This programme of artists’ moving image from New Zealand explores themes of (re)awakenings, endings, memories, and renewal. Curated by Mark Williams, CIRCUIT Artist Film and Video Aotearoa New Zealand.

Eli Jenkin's Prayer
Aliyah Winter, 2016, 3 min

"The material from this work is lifted from a personal archive of musical recordings of the artist’s late grandfather, who was a prolific tenor. This work plays with a form of “drag”, both visually and temporally, to embody the existence and continuity of queerness through time and space." – Aliyah Winter

New Age
Gavin Hipkins, 2016, 10 min

Gavin Hipkins has completed two short films (in 2016) towards a trilogy of shorts: New Age, New World and New City. These three films navigate mythologised sites as their starting point for a reappraisal of genre and representation of these historic places. New Age explores the ritual landscape of Avebury’s stone circles by calling on passages from an English spiritualist manual from the 1870s and connotes spirit photography through recent snapshots.

Tai Whetuki (House Of Death)
Lisa Reihana, 2015, 14 min

Tai Whetuki is a powerful video work by leading multi-media artist Lisa Reihana (Ngapuhi, Ngāti Hine and Ngai Tu) which delves into Māori and Pacific cultural practices pertaining to death and mourning. Haunting and evocative images, accompanied by an elemental soundscape take us on a journey through the intensity and spectacle of communal mourning, in a reflection on grief and the transition of the spirit.

I Am an Open Window
Rachel Shearer, 2015, 6 min

Beginning in high saturation, I am an open window explores various amplifications of sensation; day passes to night, clouds hang in the sky like unexplained portents, nature brims with potential. A shudder of film in the gate subtly intimates the slippage between one state to another.”

What I Am Looking At
Marie Shannon, 2011, 8 min

What I Am Looking At takes its title from Julian Dashper’s 1993 work, What I Am Reading at the Moment – a library chair with a pile of every issue of Art Forum to 1993. The video uses rolling text with simultaneous voiceover to describe the contents of an artist’s studio and the work that needs to be done to make sense and create order once the artist is no longer there. The text describes categories and lists of objects: the precious, the mundane and the baffling.

Remember Snow
Gray Nicol, 2009, 10 min

Remember Snow began from memory, after Nicol carved a bust of a childhood acquaintance. “Snow was my mothers friend for some years. They didn’t marry, and he moved on, sadly. I know very little about his life before and after that time. I have only one photograph, and you can’t see his face.”

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Part of Aperture: Asia & Pacific Film Festival 2019