Between two________
Emily O'Hara, 2018
Between Two _________ is an exhibition in dual sites within Auckland city: St Paul ST Gallery Three and Silo 6, Silo Park, Wynyard Quarter. The exhibition performs a spatial practice across performance and installation approaches conceived as site-writings. Site-writings pertain specifically to modes of revealing existential belonging expressed through everyday connection to urban ruins. More than architectural figures, ruins reveal an expansive site inseparable to human mood, material histories, concepts and ideologies. Between Two_______ focuses its ruinous site-writings on processes of mourning for silent expression in ‘dialogue’ between these two sites. Ineffable translations invite moments of ‘temporary sanctuary’ for viewers, through expressions of temporal and spatial difference rendered by repetitions, extended durations and urban genealogies of dwelling.
Mourning reveals (its) truth as fragmentary, fleeting and transitory through movements of withdraw as un-concealing. There is a homophonic ineffability sounding ‘sites’—offering nuanced readings within the gift of language: Sight and cite reveal mourning stones or songs siting material signifiers for remembering those who have come before us—we sight or remember them through these mourning-stones and hear them call to us (in their mourning-songs), citing us in their names, places, histories and concepts. We sight, site and cite their calls into futures as we carry (them) on. In the aims of this exhibition (and its underlying PhD research) mourning reveals something life affirming—expanding our concepts of time, space and history—in dwelling with (human and non human) others.