Gaza: the Soul of Souls, an exhibition by Justice for Palestine, is focused on Gaza, the people, our martyrs and a place where on it are, as Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish says, those who deserve to live.

The Centre Does Not Hold is an exhibition in three parts by the Palestinian artist Inas Halabi. Across a sound installation and two moving image works that address different regions mired in colonial power structures, Halabi considers the landscape as a living archive from which to excavate the (in)visible sediments of trauma and slow violence. In its invitation to look closely and listen deeply, The Centre Does Not Hold surveys the malleability of sound and image, and in doing so, unearths histories hiding in plain sight.

Hiraeth is a Welsh word describing a spiritual longing for a place that we have never been. It is the lost ancient places we imagine our ancestors would stomp their feet into their lands and the grief we struggle to locate in our bodies—a dislocated homesickness for a motherland we have never belonged to. The offerings of this exhibition illustrate the artists’ intimate and awkward rituals of becoming truly Pākehā—tangata Tiriti on their haerenga towards becoming familiar with the layers of their cultural identities and realities on this whenua and in relation to its people.

Proposal for a Body posits that sound and text-matter are mediums that can be regarded as inherently queer in their expansive and corporally liminal states. Jo Bragg and Georgina Brett present immaterial or bodiless practices focused on experimental process and experience rather than resolved closed-outcomes.

God the Mechanical Mother is an exhibition of extraction and post-metaphysical effluvia. Kat Lang experiments with primordial and time-bound materiality, and offers a deconstructed ontotheological study into the implications of meaning and uncertainty.

Enjoy is privileged to host a two day exhibition and programme of events by Te Waka Hourua, on Sunday 4 and Monday 5 February 2024. This exhibition is an opportunity for people to engage and learn more about Te Tiriti o Waitangi prior to Waitangi Day, 6 February. 

A Map So Big It Blocks the Sun is a new film by Quentin Lind, taking Jorge Luis Borges' short story On Exactitude in Science as a starting point. Borges’ 1946 story was partly influenced by a novel by Lewis Carroll Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), in which a character notes that they made a map on a mile to mile scale, but they have not yet used it, as farmers objected due to concerns it would cover the entire country and block out the sunlight. Instead, they “now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.” Those in Borges’ story similarly pursued ‘perfection’ in the form of a 1:1 scale map. Their descendants “were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears” and saw no need for it. Readers of both stories are required to have a wry sense of humour in the face of impending horror.

Haere mai, nau mai
Haere mai, kuhu mai ki ngā hūhā o Ruawehea.

Welcome welcome
Welcome through the whakapapa of Ruawehea.

All This Work Is Necessary is an extension of Ashleigh Taupaki’s doctoral research investigating her Ngāti Hako connections to the Hauraki wetlands. The artist’s whakapapa is an essential part of her practice. Taupaki’s tūpuna are said to be the earliest settlers of Hauraki. Though Ngāti Hako records, such as pūrākau and waiata, have sadly been decimated over time due to inter-iwi wars and colonial settlement, she has spent years pouring over surviving records written by those who sought to oppress Māori through imperial power structures. The resulting artworks are a testament to Taupaki’s determination to convey the systemic decline of the Hauraki wetlands.