What happens if it's broken?

In this exhibition, Latamai Katoa presents a new series of photographs. These images, offering a view into their family whare, appear almost alien. Under the warmth of domestic lighting, janky DIY plastering jobs and chipped walls resemble decaying skin, a manifestation of how domestic spaces absorb traces of life.

Katoa recontextualises objects made by whānau or gifted by friends, extending this consideration of memory beyond the photographic image. Her 21st key, a birthday present from close friends and whānau at Wheke Fortress, is not merely symbolic of reaching a new era of adulthood, but also speaks to the bonds formed within Indigenous queer spaces. An ornamental hoe, or paddle, was the first piece made by Katoa’s sister during her carving course, grounding the exhibition in familial lineage.

The mailbox, propped up on a music stand, is presented as a readymade, its elevation from everyday utility foregrounding questions of memory, communication, and display. Displaced from its original position at the threshold, it no longer functions as a passive receptacle, but instead stages and performs the act of holding. In doing so, it suggests that memories of home are not simply retained, but actively constructed and revisited over time.

At the centre of the exhibition, a stage-like mock-up of Katoa’s whānau home, constructed from memory out of cardboard, acts as a spatial and conceptual anchor. Its intentionally bastardised floor plan disrupts conventional architectural logic, foregrounding the instability of memory and the constructed nature of domestic space. The house is reimagined not as a fixed site of origin, but as a performative structure, continually reconfigured through acts of recall and reinterpretation. Described by the artist as a “sibling” to their previous exhibition Nostalgia Archive, the work in What happens if it’s broken? continues Katoa’s exploration of the house as both an architectural form and a lived, unstable archive.