Ex-ante
Fiona Amundsen, Tanya Busse and Emilija Škarnulytė, Seamus Harahan, Chia-Wei Hsu, Susan Schuppli
Curated by Remco de Blaaij
October 27 – December 22, 2017
Public programme
Chia-Wei Hsu, 'Huai Mo Village' 2012, one-channel video installation, 08:20 (still).Utilising observation, forensic, and analytical strategies, the work of six artists offer cinematic approaches to capturing community-based realities. Through their exhibition, and a series of reading groups and events, Ex-ante is interested in tying stories and storytelling from the Canadian North, Northern Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, and Aotearoa.
Publicly asking how these works negotiate conflicts of nature, law, politics, and materials, this exhibition suggests that inabilities to respond to and to produce ‘truth’ belong also to the domain of image-making.
New regimes of images find their way into our courtrooms, at first adding an unusual break into the perceived truth of law. The image’s performative tactic can give form to the identity of stories from communities that might otherwise not surface into public knowledge. Stripped of its observational power, the image loses clear connection to a single reality.
These are some of the attitudes employed to signal a shifting need for the undermining of the historical event, its claim to the truth, and the position from which it is told. How is the image and imagination involved in this? Can we speak before our turn? How to offer a reality before the event?
Ex-ante focuses on the role of images in our world, arguing that we need not speak to truth —either ‘post’ or ‘pre’—nor the image perform it. Instead, the exhibition advocates for the imaginative and speculative role of the image when it is set to work on the present. It tries to understand how we might be complicit in the production of our own realities, truths, or futures. How not to forecast, but to see, before the event?
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Public programme
Saturday November 18, 3pm
Screening event
Utilising observation, forensic, and analytical strategies, the work of six artists offer cinematic approaches to capturing community-based realities. Through their exhibition, and a series of reading groups and events, Ex-ante is interested in tying stories and storytelling from the Canadian North, Northern Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, and Aotearoa.
Through the duration of the exhibition we will be holding a series of events that build on and extend the concerns of Ex-Ante, beginning with a film screening of Snow in Paradise and Hotu Painu.
Nikki Si'ulepa and Justine Simei-Barton's short film, Snow in Paradise gives a snapshot of life on a remote, picturesque island in the south Pacific through the eyes of a young Polynesian girl. As she ventures out on her daily routine she encounters the familiar faces of her family and the small community that she loves. Like her, they are all unsuspecting of the devastating power that lies beyond the ocean reef in a nuclear testing facility. In one moment her world will change forever.
Pita Turei's wide-ranging documentary, Hotu Painu, explores the history of nuclear testing in the Pacific — and its relationship with French colonialism in Tahiti (which locals claim has made them strangers or "Hotu Painu" in their own land). There is compelling testimony of serious health effects from previous tests; and Turei's cameras follow a Greenpeace protest flotilla to Moruroa as the French keep watch. Interwoven throughout is the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior and its aftermath, as DGSE agents are tried and the ship finds a final resting place at Matauri Bay.
Saturday November 25, 2pm
Open reading group
Tuesday November 28, 6pm
Artist talk with Fiona Amundsen and Chia-Wei Hsu
Friday December 1, 5pm
Open reading group
Thursday December 7, 5pm
Open reading group
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
