These are Addressed to You

Bas Jan Ader, I'm too sad to tell you, 1970–71. 16mm film transferred to digital video, silent, 3:22 mins. Image courtesy of La Colección Jumex, México.

Bas Jan Ader, I'm too sad to tell you, 1970–71. 16mm film transferred to digital video, silent, 3:22 mins. Image courtesy of La Colección Jumex, México.

upcoming
23 May – 4 Jul

Abigail Aroha Jensen, Bas Jan Ader, Christian Dimick, Sarah Rose, Sharon Kivland, Yana Dombrowsky-M'Baye

These are Addressed to You brings together the work of Bas Jan Ader, Christian Dimick, Yana Nafysa Dombrowsky-M’Baye, Abigail Aroha Jensen, Sharon Kivland and Sarah Rose—artists whose practices span painting, sculpture, sound, performance, writing and moving image. This exhibition borrows its title from a 2025 book in letters by participating artist and writer Sharon Kivland. It explores what it means to address and to be addressed, to correspond and to be in correspondence with. As the definition of a letter encompasses both the alphabetic and the epistolic, these are practices that are attentive to the potentials of language and its transmission. Within this understanding of correspondence, address is slippery, unstable —a crack that appears between sender and receiver.

 

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Works by Bas Jan Ader and Sharon Kivland begin in the form of a postcard dispatched across oceans. Ader’s I’m Too Sad to Tell You (1971) is a performance and video work in which the Dutch conceptual artist cries on camera, seemingly wracked by a sadness too powerful to put into words. Kivland’s Mes horizons (2013–ongoing) is a series of found and collected vintage seascape postcards, which have been modified with layers of Indian ink that black out the skies—a gesture that displaces their function as souvenir, yet intimates a more fragile relationship with memory. A new sound installation by Sarah Rose continues her interest in the body of letters exchanged between American conservationist Rachel Carson and her friend and lover Dorothy Freeman, and recasts absence as something heard as well as felt. Yana Dombrowsky-M’Baye’s work draws on a speculative fiction in which a shifting protagonist addresses the resonance of colonial frictions in the present. Both Christian Dimick and Abigail Aroha Jensen, in different ways, engage with expanded forms of whakapapa as sites of transformation and catharsis. What emerges—through repetition, fiction and accumulation—might be considered ways of navigating distance, both proximate and far.

A letter is a form that unfolds; it travels, transforms and resists fixed definition. Across the exhibition, these artworks similarly elude fixity, instead embracing ambiguity and ambivalence as sites of critical and imaginative possibility. And meaning slips, as longing does, between senders.

Curated by Jess Clifford

He pūtahitanga te whakaaturanga nei o ngā mahi a Bas Jan Ader rātou ko Christian Dimick, ko Yana Nafysa Dombrowsky-M’Baye, ko Abigail Aroha Jensen, ko Sharon Kivland, ko Sarah Rose anō hoki—he ringatoi ēnei me ā rātou mahi e tāpae ana i ngā ao toi o te peita, te tārai, te oro, te whakaari, te tuhi me te ata teretere.

He mea rauhī a These are Addressed to You nā Jess Clifford. He mea mino anō tōna ingoa nō tētahi pukapuka ā-reta o 2025, nā te kaituhi me te ringatoi whai wāhi mai, nā Sharon Kivland. Ko tāna he whakatōmene i ēnei mea te anganui atu ki tētahi, me te noho anganuitia ana anō, ko te kōrero atu ki tētahi, me te noho e kōrerorero ana, tētahi ki tētahi. Kei te whai wāhi mai i raro i te tikanga o te kupu reta ko te arapū, ko te mahi tuku karere hoki. He kaupapa ēnei e areare ana ki te pitomata o te reo me tōna tukunga atu. I roto i tēnei māramatanga o te tuku karere ka pāhekeheke tēnei mea te anganui. Arā ngā mahi a Bas Jan Ader rāua ko Sharon Kivland, ka tīmata ai hei pōhi kāri e tukuna nei e whakawhiti ana i te moana. Ko tā Ader I’m Too Sad to Tell You (1971) tētahi mahi toi whakaari, toi ataata hoki. I reira te ringatoi ariā o Hōrana e tangi ana i mua i te kāmera. Te āhua nei kua pokea ia e tētahi pāpōuri nui rawa kia kōrerohia atu e te kupu. Ko tā Kivland Mes horizons (2013–e moroki ana) he rokiroki pōhi kāri tawhito, he tirohanga moana, kua kitea noatia ētahi, kua kohia anō hoki. Kua whakarerekētia ēnei ki ngā paparanga o te waingārahu Īnia, e pokea katoatia ai ngā rangi—mā reira te take o ēnei hei manatunga ka kore ai, kia kōrerohia kētia tētahi hononga tikoki ake ki te mahara. 

He haerenga tonutanga te puninga toi oro a Sarah Rose o tana aronui ki te pūhanga reta i whakawhitia ai e te kaitiaki-taiao, e Rachel Carson, rāua ko tāna hoa, whaiāipo hoki, a Dorothy Freeman. Ko tāna he whiu anō i tēnei mea te korenga hei mea e rangona ā-taringa tonu nei, ā-tinana hoki. Kei te ahu mai te mahi a Yana Dombrowsky-M’Baye i tētahi kōrero paki whakapae, i reira tētahi kiritoa pāhekeheke e kōrero ana ki ngā kawekawe o ngā whakatete tāmitanga i te ao hou. Ko Christian Dimick rāua ko Abigail Aroha Jensen ērā e whai ana i ā rāua ake ara hei whakawhānui ake i tēnei mea te whakapapa, e kōrerohia ai ia hei tētahi wāhi o te whakawhitinga me te whakamaheatanga. Ko ngā mea ka ea mai—mā te tāruarua kōrero, te kōrero paki me te whakapūranga—ko ētahi ara pea hei whakatere i te ahoaho, ki te pae tata me te tawhiti hoki. 

Ko te reta tētahi āhuahanga e māroha mai ana; ka hāereere, ka whakawhitiwhiti, ka ātete hoki i ngā tautuhinga pūmau. Huri noa i te whakaaturanga nei, ka pēnā hoki ā ngā mahi toi nei karo i te pūmau. Ko tā rātou anō he whai i te rangirua me te ngākaurua, hei wāhi e kitea ai ētahi tūponotanga waiwai, pohewa anō hoki e tārewa ana. Ka mutu, ka tāheke te tikanga, pērā i te kōingo, i waenganui i ngā kaituku.

Te reo Māori translation by Bea Joblin.