Selina Ershadi and James Tapsell-Kururangi

My throat/a shelter

27 Oct — 10 Dec

Image: Selina Ershadi, چشم چشمه (film still), 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

Image: My throat/a shelter (installation view), 2023. Photo by Nancy Zhou.

Image: James Tapsell-Kururangi, Homman (installation view), 2023. Single-channel, 4K video. 8:21 mins. Photo by Nancy Zhou.

Image: Selina Ershadi, چشم چشمه (installation view), 2023. Two-channel video projection. 8:15 mins. Sound design by Frances Libeau. Photo by Nancy Zhou.

Image: James Tapsell-Kururangi, Homman (video still), 2023. Single-channel, 4K video. 8:21 mins. Courtesy of the artist.

Image: Selina Ershadi, چشم چشمه (film still), 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

Selina Ershadi and James Tapsell-Kururangi
My throat/a shelter

Curated by Amy Weng

Whakatau and opening: Friday 27 October, from 5:30pm
Exhibition runs 27 October – 10 December 2023

A selection of Palestinian and Indigenous short films will be screened on opening night at 6:30pm. Koha is welcome, with all proceeds from the screening going towards UNRWA emergency aid in Gaza. Full programme here.

My throat/a shelter is an exhibition of two new experimental films by Selina Ershadi and James Tapsell-Kururangi. The exhibition is situated in embodied and intangible systems of knowledge, with the artists drawing on family narratives documented in home videos, oral histories, portents and screen histories. These and other sources in the works compose a meditation on time and memory, as non-linear and haptic.

Guided by omens, voices and visions, Ershadi’s two-channel film brings together fragments from the artist’s family archive with footage captured while learning to see through the dim viewfinder of a 16mm Bolex camera. Filmed in part while accompanying her mother at an eye clinic in Tāmaki, Ershadi’s work explores various modes of seeing, documenting and recollecting as the eye loses dominion. The sonic register is composed by sound artist Frances Libeau. It comprises aural textures from personal archives, and field recordings subjected to gentle electroacoustic interventions. Following the form of an ouroboros, the work moves in two directions at once, unsettling linear perception.

Retracing the footsteps of his tūpuna across multiple continents and generations, Tapsell-Kururangi’s film is a meditation on temporality and mortality. Using the story of Maui and Hine-nui-te-pō as a scaffold, the work traces an itinerant path through Hong Kong, Copenhagen, and finally to the artist’s father’s home in Paengaroa. The film entangles lyrical imagery and verse, envisioned as a conversation between the artist and his father, at once longing and withholding. The subject hovers on the periphery of the senses, never coming fully into view or resolution, bringing into proximity absence and the potential for failure.

My throat/a shelter speculates on marginal and inhabited understandings of time and memory. The films echo what Laura U. Marks describes as a condition of intercultural cinema, where rupture experienced through exile or displacement gives rise to diffuse notions of truth. These works grapple with the potential for audiovisual media to express complex and multi-layered experience, finding resonances in the liveliness and mutability of material traces and inherited stories.

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Selina Ershadi is an Iranian-born, Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland-based, artist working within a lineage of experimental film forms. She holds an MFA from Elam School of Fine Arts and a BA majoring in English Literature from the University of Auckland.

James Tapsell-Kururangi (Te Arawa, Tainui, Ngāti Porou) is a curator and artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Recent exhibitions include Indigenous Histories, Museo de Arte de Sāo Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, Sāo Paulo, 2023; The long waves of our ocean, National Library, Pōneke Wellington, 2022; twisting, turning, winding: takatāpui + queer objects, Objectspace, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, 2022; and Matarau, City Gallery Wellington, Pōneke Wellington, 2022.

The artists would like to acknowledge Creative New Zealand for their generous support of this exhibition.