My throat/a shelter

My throat/a shelter is an exhibition of two new experimental films by Selina Ershadi and James Tapsell-Kururangi. The exhibition is situated in embodied and intangible systems of knowledge, with the artists drawing on family narratives documented in oral histories, home videos, material portents and screen histories.

Eshadi's two-channel film چشم چشمه (2023) brings together fragments from the artist's family archive with footage captured while learning to see through a 16mm Bolex camera. The work explores various modes of seeing, documenting and recollecting as the eye loses dominion, drawing inspiration from a VHS tape in Ershadi's family archive which captures a childhood visit to Tehran. The sonic register is composed by sound artist Frances Libeau, comprising aural textures from Ershadi's personal archives and field recordings.

Tapsell-Kururangi's film Homman (2023) is a meditation on temporality and mortality. Using the story of Maui and Hine-nui-te-pō as a scaffold, the work traces an itinerant path through Hong Kong, Copenhagen, and the artist's father's home in Paengaroa. The film becomes a conversation between the artist and his 80-year-old father, surfacing mythologies, histories and places dense with meaning.

Both works grapple with language, vision and translation, embracing narrative and temporal fragmentation to express complex and multi-layered experience.