This is the house that jack built, Andy Butler, Kerry Deane, Sara Gómez, Ming Ranginui, Ashleigh Taupaki, X&Y

If you arrived at an art gallery and were asked to empty your pockets of valuables into a tray, would you? As an audience member, would you agree to this kind of exchange? In 1977, collaborative duo X&Y staged an exhibition titled Take the money and run at de Appel in Amsterdam that asked gallery visitors to do just that: hand it over. After turning their belongings over to gallery staff at the entry, visitors were then led to watch via closed-circuit security camera this same scenario play out for others, and ultimately witness the artists leave the premises with their things. This performative intervention sharply describes the logic of the closed-circuit. Here, the circuit in discussion is the way much of life's value is measured by an unbreakable loop between wealth and an individual's proximity to it.

In This is the house that jack built each artwork casts light on this closed-circuitry and the complex frictions it avoids. The wielding of the individual's visible economic position as power par excellence risks blunting the value of other social contributions such as reproductive and collective labour. The models of individualised ownership are also further entrenched. The various societal and infrastructural mechanisms that enact this separation between so-called public and so-called private life often curtail nuanced and emergent approaches to exchange and relationship building. Whereas, exchange and relationships happen in many ways: through collaboration, whakapapa, nurturing loved ones and places, and underscoring solidarity. Considering value in this expanded way prompts the reimagining of standards: in this exhibition at the centre of Kerry Deane’s work Drawing (2024), two faces encounter one another, underneath reads the subtitle ‘Dialogue.’

The 18th-century English nursery rhyme which gives the exhibition its title expands upon the closed-circuit. This diagram describes interlocking exchange economies of scale within an ecosystem and the subsequent effect of these processes on said ecosystem. As an acute diagram of relationships the nursery rhyme has frequently been used as a scaffold to critique modes of oppressive power such as the right to vote in the UK, slavery in the US, and colonisation here in Aotearoa New Zealand. Zooming in on these interdependencies, this exhibition explores standards of exchange across multiple decades and contexts. Beginning with Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez’s seminal film Mi Aporte (My Contribution, 1972), shot in a work camp offers first-hand accounts of the challenges of integrating women into the workforce 13 years into the revolution. Spiralling to Aotearoa today, Ashleigh Taupaki’s drawings made in the gallery animate intimate histories. Taupaki’s practice insists her whānau, hapu, and iwi are non-negotiably bound to place and its innate collectiveness.

This is the house that jack built invites audiences to encounter a fifty-year arc of artworks and their relative contexts. As in X&Y’s 1977 provocation to give it all up to participate, each work in the exhibition considers the complex nature of exchange, and how whole value systems can be neglected by social valuing of homogenous worth. The visitors to X&Y’s exhibition were eventually reunited with their belongings located at an undisclosed site not by following a linear procedure but, after engaging in extended dialogue with fellow audience members and the artists. This process, as with the Artspace Aotearoa annual question “do I need territory?”, invites the audience to pause, take stock, and scan the opportunities for exchange and relationships here in the gallery and in daily life. Consider which points on the circuit enable, which entrench, and how this could all be otherwise.

Biographies

Andy Butler is an artist, writer, and curator living in Naarm Melbourne. His visual practice employs moving image, performance, painting and text to consider strategies for maintaining hope and optimism at a time of political upheaval, with a strong focus on the political currents of the Indo-Pacific region. Andy has undertaken several residencies including with Asialink, Manila, Powerhouse, Sydney, and the Humboldt Forum, Berlin. He has recently developed significant commissions with the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and,Ian Potter Museum of Art. Recent curatorial projects have been developed with Monash University Museum of Art and UTS Gallery, Sydney.

Kerry Deane was born in Paeroa, but spent formative years living on Lone Kauri Farm within the Waitakere Ranges, overlooking Karekare. This close relationship with the environment fundamentally impacted, and continues to inspire, the work he is making today. Deane worked continuously as a lawyer from 1979–2015 initially as a criminal defence lawyer and later in commercial law until a catastrophic stroke changed his life. He now focuses his time on writing and drawing and works out of Māpura Studios, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.

Sara Gómez (1942–1974) was an Afro-Cuban filmmaker who engaged directly and courageously with the social, political, economic, and cultural transformations promised by the Cuban Revolution until her untimely death. Gómez directed numerous documentary films in 10 prolific years. She also made De cierta manera (One way or another), her only feature-length film. Her films navigate complex experiences of social class, race, and gender by reframing revolutionary citizenship, cultural memory, and political value. Her inventive strategies become foundational to new Cuban cinema and feminist film culture, but they also continue to inspire media artists today who deal with issues of identity and difference.

Ming Ranginui of Te Ati Haunui-a-Pāpārangi is an artist from Whanganui who lives in Tītahi Bay. She gained her Bachelor of Fine Arts (Hons) at Massey University, Wellington (2020), and furthered her studies at Te Wānanga o Raukawa, specialising in raranga, this year she completed a residency at the Banff Centre, Canada. She creates sculptures using a blend of whatu and taniko weaving techniques as well as modern fabrics to address tino rangatiratanga, spirituality and survival. Her work has been shown widely in Aotearoa, most recently at Treadler and Objectspace.

Ashleigh Taupaki of Ngāti Hako and Samoa is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland working primarily in object, drawing, and research. Taupaki has developed an expanded mind mapping practice that emphasises connectivities across historical, cultural, and environmental ecologies. She is currently a doctoral candidate at Te Waka Tūhura - Elam School of Fine Arts and Design.

X&Y were a collaborative duo active from 1976–1978. Artists Coleen Fitzgibbon and Robin Winters, were both working with performative installation prior to collaboration, including participating in programmes at Whitney Biennale, the Kitchen, and Anthology Archives all in New York. Their shared interest in gender and class politics propelled the collaboration, culminating in the exhibition Take the money and run, de Appel in Amsterdam (1977). Returning to the USA, they founded an advisory group with artists Peter Fend, Jenny Holzer, Peter Nadin, and Richard Prince to offer creative and practical services. Most recently Fitzgibbon has exhibited film works and Winters has exhibited works of blown glass.

OUR PROGRAMME 2024

This year we explore the question “do I need territory?” through our cornerstone exhibition programme, online reading and screening rooms, and other events. History shows us that the expressive commitment to forming an otherwise is unflinching, it also shows us a dogged insistence on wielding power at the cost of the other. The impulse to compartmentalise the many entangled zones it takes to run a life has been an efficient tool to entrench hierarchy. Boundaries, borders, and cuts are concepts enacted in order to extract a quantifiable value by separating or to withhold resources from the other. However, scholar and activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore encourages us to consider that these same sites are also where relationships begin, where transformation becomes possible. What would it take to feel not only part of a community but also full as an individual, a boundless participant? What world could be shaped when we go towards difference? Link here to read the full text.