He waiata aroha is a new moving-image installation by Tāmaki Makaurau-based artist James Tapsell-Kururangi. Moving closer towards his whānau oral histories, the film meditates on aroha, living and Māori conceptions of time and history.

The work was filmed at two locations: on the Tongariro River, close to where the artist’ great grandfather passed, and inside the house of his kuia in Rotorua. The film transits the length of the Te Arawa Waka, as Tama-nui-te-rāi comes to rest. Rather than acting to document these places, the film moves towards a semi-fictional space, where locations dense with meaning and memory for the artist act as touchstones, gateways into an imagined celestial space.

A waiata, composed by the artist, accompanies the images on screen. The waiata contains the many imagined voices of an imagined character: Te Rā; Māui and his brothers; the house of Tapsell-Kururangi’s kuia; his great grandfather. Together, these voices pose questions—around place and time, and the human condition. They observe life and death, like the sun rising and setting each day.

Produced by Tapsell-Kururangi in close collaboration with his whānau, friends and mentors, He waiata aroha is a song for the artist’s kuia, and for her father.

Acting as artist-anthropologists, Brady and Ritchie use the gallery’s entryway and the less visible sites of marking and repair throughout the leased building (from missing bricks and the height of doorway frames, to the patterned ridges of keyholes) to reinvigorate what may first slip from attention. The artists take notice of both forgotten and reinserted markings, offering loving attention to the ways that traces left by people affect the present in tiny and detailed ways.

Taking stock of Enjoy’s 2019 relocation to 211 Left Bank Arcade from its past life up the stairs at 147 Cuba St, Brady and Ritchie investigate the gallery’s relationship to its local surroundings, as well as the audience’s relationship to the new gallery. Their experience starts from the doorway, where artworks ask how design forms intuitive experience by examining how a body might enter and exit through space. The exhibition includes an original score by Megan Brady, which welcomes viewers into a world of subtle affectations. Similarly, the artists explore the reassuringly quiet security systems designed to keep people out as much as protect what lies within.

Usually, gallery staff will scrub away evidence of previous shows between exhibitions, offering a completely clean, blank slate. In Lay in measures, the artists choose to celebrate the failure of total erasure and remain in play with past tenants, considering dust an often-ignored inheritance.