To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life brings together works by the Turner-Prize winning artist Charlotte Prodger alongside Sholto Buck, Laura Langer, Laila Majid, David Moser, Louis Blue Newby, Dayle Palfreyman and Tobias Allen.

To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life takes as its point of departure the novel of the same name by French writer and photographer Hervé Guibert, and proposes a constellation of relationality between a group of intra-generational artists working in Aotearoa and internationally. Written following Guibert’s terminal AIDS diagnosis in late 1980s Paris, the book's narrative is a thinly veiled fiction of three months in the penultimate year of the author’s life, and hinges around a candid account of the death of his friend Muzil — a stand-in for inimitable philosopher and BDSM enthusiast Michel Foucault. A celebration of unruly bodies at a time of threatened extinction, Guibert’s text functions as a paean to friendship and community as well as a wry and unflinching devotion to chronicling corporality. Bringing together works by the Turner-Prize winning artist Charlotte Prodger alongside Sholto Buck, Laura Langer, Laila Majid, David Moser, Louis Blue Newby, Dayle Palfreyman and Tobias Allen, the exhibition presents an affective ecology of art that is at once liminal and spectral. By holding the figure at a remove, their works invoke desire untethered from its bodily framing and in so doing the precariousness of all flesh.

With a special one-night screening of short works from the 1980s by the pioneering queer filmmaker Barbara Hammer (1939-2019).

Curated by Jess Clifford

Learn more about the artists here.