Vital Machinery explores intersections in the practices of five Aotearoa women artists working across photography and moving image. In this exhibition, the camera has been engaged as a technology and an extension of the body and thought process.

The artists in Vital Machinery draw on the history of lens-based art practices and interrogate the consumption, agency, and stability of the image in a digital age. Ever-present are the power dynamics and ambiguities of the camera, which are exploited to consider women’s experiences of the lens; the entanglement of lived experience and creative practice; and the implications of image capture within histories of colonisation. Navigating the networked world, this exhibition reaches inside the mechanisms at play in the processes of representing and recording ourselves within the contemporary moment.

First presented in late 2022 in Ōtepoti at Dunedin Public Art Gallery, the exhibition has been revisited and extended with same group of artists a year later for Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga-Hastings Art Gallery, and includes new and commissioned works.

Curated by Sophie Davis and Lucy Hammonds