B.

Sione Monu, 2020
Single-channel HD digital video, colour, sound, duration 3 min 55 sec
Courtesy of the artist

Sione Monu is usually based in Canberra, Australia but after a round trip to Tonga, as part of a Christchurch Art Gallery / Creative New Zealand funded project due to have opened on 1 April 2020, he is staying with family in Māngere, Auckland. Producing short, sharp and witty works in video, Monu’s practice has the immediacy and energy of French New Wave cinema comprising every aspect that cellphone media can provide.

James Oram, 2020
Single-channel HD digital video, colour, sound, duration 22 min
Courtesy of the artist

Artist James Oram produces works that embrace the elegance of raw materials from which to draw out honest observations of modern living. This work is located within the tradition of the uninterrupted single take, no edits, preferring video as a direct document of an action over a constructed narrative.

Employing blue latex gloves and surgical tools, Oram carves a face from a square block of soap resting on a mirror to construct a clean, idealised version of himself. The work is reminiscent of lives configured for the best possible presence online, or of how we now protect ourselves when attending to daily banalities such as trips to the supermarket during lockdown. Either way our interface with the world has been transformed, what will the new you be like when we re-emerge in real life?!

Conor Clarke, 2020
Single-channel HD digital video, colour, sound, duration 1 min 28 sec
Courtesy of the artist and Two Rooms, with thanks to Krzysztof Wysocki and University of Canterbury Campus Security

For some years, artist Conor Clark (Ngāi Tahu) has been exploring the sleight of hand potential of photography. More recently she has experimented with video, bringing her photographic tendencies with her to draw out the sensuousness of moving image. Perceptions of nature and our relationships to water are also consistent themes for Clarke.

Shot on her cellphone, Reservoir Romanticism documents a range of water sources Clarke discovered within a one kilometre radius from her home. It is an experiential map of sorts, and an ode to hard-working waters.

Bridget Reweti, 2020
Single-channel HD digital video, re-coloured photographs, sound, duration 50 sec
Thanks to Flogging a Dead One Horse Town for their song 'Dork Tomahawk'

Bridget Reweti (Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi) often draws from her everyday experiences of being in a place and reflections on the history it contains, layering these ways of thinking about a site. Here, Reweti re-coloured black and white photographs taken on her state sanctioned walks to Tunnel Beach, the nearest to her new home in Ōtepoti. An old-fashioned technique, hand-tinting of photographs was common in the nineteenth century, and her use of this method reflects an ongoing interest in the history of photography, its role in documenting colonial life and landscapes as well as the agency Māori have within photography. 

Sonya Lacey, 2015 
Single-channel HD digital video, sound, duration 9min 7 sec
Courtesy of the artist and Robert Heald Gallery
Originally commissioned by CIRCUIT Artist Film and Video Aotearoa
Camerawork by Campbell Farquhar and Sonya Lacey
Narration by Fuyuko Akiyoshi
Music by Johnny Chang: folk music background (excerpt) 

By Sea is a carefully constructed narrative on the merging of language and architecture, a literal unfolding of what it might mean to live inside a letter. It tells the story of a fictional seaside apartment building, part of a complex that forms the words Par Mer, written in a bold, italic typeface. Most filming takes place inside an architectural model intricately built out of cast salt. Originally commissioned as a response to the poetry of Joanna Margaret Paul.

Ronnie Van Hout, 2020
Single-channel HD digital video, colour, sound, duration 12 min 25 sec
Courtesy of the artist and Ivan Anthony

A quintessential film of the 1980s,The Breakfast Club is based on five stereotypical high school students – a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal – stuck together on Saturday detention in the library. This remake or ‘ghosting’, in which Ronnie van Hout plays all five characters, emphasises the awkwardness of our teenage years and offers some Brechtian comic relief on the idea of the social distancing that has become part of our everyday lives.

John Chrisstoffels, 2018
16mm film transferred to single-channel digital video, sound, duration 2 min 36 sec
Director/Editor: John Chrisstoffels 
Camera: Alexandra Porter & John Chrisstoffels
Courtesy of the artist

Inspired by the David Bowie hit ‘The Man Who Sold the World’, Ritornello from John Chrisstoffels seems to embody the increasing claustrophobia of the lockdown experience. A ritornello is a repeated musical phrase and in the alternating camera shots, upstairs inside to downstairs outside, we are presented with an increasingly manic back and forth, a growing sense of unease at being both locked in and shut out. Chrisstoffels has described this work as a homage to filmmaker Maya Deren, De Stijl architect Gerrit Rietveld and philosopher Henri Bergson.

Sriwhana Spong, 2006 
Super 8 film transferred to single-channel digital video, black and white, silent, 2 min 52 sec.
Courtesy of the artist and Michael Lett

There is an avant garde tradition of embracing the nature of film's inherent material qualities. This methodology keeps every aspect of the material in place, every element remains intrinsic to the work. Here, we see an entire roll of Super 8 film exposed by hand across a 24 hour period.

Filmed in her parent’s garden, Sriwhana Spong condensed time through stop-motion photography in order to capture light falling across a group of shrine-like objects made using souvenirs from Bali and assemblages of fruit and everyday items. As the sun moves across the sky, we observe the accelerated passing of time in the small enclave.

Spong often incorporates timed musical sequences across the duration of her exhibitions, grounded in a cyclic Indonesian musical tradition. For us, her work will appear and disappear like a gong, chiming at month-long intervals from May through September.

On   28 April – 28 May
Off   29 May – 27 June
On   28 June – 28 July
Off   29 July – 27 August
On   28 August – 28 September 

Xin Cheng, 2019
Single-channel HD digital video, colour, sound, duration 34 min 31 sec.
Camera: Jesús Pulpón
Calligraphy: Wigger Bierma
Courtesy of the artist 
With thanks to Creative New Zealand

Everyday resourcefulness is central to the work of Xin Cheng. Her recent film Seeing Like A Forest was made in Hamburg. While living in the city for three years, she reflected on over a decade of research observing the small modifications to shared spaces made by non-specialists, around the Asia-Pacific and Europe. Walking, talking, doing and making, Cheng learns from close looking; in this work she shows some of the approaches people take to adapting their communal environments, examples of inventive resourcefulness and heartwarming waste minimisation.