Beyond Exhausted .

Beyond Exhausted
The Physics Room, Christchurch
17 November – 23 December 2016
Curated by Sophie Davis

Beyond Exhausted explored the contemporary possibilities of publishing through the idea of the reprint—the recognition that, while print media once played an important role in feminist, queer, and protest movements, the notion of ‘independent publishing’ has become a more hybrid political gesture and field of enquiry for artists working today.

My contribution centres on the final three issues of The Silver Bulletin, the newspaper I produced in Ōtautahi Christchurch between 2011 and 2012. Where all of its issues responded to the social climate following the Canterbury earthquakes, these three marked a distinct change of direction—both for the publication and in my own thinking—becoming pointedly political about the redevelopment and rebranding of post-quake Christchurch, and serving now as a document of that period.

Working with Ilam Press, I reprinted the three issues and distributed them from the gallery to visitors over the course of the exhibition, presenting them alongside sculptural and graphic works that reflect on democracy and symbolism in the Christchurch rebuild and on the city’s historic urban planning—drawing out the structural relationships between design, power, and cultural capital, and, in re-presenting the work four and five years on, registering how rapidly the city had shifted.