In the Image of the City.

The Power that Flows Through Us examines the construction and political context of the Clyde Dam—the third-largest hydroelectric plant in Aotearoa—holding in view both the generation of electrical power and the distribution and exercise of political power that flows from the dam site, in a remote country landscape, into our towns and cities. The dam is a legacy of Robert Muldoon’s ‘Think Big’ initiative; its construction, begun in 1982 and completed in 1994, saw around a third of the Tīrua Cromwell township relocated to higher ground.

This iteration turns to the monumental physicality of the dam’s architecture. Its main addition is a new powder-coated steel seat that takes its form from the public seating on the Clyde Dam viewing platform, alongside sculptural works that mimic the platform’s bannisters—each carrying silver vinyl copies of the names visitors have scratched into these steel amenities. Installed in segments, they form a support structure for monitors showing the dam’s external workings and its impact on the landscape beyond its edges, accompanied by poems by Brian Turner.

This is the fourth iteration of the project, which began in Optimism and its afterlives, curated by Simon Gennard at Enjoy Contemporary Art Space in 2020, before being presented as a public installation across the Heritage Precinct, Cromwell, and Clyde Museum in 2022, and in Infrastructure: power, politics and imagination at Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery in 2024. In the Image of the City brings together practitioners documenting what is observed and experienced at the edges of the built environment, with David Straight, These Are the Projects We Do Together, Edith Amituanai, Monash Urban Lab with Baracco+Wright Architects, Safa, Emina and Fatima El Samad, and Emily Parr and Arielle Walker.