Economies of Deferral

The exhibition includes artists from Taranaki, Aotearoa and working internationally between the 1980s to the present whose work bears witness to, advocates from within, and troubles our understanding of the profound economic, social and political transformations that have shaped the last four decades.

At the project’s heart is a re-engagement with Urenui-born film- and video-maker Darcy Lange’s 1987 video Lack of Hope: Co-op a new future, produced in collaboration with John Miller (Ngāi Tawake ki te Tuawhenua, Ngāti Rēhia, Te Whiu, Ngāpuhi). Developed three years into the neoliberal restructuring of New Zealand’s economy, the video documents the voices of unemployed workers and groups organising in their interests in Taranaki, Tāmaki Makaurau and Tairāwhiti. Made by an artist with a lifelong investment in the ethics, problems and possibilities of representing labour and political struggle, the video seeks stable ground within a moment of profound uncertainty, and acts as testimony to human lives caught up in the tides of structural adjustment.

The exhibition also features archival and newly developed work by Fiona Clark, who has recorded over fifty years the social and ecological change wrought by the extractive industries that surround her home in Tikorangi, as well as community-led efforts to hold powerful actors to account.

Matthew Galloway’s new work furthers the artist’s interest in the political and physical infrastructures of energy production and circulation. Galloway’s project considers the lives and afterlives of the 1979 oil crisis, and the Think Big infrastructure projects which sought to secure self-reliance for Aotearoa’s energy needs.

Ngahuia Harrison’s (Ngātiwai) newly commissioned body of work engages with sites of industry around Whangārei te Rerenga Parāoa (Whangārei Harbour) to examine the complex entanglements between economic dependency, ecological harm and Indigenous authority which saturate this place. Returning in particular to Marsden Point following the termination of its oil refinery operation in 2022, Harrison’s work examines the site’s unresolved place within local memory, and the deferred reckoning of industrial retreat—for workers, mana whenua, and the land and water upon which industry depends.

In his first presentation in Aotearoa, Singapore-based artist Ho Rui An’s work interrogates the interlaced histories of Singapore’s oil economy and its mythology as a “garden city.” Despite having no oil resources of its own, the island state provides Aotearoa with a third of its petroleum imports, through its refining, storage and distribution infrastructures which remain relatively inscrutable, though thoroughly enmeshed within the global flows of capital and fuel.

This project emerges within a transitional moment for economies and energy production locally and globally. It takes place within a context in which efforts to realise just transition towards a future compatible with human and earthly thriving are continually deferred by political impasse. It proposes artistic inquiry as capable of metabolising the movements, manoeuvrings, and unforeseen impacts of historical forces which shape what feels possible, and creating conditions to imagine the future, and past, anew.