“Under the blue dome one was, one was not” is a phrase that appears time and again in Iranian folklore. This phrase invokes perception and travels through time, shared mouth to mouth between generations. The blue dome is of course the night sky, but it is also a void, an opening, an aperture. Apertures, both natural and mechanical, direct our gaze: what is made visible? What remains out of sight? This act of drawing attention sits at the heart of Selina Ershadi’s practice as she explores the telling of personal stories that hover at the periphery of dominant historical narratives. Grappling with the apparatuses often used to tell these stories—the camera, the microphone—she interrogates standards of veracity associated with documentary processes. She teases out the narrative friction between notions of the minor, the often over-looked, and major, the often over-emphasised, and how these registers affect our understanding of character, site, and form. Ershadi works with her body, camera, and the women in her family; exploring the ways in which our proximity to power, place, and language radically informs our perspective and ability to tell our stories.

The Blue Dome (2026) is constructed out of audio visual material produced in two recent visits to Tehran, Ershadi’s first home which she now mostly experiences at a distance. The film, which moves between digital and analogue formats, unravels the assumption that the recording of people and their lives via an apparatus will create a stable account. Against this, The Blue Dome braids an inverted shape of time into its structure to explore this impossibility and loops between two alternating endings. In between these deviations from standard timelines the audience spends 30 minutes (a day, a year, a lifetime?) with Ershadi, her aunts, and grandmother who discuss the making of the film at the same time as considering familial relations within a wider social context. The film offers glimpses into this family’s orbit—and scenes that graze the edges of Tehran, as if from the perspective of the aperture itself.

Hannah Arendt’s text Human Condition describes conversation as essential to avoiding behaviours that enable authoritarianism. Similarly, pioneering Indigenous filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin has asserted that her process always begins with listening to those she is working with. Arendt and Obomsawin draw us into a manner of constructing the world predicated on relationships rather than individualism. They propose that participating in society—specifically from their experience as cultural producers who document life—requires relinquishing the prioritisation of the enclosed individual and going towards the other, differences and all. Weaving these positions together, “one is, one isn’t”, Ershadi constructs an environment through her embodied methodologies that activate the tenderness of listening and the fragility of conversation. This position offers a potent alternative to the pervasive tone of our current moment, which could be described as the age of the monologue, slogan, or diatribe. In The Blue Dome the entire gallery becomes a site to play out this alternative, as it acts as an instrument to transmit both image and sound that is susceptible to the variabilities of the world around us.

The exhibition leads with listening. It begins as an aural experience, with a new audio work as its prelude. It underscores Ershadi’s understanding of sound as a physical, poetic, and political material contingent on relationships. Sound takes on a three-dimensional quality as it constructs a space made up of field recordings from diverse localities that include a ticking clock, darkness, breath, clothes, sleep, as well as the human voice from whisper to song. Ershadi emphasises the paradox of forming a whole out of fragments, whether audio or visual, drawing our attention to the subjectivity of the editing process.

If the blue dome is a night sky and aperture, it surely must also be an eye. An eye, open (2026) explores the same paradox of forming a whole from a drawn-out glimpse. The film renders the eye of Ershadi’s mother, Azita, its major character. Shot over three years, this film documents the regular medical imaging of Azita's eye as her ocular tuberculosis is monitored. Only fragments of this footage are usable, mirroring this rare condition which can lead to blindness if left untreated. The looping image repeatedly shows a target, throwing into stark relief the ways image-making can quickly replicate mechanisms of power and discipline regardless of the fragility of the content encountered.

This exhibition is made up of oblique angles, curves, cuts, gaps, and veils. Its artworks dance along the edge of visibility and stability as “one is and one is not.” Ershadi elides the contemporary compulsion for highly saturated images and high pitched sounds, directing us, instead, to that most fragile of moments when an image or sound is formed. In her hands, the camera and the microphone close in on the whisper, the side-long glance, and the otherwise overlooked, conjuring the potency of the minor. Ultimately, Ershadi reminds us that it is from the so-called minor that life and meaning are constructed.

Biography

2026 programme

Each year Artspace Aotearoa asks one question. Across the year, this question is explored by artworks, artists, and audiences. In 2026, we ask, “which history?” You can think of our annual exhibition programme as a connected inquiry, in four parts and with many possible answers. Join us.