Open Window: What would this place look like without fossil fuel sponsorship?

What would this place look like without fossil fuel sponsorship? documents a performance undertaken by Fiona Clark during the early hours of a Sunday morning in the middle of winter 2025. Adorned in a dress constructed from repurposed hessian sacks, Clark circles the perimeter of the Len Lye Centre. Throughout, she maintains a probing, contemplative stare into its towering, mirrored steel façade. 

Clark’s gesture speculates on an alternative past, present and future and mounts a critique of the institution’s willingness to accept financial sponsorship from fossil fuel corporations for its architectural development. Staged without fanfare in the same month the Gallery publicly celebrated the tenth anniversary of the opening of the Len Lye Centre, Clark’s performance serves as testament to the role the artist plays as critic and social conscience. 

The work is a continuation of Clark’s persistent witnessing of social and ecological change wrought by the aggressive development of oil and gas industries in the region—particularly in Northern Taranaki, where the artist has lived since 1975. For decades, Clark has worked with communities to try to mitigate the industry’s most acutely harmful impacts, and hold powerful actors to account for failed promises, and environmental negligence.

Clark’s performance belongs within a tradition of institutional critique—in which artists use their work to remind us that the infrastructures which enable art’s production, presentation and distribution are by no means divorced from the political realities and ethical questions addressed within them. Clark’s voice is one among many artist-activists globally who continue to call upon arts institutions to recognise the social costs of sponsorship from sources implicated with the already-unfolding climate crisis and insist upon art’s potential as a vehicle for change.

Fiona Clark, What would this place look like without fossil fuel sponsorship? screens as part of the exhibition Economies of Deferral.