Exhibition Review for My throat/a shelter
Physics Room, 27 Oct – 10 Dec 2023
The names of the artists, James Tapsell-Kururangi and Selina Ershadi, and the exhibition, My throat/a shelter, in pale text contrast a dark surrounds, pasted on the doors of the Physics Room. Inside, this illuminates the reversed names and diffuses the afternoon light as I walk into the gallery. At the juncture I enter, on a screen to my right eyes intently stare back at me and are big before it cuts to darkness. Punctuating the dark a ticking begins, a timer, a trigger, a clock, the sound of a bell. The white flesh of fish flashes across a worn cutting board, dissected by knowing hands. Dark again. James Tapsell-Kururangi’s (Te Arawa, Tainui, Ngāti Porou) film Homman is grounded in deep affiliations with spaces and people as mediated by relationship. The sense of all-time created by representations of memory and present life, each characterised by their changeability, is articulated in the ways of knowing presented in Tapselll-Kururangi’s work; te whenua, te reo, the eyes, the hands.
The experimental film works of both artists share this grounding in place, memory, family, and the disruption of time as linear. In the back space of the gallery the two projections facing each other while playing the same film in different directions locate the work in contemporary art film practice, rather than contemporary cinema. As curator Amy Weng describes, Ershadi’s work is an ouroboros. Physically, this means the viewer has a choice; to sit to the side and observe both screens or to float in between them. This experience immediately problematizes the narrative structure a person might expect from cinema, namely that familiar, linear, beginning, middle and end. Instead the work leans into relationality, the many ways of knowing and the layering of reality created by memory. The images are simultaneously familiar and mythic. The in-between times of sunrise and sunset, the witching hour on a full moon, the rippling sun in flowing water, birth, blood, language, and home. In this work, چشم چشمه, Selina Ershadi (Iranian-born and based in Tāmaki Makaurau) meditates on the multisensory nature of meaning-making and memory-forming.
The Physics Room offers the space to hold this liminality and warmly envelop those seeking embodied experience and moments that exist out of, through, or as all, time. Lingering here is an invitation I would extend to any interested in contemporary art, film, or the webs of interrelated being.
meg doughty 