Infrastructure: Power, Politics and Imagination
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Infrastructure brings together three discrete exhibitions tracing moments from the 1980s: Matthew Galloway examining the socio-political climate surrounding the Clyde Dam, a legacy of Robert Muldoon’s ‘Think Big’ initiative; Doris Lusk’s Imagined Projects series painted in 1983/4 depicting fictional industrial sites in the landscape; and Raúl Ortega Ayala’s documentation of the exclusion zone around Chernobyl—a landscape rendered uninhabitable by the nuclear power plant disaster of 1986—and the impact of this on its former residents.
These exhibitions all focus on power: both in the sense of the physical creation of energy and the political thrust behind large infrastructural projects. They consider the landscape and how environmental conditions are altered through these extractive processes. They think about the people, both the key political players who make decisions and those whose lives are irrevocably changed through their actions. Brought together in this way these exhibitions call attention to how we might imagine our futures by thinking about the recent past.
Matthew Galloway: The Power that Flows Through Us
The Power that Flows Through Us explores the construction and political context around the Clyde Dam, Aotearoa’s third-largest hydroelectric plant, a legacy of Robert Muldoon’s ‘Think Big’ initiative. Playing off the architecture of the gallery to help us reflect on the monumental physicality of the dam, Galloway uses poetry as sonic interventions, large-scale projections of drone footage and archival political cartoons blown up into sculptural form, to locate us within the narratives and perspectives swirling around the Clyde Dam since its inception. The exhibition invites us to consider not only the physical generation of electrical power but also the distribution and implementation of political power.
Doris Lusk: Imagined Projects: Forty Years On
Doris Lusk’s Imagined Projects & Imagined Views (1983/4) is one of the artist’s last major series. It is a culmination of six decades of Lusk’s practice and thinking around landscape in Aotearoa. This exhibition focuses specifically on the Imagined Projects works, gathering five of the seven paintings together for the first time in forty years. The paintings depict delicately coloured opaque washes of imagined industrial sites inserted into fictional earthy landscapes. The architectural sites in these paintings do not sit in harmony with nature but are juxtaposed with it. They illustrate the tensions at play when large extractive infrastructural interventions are made in the landscape.
Raúl Ortega Ayala: The Zone
Raúl Ortega Ayala’s The Zone (2013-2020) documents the legacy of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident through video, photographs and firsthand accounts of former residents of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Shot over four years, the work speaks to the repercussions of failed technological development at a monumental scale—exploring the ongoing impact on the lives of those affected, the visual impact of an abandoned city given over to nature and decay, and the lingering paraphernalia of an expired political system.
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