The air, like a stone

This exhibition brings together a feature-length 16mm film by Rosalind Nashashibi, Denim Sky (2018-2022), and a newly commissioned installation by Emma Fitts, From heat to translucence / your mineral touch (2023). The works share a concern with non-nuclear relationships—human, material, social—and non-linear time, where signs, omens, weather, friendships and materials power narrative rather than chronological time. Denim Sky, made with friends and family as cast over three years across the Orkney Islands, Scottish National Gallery, and Baltic Sea, explores a fiction of space travel using non-linear time, prompted by Ursula K. LeGuin's The Shobies' Story. Fitts' installation, made from weathered canvas, felted wool, aluminium and wooden rods, remains lit throughout the night, alluding to astronomical and tidal time measures. The canvas panels are repurposed from an earlier outdoor work in Tāmaki Makaurau, aged and marked by weather. Fitts' wall-based work responds to The Physics Room's Ōtautahi site and the season's short days. Forms are drawn from galaxy structures and Mount John Observatory architecture. Nashashibi's film unfolds in three chapters with titles determined by the I Ching, foregrounding alternative logics and speculating on moving outside linear time as a space of potentiality.