Leap to the Place of Two Pools

Taking into account moving image’s traditional emphasis on the visual, Leap to the Place of Two Pools presents five new works by artists who resist or relinquish ocularcentrism through multisensorial knowledge systems. In both making and viewing, how to honour what cannot be seen? How can surety and attachment to the two pools—the eyes—leap and transmigrate to other sensing sites within and beyond the boundaries of our bodies?

Sonya Lacey’s silent stop-frame animation, constructed from acid-etched copper plates, cites the cloud-like formation of scene changes used in historical animated productions. Transition sequence for a dream or fight revels in this visual device that prevents us from seeing, while proposing the ongoing unknown as a hospitable, generative state. In fugue notes, Selina Ershadi’s original vision for a film is ultimately supplanted by its notes. In deep shadow and inky darkness, a voiceover unfolds, drawing connections between eroding autobiographical memory and the failed image. James Tapsell-Kururangi’s work explores expectations of the visual representation of whakapapa and tikanga. As a form of self-portraiture, James documents the artist’s candid performance in Te Rotorua-nui-a-Kahumatamomoe (Lake Rotorua). Kah Bee Chow turns to archival footage to process her father’s passing. In Fronds, focusing on the walled enclosure of her family home, his garden becomes a mnemonic device and the camera a technology that enacts a form of touch. In the absence of a conventional protagonist, grief provokes a rhythm of sensual close-ups and textual interludes. Kite’s Makȟóčhe Kiŋ Oíč’iwa (The Land Paints Itself) pairs technologies of dreaming and AI to imagine Indigenous futures patterned across unceded land, marked by stones whose own language emerges as a conduit to multivocal storytelling.

Leap to the Place of Two Pools is the latest edition of CIRCUIT’s ongoing series in which an international curator is engaged to develop a programme of new artist commissions based in the moving image. Its title is adapted in dialogue with Anna Tsing, citing her translation of Meratus Dayak Putir performance.⁽¹⁾ Through poetry, the shaman passes the two gleaming pools, guarded by eyelash swords, into the vast landscape of the body, where the world is expansive and healing is possible. With this offering in mind, these works emerge, variably sensing the unseeable known and unknown realms of oral history, memory and dreams.

Curated by Erin Robideaux Gleeson and commissioned by CIRCUIT Artist Moving Image.

Previous project curators have been based in Europe, Asia and North America, and the resulting commissions have shown extensively in venues in Aotearoa and internationally. The series will be celebrated in a forthcoming publication that documents the 41 artworks commissioned over 2015–25, entitled CIRCUIT: Dialogues in Artist Moving Image, which will launch in autumn 2025.

⁽¹⁾ Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, 'Beyond the Boundary of the Skin,' in The Realm of the Diamond Queen. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993.

About the artists and curator

Kah Bee Chow is an artist from Penang, Malaysia and Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa, living and working in Malmö, Sweden. In her practice, Chow works with forms of protective architecture, including looking at forms for the body such as shields and shells, as well as architectural mechanisms of enclosure, paying close attention to the particularities of space and site. Her work has been shown at institutions including: Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Malmö Konsthall; Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen; Kunstlerhaus Bregenz, Austria; Te Tuhi, Aotearoa; Tranen Contemporary Art Centre, Copenhagen; Signal Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö; Rupert, Vilnius; Magenta Plains, New York; Blank Canvas, Malaysia; Artspace Aotearoa, among others.

Selina Ershadi is an Iranian-born, Aotearoa-based artist working within a lineage of experimental and hybrid forms across filmmaking and writing. Often drawing on personal and familial histories and archives, her works complicate autobiography, exploring the slipperiness of storytelling, memory and language, as well as the risks and failures that haunt documentation. Her work has been exhibited and screened at Te Papa Tongarewa, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington; Heretaunga Hastings City Art Gallery, Heretaunga Hastings; The Physics Room, Ōtautahi Christchurch; Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Ngāmotu New Plymouth; Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Ōtepoti Dunedin; Enjoy Contemporary Art Space, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington; Granville Centre Art Gallery, Gadigal Sydney; Seventh Gallery, Naarm Melbourne; and RM Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.

Erin Robideaux Gleeson is a curator, writer and educator based on Dakota lands of Mní Sóta Makhóčhe (Minnesota), or Lands Where Waters Reflect Clouds. She is currently Lecturer in Critical Theory and Curatorial Studies in the Art Department of the University of Minnesota (2020–) and Director and Curator of FD13 (2021–), a residency program focusing on liveness, most recently with Raven Chacon, Kablusiak, Anocha Suwichakornpong, Pio Abad, Yee I-Lann, and Moe Satt. Her recent advisory work includes with Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, the George Morrison Catalogue Raisonné Project, and Han Nefkens Foundation. Living in Phnom Penh (2002–2019), Erin co-founded and directed SA SA BASSAC (2011–-2018), a non-profit multidisciplinary art center focusing on contemporary art and its histories in Southeast Asia. Over the past 10 years, Erin has worked with several artists and curators from Aotearoa, most recently at Legacies | Routes, an exhibition and gathering presented by CIRCUIT at Storage Art Space, Bangkok, in 2023.

Kite (Dr. Suzanne Kite) is an Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with a BFA from CalArts in music composition, an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and a Ph.D. in Fine Arts from Concordia University, Montreal. Kite’s scholarship and practice investigate contemporary Lakȟóta ontologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance, often working in collaboration with family and community members. Kite has published in The Journal of Design and Science (MIT Press), with the award-winning article, ‘Making Kin with Machines.’ Recently, Kite was a 2023 Creative Capital Award Winner, a 2023 USA Fellow, and a 2022-2023 Creative Time Open Call artist with Alisha B. Wormsley. She is currently Director of the Wihanble S’a Center for Indigenous AI, Distinguished Artist-in-Residence and Assistant Professor of American and Indigenous Studies at Bard College. She is an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux tribe.

Sonya Lacey is an artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Her practice focuses on rest and restlessness in the context of labour, and the physiological consequences of abstractions such as time structures and the work environment. She works primarily with moving image and sculptural installation. Lacey’s exhibition Weekend was nominated for The Walters Prize in 2021 and exhibited at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Recent exhibitions include: No distance at all, Robert Heald Gallery, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, 2023; The Polyphonic Sea, Bundanon Art Museum, New South Wales, Australia, 2023; Thresholds, Several Degrees of Attention, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Ngāmotu New Plymouth, 2022; Totally Dark, Dunedin Public Art Gallery; Ōtepoti Dunedin, 2021; Crossings, Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, 2021; and State of Motion 2020: Rushes of Time, Asian Film Archive, Singapore.

James Tapsell-Kururangi (Te Arawa, Tainui, Ngāti Porou) is an artist based in Ōtautahi, where he is the Director of The Physics Room. Recent exhibitions include: My throat a shelter, The Physics Room, Ōtautahi Christchurch, 2023; 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 Te Whare Toi, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, 2022.