Unnerved: The New Zealand Project

Curated by Maud Page, Unnerved: The New Zealand Project is the second of GoMA's country- specific exhibitions focusing on the Brisbane art museum's contemporary collections. The exhibition "explores a particularly rich dark vein that recurs in New Zealand Contemporary art and cinema. Psychological unease pervades many of the works in the exhibition with humour, parody and poetic subtlety among the strategies used by artist across generations and genres." From the GoMA website

Unnerved includes Gavin Hipkins' The Homely, which has been described as a post-colonial gothic novel. Through a cinematic run of 80 images, which are often slightly blurry and filled with the colours of a dreamscape, Hipkins re-presents monuments and memorials of Australia and New Zealand nationalism with fragmented glimpses of domestic interiors and museum dioramas. He also says: "Although New Zealand has an international reputation for being clean, green and beautiful (a mythology that New Zealanders often call on to represent ourselves) it is the treatment and conquest of nature as an adventure playground that interests me with this project". 

Images: images from Gavin Hipkins' series The Homely