Events
Leap to the Place of Two Pools | CIRCUIT artists' moving image
Part of International Collaborations
LUX Scotland is excited to present a screening programme at GMAC, Glasgow, featuring four works from Aotearoa New Zealand, and one by Lakȟóta artist, ‘Leap to the Place of Two Pools’ as part of our collaboration with CIRCUIT Artist Moving Image. The programme is curated by CIRCUIT’s International Curator-at-large Erin Robideaux Gleeson and we’re excited to be joined by Mark Williams, CIRCUIT Director, for an in-person Q&A following the event.
This event continues our collaboration with CIRCUIT and is made possible by the new British Council Connections Through Culture grants. ‘Ka Mua Ka Muri – Walking Backwards Into the Future’ takes place across February and March, and explores artistic strategies for sustainable futures through moving image practice.
Taking into account moving image’s traditional emphasis on the visual, ‘Leap to the Place of Two Pools’ presents five new works by artists who resist or relinquish ocularcentrism [1] through multisensorial knowledge systems. In both making and viewing, how to honour what cannot be seen? How can surety and attachment to the two pools — the eyes — leap and transmigrate to other sensing sites within and beyond the boundaries of our bodies?
Sonya Lacey’s silent stop-frame animation, constructed from acid-etched copper plates, cites the cloud-like formation of scene changes used in historical animated productions. ‘Transition sequence for a dream or fight’ revels in this visual device that prevents us from seeing, while proposing the ongoing unknown as a hospitable, generative state. In ‘fugue notes’, Selina Ershadi’s original vision for a film is ultimately supplanted by its notes. In deep shadow and inky darkness, a voiceover unfolds, drawing connections between eroding autobiographical memory and the failed image.
‘James’, Tapsell-Kururangi’s work explores expectations of the visual representation of whakapapa and tikanga. As a form of self-portraiture, ‘James’ documents the artist’s candid performance in Te Rotorua-nui-a-Kahumatamomoe (Lake Rotorua). Kah Bee Chow turns to archival footage to process her father’s passing. In ‘Fronds’, focusing on the walled enclosure of her family home, his garden becomes a mnemonic [2] device and the camera a technology that enacts a form of touch. In the absence of a conventional protagonist, grief provokes a rhythm of sensual close-ups and textual interludes. Kite’s ‘Makȟóčhe Kiŋ Oíč’iwa (The Land Paints Itself)’ pairs technologies of dreaming and AI to imagine Indigenous futures patterned across unceded land [3], marked by stones whose own language emerges as a conduit to multivocal storytelling.
The title ‘Leap to the Place of Two Pools’ is adapted in dialogue with academic Anna Tsing’s translation of a Meratus Dayak Putir performance.[4] Through poetry, the shaman passes the two gleaming pools, guarded by eyelash swords, into the vast landscape of the body, where the world is expansive and healing is possible. With this offering in mind, these works emerge, variably sensing the unseeable known and unknown realms of oral history, memory and dreams.
[1] “Ocularcentrism” is a the idea that Western Cultures bias vision over other senses.
[2] “Mnemonic” is a word used to denote or describe something that aids or improves memory.
[3] “Unceded land” is a term that recognises when Indigenous lands were never formally surrendered to colonial rule.
[4] Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “Beyond the Boundary of the Skin,” in ‘The Realm of the Diamond Queen’, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1993. Cited in conversation with Sarah Shin in the introduction to Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘The Carrier Bag of Fiction’ (1986), London, Ignota Books, 2019.
Erin Robideaux Gleeson
Erin Robideaux Gleeson is a curator and writer based in Mní Sóta Makhóčhe/Minnesota, or Lands Where Waters Reflect Clouds. She is lecturer in Critical Theory and Curatorial Studies, Department of Art, University of Minnesota (2020 – ). As director of FD13 (2021 – ), an itinerant residency program focused on liveness, she invites artists to experiment towards new work, most recently with Kite, Raven Chacon, Pio Abad, Anocha Suwichakornpong, Yee I‑Lann, and Moe Satt. Based in Phnom Penh from 2002 – 2019, Erin was co-founding director of the non-profit contemporary art space, SA SA BASSAC (2011 – 2019). Erin is CIRCUIT’s 2025 International Curator-at-large.
CIRCUIT
CIRCUIT is an arts agency based in Aotearoa New Zealand which supports artists working in the moving image through commissioning, critical review and distribution. ‘Leap to the Place of Two Pools’ is the latest edition of CIRCUIT’s ongoing series in which an international curator is engaged to develop a programme of commissions based in the moving image.
Sonya Lacey
‘Transition sequence for a dream or fight’ (2025)
‘Transition sequence for a dream or fight’ is a stop-frame animation is constructed from acid-etched copper plates, one of many metals the artist works with for its qualities that, in supplement form, regulate and improve sleep. Lacey’s research on states between wakefulness and dreaming became focused on an ambiguous visual device used in early cinematic screen productions and cartoons. Used as a scene change, the device can be a stand-in for the dreamstate – hiding a character behind the misty veils of sleep, or it can signal a fight – a dust cloud masking physical violence. The potential misread and intervening space between sleep and skirmish might suggest the potential of the unseen as a way to reorganise reality.
Sonya Lacey is an artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Her practice focuses on rest and restlessness in the context of labour, and the physiological consequences of abstractions such as time structures and the work environment. She works primarily with moving image and sculptural installation. Recent exhibitions include ‘No distance at all’, Robert Heald Gallery, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, 2023; ‘The Polyphonic Sea’, Bundanon Art Museum, New South Wales, Australia, 2023; ‘Thresholds, Several Degrees of Attention’, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Ngāmotu New Plymouth, 2022; ‘Weekend’, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki Ta (The Walters Prize nomination exhibition), 2021; and ‘State of Motion 2020: Rushes of Time’, Asian Film Archive, Singapore.
Selina Ershadi
‘fugue notes’ (2025)
In ‘fugue notes’ an elliptical pan around a room at the blue hour descends into the night, holding fragments and holes of the artist’s fugitive attempts to recover eroded autobiographical memory. As the voiceover unfolds, images and sensations break through the dark screen, before disintegrating into the grainy void once more. Filmed during an artist residency in Karekare, fugue notes honours a failed, original vision for a film transformed into its notes.
Selina Ershadi is an Iranian-born, Aotearoa-based artist working within a lineage of experimental and hybrid forms across filmmaking and writing. Often drawing on personal histories and archives, her works complicate autobiography, exploring slipperiness of storytelling, memory and language, and the risks and failures that haunt documentation. Exhibitions and screenings include at Te Papa Tongarewa, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington; Heretaunga Hastings City Art Gallery, Heretaunga Hastings; The Physics Room, Ōtautahi Christchurch; Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Ngāmotu New Plymouth; Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Ōtepoti Dunedin; Enjoy Contemporary Art Space, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington; Granville Centre Art Gallery, Gadigal Sydney; Seventh Gallery, Naarm Melbourne; and RM Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.
James Tapsell-Kururangi
‘James’ (2025)
Using video, archival family photographs and physical performance, ‘James’ is a self-portrait of the artist. Filmed on Te Rotorua-nui-a-Kahumatamomoe, Tapsell-Kururangi works through the complexities of his whakapapa, identity and tikanga. Traversing the body of water, Tapsell-Kururangi focuses on his own image, returning home to reassess the changing environment and stories he grew up with.
James Tapsell-Kururangi (Te Arawa, Tainui, Ngāti Porou) is an artist based in Ōtautahi, where he is the Director of The Physics Room. Recent exhibitions include: ‘My throat a shelter’, The Physics Room, Ōtautahi Christchurch, 2023; ‘Indigenous Histories’, Museo de Arte de Sāo Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, Sāo Paulo, 2023; ‘The long waves of our ocean’, National Library, Pōneke Wellington, 2022; ‘twisting, turning, winding: takatāpui + queer objects’, Objectspace, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, 2022; and ‘Matarau’, City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, 2022.
Kah Bee Chow
‘Fronds’ (2025)
The artist’s annual visits home to Penang, Malaysia, involved filming incidental footage of her family home, including the enclosure of the garden loved and cared for by her father until his recent passing. Revisiting a decade of this archive to construct a personal portal and offering to her father, ‘Fronds’ close-up images, intimate sonic layers and textual interludes document the complex and spirited relations between gardener and garden, father and daughter, presence and absence, including what remains incommunicable.
Kah Bee Chow is an artist from Penang, Malaysia and Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa, living and working in Malmö, Sweden. Chow works with forms of protective architecture, including looking at forms for the body such as shields and shells, as well as architectural mechanisms of enclosure, paying close attention to the particularities of space and site. Exhibitions include at Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Malmö Konsthall; Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen; Kunstlerhaus Bregenz, Austria; Te Tuhi, Aotearoa; Tranen Contemporary Art Centre, Copenhagen; Signal Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö; Rupert, Vilnius; Magenta Plains, New York; Blank Canvas, Malaysia; Artspace Aotearoa, among others.
Kite
‘Makȟóčhe Kiŋ Oíč’iwa (The Land Paints Itself)’ (2025)
In ‘Makȟóčhe Kiŋ Oíč’iwa’ four Lakȟóta beings in near future Rapid City, South Dakota, USA, begin to dream and are enveloped by colour and pattern which have been generated through custom software designed by the artist with Wihanble S’a Center for Indigenous AI. Panning out to a map of the United States, stones from carceral sites across unceded Lakȟóta land reveal their own design. Affirming dreaming as a technology for visioning and creating Indigenous futures, human and more-than-human voices construct an ethical counter to extractive politics.
Kite (Dr. Suzanne Kite) is an Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California. She holds a BFA, Music Composition, CalArts; MFA, Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School; and Ph.D., Fine Arts, Concordia University, Montreal. Kite’s scholarship and practice investigate contemporary Lakȟóta ontologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance, often working in collaboration with family and community. Recent awards include “Making Kin with Machines” (MIT Press) and 2023 Creative Capital Award. At Bard College, she is Director of Wihanble S’a Center for Indigenous AI, Distinguished Artist-in-Residence, and Assistant Professor of American and Indigenous Studies. Kite is an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux tribe.
Glossary
“Aotearoa” is the Māori name for New Zealand.
“Lakȟóta” is a Native American Tribe.
“Mnemonic” is a word used to denote or describe something that aids or improves memory.
“Ocularcentrism” is a the idea that Western Cultures bias vision over other senses.
“Unceded land” is a term that recognises when Indigenous lands were never formally surrendered to colonial rule.
“Tikanga” is a Māori term for traditional values and culture.
“Whakapapa” is a Māori term for lineage/ancestry.
Closed Captions
Partners
Part of International Collaborations
LUX Scotland works with a range of trusted international partners to deliver projects in Scotland and internationally. Our international collaborations aim to expand the expertise, networks and audiences for Scotland-based artists, as well as bring new international moving image work to Scotland.