Vital Machinery brings together recent works by five Aotearoa New Zealand contemporary artists working across photography and moving image. Diverse in form and approach, the intersections of these five bodies of work create space for new thinking – opening up ways to consider histories of lens-based art practices, relationships between artist and subject, and the consumption, agency and stability of the image in a digital age.

The works in Vital Machinery offer ways to examine, exploit and subvert the power dynamics of the camera – activating discussion of women’s experiences of the lens, the entanglement of lived experience and creative practice, and the implications of image capture within histories of colonisation.

Curated by Lucy Hammonds and Sophie Davis.

Read/download the exhibition essay here.