Sisters: Fashion Activists for Te Papa Tongarewa; in 2019 she was Curator of the Honolulu Biennial; and she continues to be instrumental figure in contemporary art.

Mark Williams is the director and founder of CIRCUIT Artist Film and Video Aotearoa New Zealand, an arts agency that supports artists working in moving image through distribution of works, professional practice initiatives, commissioning and critical review. Williams has organised symposia, festivals and exhibitions that provide fertile platforms for these art forms. He regularly contributes writing and kōrero to exhibition catalogues, magazines, websites, and podcasts.

This episode's release was delayed while the gallery team installed the incoming exhibition.

Levin’s essay focusses on the film ‘Havarie’, by Philip Sheffner and Merle Kröger. This film repurposes a short, amateur video clip uploaded to YouTube by its author Terry Diamond, a passenger on board a cruise liner, who caught on camera a mid-Mediterranean encounter with a boat-load of refugees. Levin offers a powerful and multi-facetted reading of the film. He uses the occasion to offer his own meditations on distance. These draw on philosophy, art history, film theory and autobiography, as he recounts his own separation from his parents, who live in Jerusalem, and the alienating effects of communicating with them through his computer screen.

[Image: Still from Philip Scheffner, ‘Havarie’, 2016]

“At times we phone or Skype. It’s the only way we can talk.”

- Rhim Ibrir, Havarie, 2016

Crossings is a show about the closeness of distance, the experience of connecting with others from afar, while ensconced in our homes, physically disconnected yet always online. As we shared the experiences of a global pandemic, of shifting political landscapes and transformative action, 2020 was also a time of interiority, of modified subjectivities and heightened anxieties as global lockdowns forced us to turn inwards. Together we withdrew from the world; our most intimate relationships were confined to our bubbles or existed only on screen.

Crossings brings together a range of artists and works that register the polarities of inside and outside, closeness and distance, health and illness and the impacts of larger external forces on our collective subjectivities. The artists selected work in a variety of media, are of different generations and have different life experiences and cultural backgrounds―yet their works share a concern with how objects, images and materials carry meanings that suggest rather than proclaim. They niggle at the edge of knowing, to articulate the promise and fear of a threshold state.

Laundry Day is an unfolding series of conversations between artists, friends and collaborators in Crossings. Each episode will explore how the works in Crossings resonate with one another, where they intersect and collide, how the artists have responded to the unusual year it has been, and the new meanings that can be gleaned from the works being included in a group exhibition. Recorded from afar, from the contributors’ individual homes, Laundry Day is a chance to connect from a distance.

“At times we phone or Skype. It’s the only way we can talk.”

- Rhim Ibrir, Havarie, 2016

Crossings is a show about the closeness of distance, the experience of connecting with others from afar, while ensconced in our homes, physically disconnected yet always online. As we shared the experiences of a global pandemic, of shifting political landscapes and transformative action, 2020 was also a time of interiority, of modified subjectivities and heightened anxieties as global lockdowns forced us to turn inwards. Together we withdrew from the world; our most intimate relationships were confined to our bubbles or existed only on screen.

Crossings brings together a range of artists and works that register the polarities of inside and outside, closeness and distance, health and illness and the impacts of larger external forces on our collective subjectivities. The artists selected work in a variety of media, are of different generations and have different life experiences and cultural backgrounds―yet their works share a concern with how objects, images and materials carry meanings that suggest rather than proclaim. They niggle at the edge of knowing, to articulate the promise and fear of a threshold state.

Laundry Day is an unfolding series of conversations between artists, friends and collaborators in Crossings. Each episode will explore how the works in Crossings resonate with one another, where they intersect and collide, how the artists have responded to the unusual year it has been, and the new meanings that can be gleaned from the works being included in a group exhibition. Recorded from afar, from the contributors’ individual homes, Laundry Day is a chance to connect from a distance.

“At times we phone or Skype. It’s the only way we can talk.”

- Rhim Ibrir, Havarie, 2016

Crossings is a show about the closeness of distance, the experience of connecting with others from afar, while ensconced in our homes, physically disconnected yet always online. As we shared the experiences of a global pandemic, of shifting political landscapes and transformative action, 2020 was also a time of interiority, of modified subjectivities and heightened anxieties as global lockdowns forced us to turn inwards. Together we withdrew from the world; our most intimate relationships were confined to our bubbles or existed only on screen.

Crossings brings together a range of artists and works that register the polarities of inside and outside, closeness and distance, health and illness and the impacts of larger external forces on our collective subjectivities. The artists selected work in a variety of media, are of different generations and have different life experiences and cultural backgrounds―yet their works share a concern with how objects, images and materials carry meanings that suggest rather than proclaim. They niggle at the edge of knowing, to articulate the promise and fear of a threshold state.

Laundry Day is an unfolding series of conversations between artists, friends and collaborators in Crossings. Each episode will explore how the works in Crossings resonate with one another, where they intersect and collide, how the artists have responded to the unusual year it has been, and the new meanings that can be gleaned from the works being included in a group exhibition. Recorded from afar, from the contributors’ individual homes, Laundry Day is a chance to connect from a distance.

“At times we phone or Skype. It’s the only way we can talk.”

- Rhim Ibrir, Havarie, 2016

Crossings is a show about the closeness of distance, the experience of connecting with others from afar, while ensconced in our homes, physically disconnected yet always online. As we shared the experiences of a global pandemic, of shifting political landscapes and transformative action, 2020 was also a time of interiority, of modified subjectivities and heightened anxieties as global lockdowns forced us to turn inwards. Together we withdrew from the world; our most intimate relationships were confined to our bubbles or existed only on screen.

Crossings brings together a range of artists and works that register the polarities of inside and outside, closeness and distance, health and illness and the impacts of larger external forces on our collective subjectivities. The artists selected work in a variety of media, are of different generations and have different life experiences and cultural backgrounds―yet their works share a concern with how objects, images and materials carry meanings that suggest rather than proclaim. They niggle at the edge of knowing, to articulate the promise and fear of a threshold state.

Laundry Day is an unfolding series of conversations between artists, friends and collaborators in Crossings. Each episode will explore how the works in Crossings resonate with one another, where they intersect and collide, how the artists have responded to the unusual year it has been, and the new meanings that can be gleaned from the works being included in a group exhibition. Recorded from afar, from the contributors’ individual homes, Laundry Day is a chance to connect from a distance.

“At times we phone or Skype. It’s the only way we can talk.”

- Rhim Ibrir, Havarie, 2016

Crossings is a show about the closeness of distance, the experience of connecting with others from afar, while ensconced in our homes, physically disconnected yet always online. As we shared the experiences of a global pandemic, of shifting political landscapes and transformative action, 2020 was also a time of interiority, of modified subjectivities and heightened anxieties as global lockdowns forced us to turn inwards. Together we withdrew from the world; our most intimate relationships were confined to our bubbles or existed only on screen.

Crossings brings together a range of artists and works that register the polarities of inside and outside, closeness and distance, health and illness and the impacts of larger external forces on our collective subjectivities. The artists selected work in a variety of media, are of different generations and have different life experiences and cultural backgrounds―yet their works share a concern with how objects, images and materials carry meanings that suggest rather than proclaim. They niggle at the edge of knowing, to articulate the promise and fear of a threshold state.

Laundry Day is an unfolding series of conversations between artists, friends and collaborators in Crossings. Each episode will explore how the works in Crossings resonate with one another, where they intersect and collide, how the artists have responded to the unusual year it has been, and the new meanings that can be gleaned from the works being included in a group exhibition. Recorded from afar, from the contributors’ individual homes, Laundry Day is a chance to connect from a distance.