Auckland artist Heather Straka’s recent works inhabit an eerie liminal space that sees them hovering somewhere between the worlds of painting, photography, and film.

Memoria unfolds inside a series of dilapidated interiors. The scenes and characters occupy a shallow space, dramatically lit, where the stark contrast between dark and light is evocative of the intense theatricality of paintings by old European masters such as Caravaggio or Rembrandt. In these works, Straka deftly draws together an amalgamation of contemporary global and political events, including the global pandemic, the rise of the #metoo movement, and the destruction and removal of sculptures and monuments to colonialism and patriarchal oppression in dozens of cities around the word, in a global groundswell to destabilise the politics of history and its sanctioned authors.