Cinema: Cities of Tomorrow by Gavin Hipkins

Due to the announcement on Tuesday 17 August regarding the change of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland to Alert Level 4 from 11:59pm tonight, Artspace Aotearoa will temporarily close the gallery to the public as we assist the collective attempt to slow the spread of COVID-19 down.

We have been preparing for this and have a wealth of experience within our team to make sure there will be continuous but alternative programming for our exhibition series When The Dust Settles, which will be announced soon.

In conjunction with the presentation of Gavin Hipkins’ photographs of university buildings from the series The Habitat (2000) in the current exhibition When, two of Hipkins’ architecturally-themed short films are screening in our basement cinema. Both films feature sound by Tāmaki Makaurau-based artist Torben Tilly and appear courtesy of the artist and Michael Lett, Tāmaki Makaurau.

The Quarry
Gavin Hipkins
2013
11 minutes
Voice: Sara Hodge
Sound: Ben Sinclair and Chris Todd
Music: Torben Tilly
Commissioned by The Physics Room, Christchurch for the solo exhibition Gavin Hipkins: The Quarry, 18 May — 16 Jun 2013

Juxtaposing a picturesque aesthetic with John Ruskin's meditations on architectural form and beauty sourced from The Stones of Venice, Hipkins’ The Quarry explores the relationship between architectural values and town planning with utopian and practical aspirations for Christchurch’s post-quake rebuild.

City of Tomorrow
Gavin Hipkins
2017
11 minutes
Sound: Torben Tilly
Commissioned by The Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt, for the survey exhibition Gavin Hipkins: The Domain, 25 November 2017 ⁠— 02 April 2018

Chandigarh's modern architecture is explored through Le Corbusier's early writings on repetition and order. The architect's zealous ideals taken from his 1929 The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning are revisited via the buildings and symbolism of the planned capital city.

Gavin Hipkins

Over the past three decades, Gavin Hipkins has developed a practice in photography and moving image that frequently returns to the intersections of modernism and the post/colonial nation-state by repurposing images and texts. His work addresses the histories of his chosen media as well as the ways in which images have shaped the contemporary world as transmitters and visual manifestations of ideology.

Hipkins received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland in 1992 and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver in 2002. An extensive survey of his practice, Gavin Hipkins: The Domain, was exhibited at the Dowse Art Museum in 2017. He has exhibited extensively both internationally and in Aotearoa. Hipkins represented New Zealand at the 2018 Asia Pacific Triennial, the 2002 Sao Paolo Biennale and the 1998 Biennale of Sydney. In 2006 he undertook a residency at the ISCP in New York and in 1998 he was selected as the inaugural New Zealand resident at Artspace Sydney. Hipkins’ first feature film Erewhon—based on Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon, Or Over the Range — premiered in 2014 at the New Zealand International Film Festival and Edinburgh Art Festival.