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Side A - Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland 6pm, Wednesday 1 July
Free Admission, Bookings
Side B - CIRCUIT, Wellington 3pm, Saturday 4 July
Free Admission, Bookings
Not a figure of speech is a screening of artist videos made in the Czech Republic, Japan, and Indonesia between 2015 and 2026. The programme brings together works encountered through collaborations, exhibitions, research projects, and long-term conversations.
Not a figure of speech is curated and presented by Grace Samboh, a writer, researcher, and exhibition-maker living and working in Yogyakarta, Jakarta, and wherever her friends are. Her work develops through long-term conversations with artists, researchers, educators, and cultural practitioners, often returning to questions of history, entanglements, care, and being together. Grace is visiting Aotearoa as CIRCUIT’s 2027/28 Curator-at-large with support from Gus Fisher Gallery and the Asia New Zealand Foundation. She describes the programme;
"Not a figure of speech takes the form of a mixtape. Not because the works gathered here arrive at the same conclusions, nor because they can be reduced to a single theme, but because I have come to know them through time, repetition, and return. Some emerged through collaborations, commissions, research projects, and long conversations. Others I have encountered repeatedly through exhibitions, screenings, and ongoing exchanges with artists whose practices continue to accompany my own thinking. In some instances, I also appear within the works themselves. This is therefore not a survey assembled from a distance, but a temporary arrangement of works and relations that have remained useful to think with.
Across the two sides of this mixtape, questions recur in different forms. How does a concern become shared? How does discrimination become visible? What does it mean to remain in relation across differences of experience, authority, generation, or history? At what point does observation become participation? What remains to be done with what one now knows? The mixtape does not propose answers to these questions. Nor does it suggest that the works agree with one another. Instead, it follows a series of echoes and returns. One work leaves something unresolved for another to pick up. Certain questions disappear only to re-emerge later in a different form. Even the pauses between works are part of this choreography, allowing an encounter to linger before the next one begins. A mixtape assumes that sequence matters. One thing follows another, changing how both are experienced. What emerges from that sequence, however, remains open.
Each screening is followed by a conversation between Grace Samboh and Mark Williams (CIRCUIT).
Side A - Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland 6pm, Wednesday 1 July
● Ary “Jimged” Sendy & Heru Sukmadana, Sharing anxiety (2015)
● Hikaru Fujii, あかい線に分けられたクラス [The classroom divided by a red line] (2020)
● Nadiah Bamadhaj, Ketidaknyamanan [Insecurity] (2023)
● Julian Abraham “Togar” & Oni Imelva, Sesuatu yang diam, sesuatu yang nyata [That is real, that is ignored] (2025)
Side B - CIRCUIT, Wellington 3pm Saturday 4 July
● Anchan/Anna Daučíková and Tamarra, Talking to you (2021)
● Nadiah Bamadhaj, Terpesona dengan kegelisahan [Charmed by anxiety] (2022)
● Griya Seni Hj. Kustiyah Edhi Sunarso, Hyphen—, Tom Nicholson with Ary "Jimged" Sendy, Aufa Ariaputra, Nasikin, Omar Aryarindra, & Munadi Alianto (Xonad), Sesudah banjir itu: No. 44 [When the flood is over: No. 44] (2026)
Full Programme Notes:
[SIDE A] Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland, 6pm, 1 July 2026
"I have long been drawn to works that do not simply present a social question, but try it out. Rather than explaining a problem from a distance, they construct situations through which concerns become shareable, structures become visible, and positions become palpable. What interests me is not whether these works provide answers, but how they allow a question to be inhabited for a duration. The works gathered on this side of the mixtape move through a casting call, a classroom exercise, a ceremonial gesture, and a conversation. Each begins from a particular situation. Across the sequence, we move between observation and participation, between recognising a structure and finding ourselves somewhere within it. A brief pause interrupts the programme before the final work. When it resumes, many of the earlier questions remain, but the frame through which they are encountered has expanded". - Grace Samboh
1) Ary “Jimged” Sendy & Heru Sukmadana, Sharing anxiety (2015)
19 minutes 27 seconds
When does a concern become shared? And how does one come to care about a problem that seems distant from everyday life? Ten housewives are invited to what appears to be a television advertisement casting. Scripts are rehearsed, lines repeated, gestures adjusted. Yet the advertisement itself concerns a topic rarely associated with everyday consumer choices: the palm oil industry and its environmental consequences. Borrowing the familiar format of commercial production, the work unfolds through participation, hesitation, and repetition. As the opening work of this mixtape, Sharing anxiety begins with a proposition rather than a position. Concern is not presented as something already held in common, but as something rehearsed, tested, and circulated. What follows continues this movement, asking how social structures become visible through participation, observation, and bodily experience.
2) Hikaru Fujii, あかい線に分けられたクラス [The classroom divided by a red line] (2020)
21 minutes 54 seconds
How does discrimination become visible? And at what point does witnessing it become participation? In a classroom in Mito City, neighbouring Fukushima Prefecture, elementary school students take part in a workshop modelled after educator Jane Elliott’s Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes exercise. Here, however, division is not made through race but through geography: whether one lives inside or outside the “red line” associated with radiation exposure following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. As the classroom reorganises itself, gestures of exclusion, discomfort, and authority begin to emerge. The work unfolds as a situation rather than a lesson. Students, teachers, filmmakers, camera operators, and viewers alike occupy shifting positions between witness and participant. Following Sharing anxiety, the classroom becomes another space in which social relations are not simply discussed but enacted, inviting us to consider how easily one becomes part of the structures one observes.
3) Nadiah Bamadhaj, Ketidaknyamanan [Insecurity] (2023)
4 minutes 26 seconds
How does power become felt when it remains outside the frame? Accompanied by the measured sounds of kentongan and gong, a group of abdi dalem—palace attendants—move slowly away from the camera. Their pace is deliberate, their bodies lowered, their movement restrained. What first appears ceremonial gradually becomes difficult to settle into. Duration stretches attention; repetition shifts the scene from observance toward unease. Positioned between the classroom and the longer work that follows, Ketidaknyamanan alters the rhythm of the programme. Hierarchy is no longer discussed or enacted directly, but registered through distance, posture, and bodily relation. As the attendants slowly recede, we are quietly left to consider where we stand.
~~~ short break ~~~
4) Julian Abraham “Togar” & Oni Imelva
, Sesuatu yang diam, sesuatu yang nyat [That is real, that is ignored] (2025)
61 minutes 56 seconds
What happens when a work exceeds its own subject? And what remains after listening? The film unfolds through an encounter between artist-cum-drummer Togar and human rights advocate-cum-vocalist Oni Imelva. Within Togar’s BIOSPOKE—part studio, part gathering space, part cinema—percussion, voice, and hikayat move between memory, storytelling, and political reflection. Behind the projection screen, an automated percussion system repeats and interrupts, extending rhythms that are at once bodily and mechanical. What begins as conversation gradually exceeds the frame of dialogue. Through stories of women’s resistance, contested histories, and the long afterlives of violence, the film remains attentive to acts of articulation themselves: how memory is carried, how histories are spoken, and how concerns are shared. Arriving after a brief pause, the work expands many of the relations encountered earlier—authority, participation, distance, and responsibility—while refusing to resolve them. What remains to be done with what one now knows?
[SIDE B] CIRCUIT, Wellington, 3pm Saturday 4 July, 2026
"I have also found myself returning to works that remain attentive to relation: between people, generations, institutions, and histories. Not because they resolve these relations, but because they stay with the labour of negotiating them. Communication, authority, memory, and care appear differently in each work, yet all of them ask what it means to remain in relation to something larger than oneself. The works gathered here move through a conversation, a choreography, and an act of collective historical care. Across this side of the mixtape, questions return in altered forms, shifting between intimacy and collective life, lived experience and inherited history. A short pause separates the final work from those that precede it, allowing certain questions to linger before they return again through memory, disagreement, and the ongoing work of understanding." - Grace Samboh
1) Anchan/Anna Daučíková and Tamarra, Talking to you (2021)
33 minutes
How does one remain in relation across differences of age, geography, language, and lived experience? Across different geographies, generations, and lived experiences, Anchan/Anna Daučíková) and Tamarra meet through gesture, conversation, and movement. At times spoken, at times non-verbal, Talking to you unfolds as an attempt at communication shaped less by certainty than by attention. Words appear, hesitate, and recede; gestures echo, diverge, and return. As the first work on this side of the mixtape, communication is approached not as agreement but as an ongoing practice of relation. Understanding remains partial, uneven, and unfinished. Rather than resolving differences, the work stays with it, inviting us to consider what kinds of connection become possible through the continued effort to speak, listen, and respond.
2) Nadiah Bamadhaj, Terpesona dengan kegelisahan [Charmed by anxiety] (2022)
16 minutes 10 seconds
What becomes visible when a familiar spectacle is slowed down? And where do we find ourselves within its structure? A battalion of uniformed bodies moves through a shared choreography. At first, what we hear is difficult to place: a slowed-down collective chant, stretched until its familiarity becomes strange. Gradually, figures emerge from darkness. Bodies move in synchrony, following gestures initiated by two commanders standing before them, their backs turned toward us. Produced amid the circulation of viral military and police performances across Indonesian social media, the work revisits a familiar spectacle through slowness. What once appeared celebratory, amusing, or assured begins to feel effortful, heavy, and uneasy. Following Talking to you, attention shifts from relation to hierarchy, yet both works remain concerned with how bodies move together, communicate, and inhabit structures larger than themselves. As rhythms slow and gestures repeat, we are quietly positioned within the choreography we observe.
~~~ short break ~~~
3) Griya Seni Hj. Kustiyah Edhi Sunarso, Hyphen—, Tom Nicholson with Ary "Jimged" Sendy, Aufa Ariaputra, Nasikin, Omar Aryarindra, & Munadi Alianto (Xonad)
Sesudah banjir itu: No. 44 [When the flood is over: No. 44] (2026)
60 minutes 2 seconds
How does one inherit a history? And what forms of care emerge when history remains unfinished? The film moves between personal memory and collective labour. In one movement, recollections of the West Irian Liberation period unfold through lived experience, carrying stories that drift between diplomatic histories, overlooked figures, and memories that sit uneasily beside official narration. In another, civilians gather to remake and conserve National History Museum of Indonesia’s diorama No. 44—The Liberation of West Irian, May 1, 1963—through discussion, sculpting, repainting, and debate. Arriving after a brief pause, the film expands questions that have surfaced throughout the programme: relation, hierarchy, responsibility, and collective life. Rather than treating history as fixed or complete, it follows how historical understanding is continually negotiated through people, institutions, materials, and memory. As conservation becomes a form of conversation, we are invited into history’s ongoing remaking, where care and disagreement remain inseparable