Chapter Break: Enjoy Studio Programme
Graphic designed by Joe Locke.
now on
4 Jun
–
28 Jun
Aroha Matchitt-Millar, Fetishini, Frankie Matchitt-Millar, p Walters
This Pipiri June, Enjoy Contemporary Art Space launches our Studio Programme, welcoming four innovative ringatoi to develop new work and reimagine the gallery‘s possibilities. Joining us as our studio and Chapter Three artists, Fetishini (Te Whanganui-ā-Tara), Aroha and Frankie Matchitt-Millar (Te Whanganui-ā-Tara), and p Walters (Tāmaki Makaurau) will transform Enjoy through their boundary-pushing practices.
Alongside their studio practice, the artists will engage with a curated programme of studio visits, offering critical dialogue with leading artists and arts professionals. The public is invited to visit during Enjoy’s regular opening hours from 4–29 June, with opportunities to meet the artists and explore Enjoy’s library and archives.
The culmination of our Chapter Break studio programme will be unveiled at the Chapter Three exhibition opening, 5pm, Friday 4 Hōngongoi July.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Fetishini is a queer, non-binary performance artist whose work navigates the borders of abjection, desire, and identity. Rooted in lived experiences of dysphoria, neurodivergence, and queer embodiment, their practice explores how we define ourselves by rejecting what is considered dirty, shameful, taboo, or threatening to bodily and psychic coherence.
Beginning their creative journey as a drag artist, Fetishini’s work has evolved into performance that entangles body horror, fetish, and emotional intensity. Navigating the slippery terrain where desire and revulsion coexist, Fetishini confronts sanitised cultural narratives about bodily coherence and identity.
Their performances are ritualistic encounters with what we are meant to disown—staging intimacy with shame, fetish, body horror, and emotional excess. In doing so, they offer a kind of exposure therapy through art: not to cure, but to coexist with what we are told to hide.
Aroha Matchitt-Millar (Ngāti Rangitihi, Te Whakatōhea, Tūhoe) is a multidisciplinary artist with strong foundations in contemporary jewellery and raranga. Her work is influenced by the practices her tīpuna used, intrinsically passed down through whakapapa.
Using feathers, feet, wings, and bones, Aroha creates contemporary jewellery, influenced by urban Māori 'Hori Chic' style. The intimacy of the process of skinning and pelting manu is both cathartic and repairing, recognizing the role colonisation had in separating Māori from these taonga while whatu-ing the strands of whakapapa back together. Her mahi is a rats tail reclamation to climb te ara a Whaititiri and have a cuppa with her nan.
Frankie Matchitt-Millar is a multidisciplinary artist based in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara. Through his work Matchitt-Millar explores his takatāpuhitanga alongside his Māoritanga, through embodied making. Connection to audience is an integral part of Matchitt-Millar’s making; reindigenising the realm of performance and creating accessible mahi to his community.
p.Walters is a taniwha, local to the Kingdom of South Auckland and beyond, with wings and bones stretching across from Aotearoa and to various islands of Tonga. Their work reflects their dissidence to the colonial imagination and legacy of “new zealand” and their devotion to venerating their queer & othered body.
Graduating with BFA First Class Honours in 2022 from Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland, they practice collectively & individually throughout the motu & Moana via curation, exhibition making, public programming, writing, connecting, and more.