Exhibition of Legacies at Artspace Aotearoa, 2 September – 22 October 2022
What does a legacy taste, smell, sound, feel, or look like?
Legacies, curated by May Adadol Ingawanij, is presented by CIRCUIT Artist Moving Image Aotearoa New Zeland‘s 2022 programme of artist cinema commissions. Featuring five short films for cinema by Edith Amituanai, Martin Sagadin, Ukrit Sa-nguanhai, Pati Solomona-Tyrell, Sriwhana Spong, Legacies premiered at Artspace Aotearoa with the support of Creative New Zealand.
“The project began in late 2021 when May Adadol, CIRCUIT curator-at-large, sent the artists a series of propositions about the potential of the term ‘legacies’:
“Legacies are that which we carry, sometimes with pride and sometimes with shame, as the basis of social bonding, whether as things a people embodies with pride or as an enduring pain, a burden, some kind of ghost.
Legacies as: the pre-modern artistic, cultural, linguistic and religious heritages of the place and land that you were born into and raised in; the legacies of colonisation, and the spectres of nations and nationalisms, during and after colonialism, and their continuing shaping force; the legacies of the modern art/film histories, narratives, and ways of knowing that shaped you, and that bring an ambivalence and a desire to undo.”
– May Adadol Ingawanij
The result is a programme of five new artist works that proffer a portrait of a young Pasifika matriarch; a reflection on cinema as resistance in cold war Thailand; a painter’s studio and the trans-national practice of the artists themselves who work and live between Aotearoa, Bali, Thailand, UK and the wider South Pacific.” CIRCUIT