One of two video works from the installation God is back – pass the plate (2012), this video imagines the twelve Christian apostles cruising through Wellington’s Futuna Village in a mobile party car.
Futuna chapel was originally constructed in 1961 by the Society of Mary (Marists) for people of any faith to visit, stay, and reconnect with their beliefs. In 2000 it was deconsecrated and sold by the Marists to a property developer. The subsequent housing development built around the chapel resulted in the construction of a marginal, dislocated space; yet one that Gibbs says “still resonates with embedded institutional ideologies.”
In The twelve apostles Gibbs places an image within an image; “the gloriously tacky party lights in the interior of the limousine frame the view out of the front window – it truly is a mobile theatre. In this, it functions in opposition to the chapel as a kind of ‘roaming monument’ inserting an interruption into Futuna Village that’s out-of-place and out-of-time.”
