GROUP EXHIBITION

In This is the house that jack built each artwork casts light on this closed-circuitry and the complex frictions it avoids. The wielding of the individual’s visible economic position as power par excellence risks blunting the value of other social contributions such as reproductive and collective labour. The models of individualised ownership are also further entrenched. The various societal and infrastructural mechanisms that enact this separation between so-called public and so-called private life often curtail nuanced and emergent approaches to exchange and relationship building. Whereas, exchange and relationships happen in many ways: through collaboration, whakapapa, nurturing loved ones and places, and underscoring solidarity. Considering value in this expanded way prompts the reimagining of standards: in this exhibition at the centre of Kerry Deane’s work Drawing (2024), two faces encounter one another, underneath reads the subtitle ‘Dialogue.’

The 18th-century English nursery rhyme which gives the exhibition its title expands upon the closed-circuit. This diagram describes interlocking exchange economies of scale within an ecosystem and the subsequent effect of these processes on said ecosystem. As an acute diagram of relationships the nursery rhyme has frequently been used as a scaffold to critique modes of oppressive power such as the right to vote in the UK, slavery in the US, and colonisation here in Aotearoa New Zealand. Zooming in on these interdependencies, this exhibition explores standards of exchange across multiple decades and contexts. Beginning with Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez’s seminal film Mi Aporte My Contribution (1972), shot in a work camp offers first-hand accounts of the challenges of integrating women into the workforce 13 years into the revolution. Spiralling to Aotearoa today, Ashleigh Taupaki’s drawings made in the gallery animate intimate histories. Taupaki’s practice insists her whānau, hapu, and iwi are non-negotiably bound to place and its innate collectiveness.

This is the house that jack built invites audiences to encounter a fifty-year arc of artworks and their relative contexts. As in X&Y’s 1977 provocation to give it all up to participate, each work in the exhibition considers the complex nature of exchange, and how whole value systems can be neglected by social valuing of homogenous worth. The visitors to X&Y’s exhibition were eventually reunited with their belongings located at an undisclosed site not by following a linear procedure but, after engaging in extended dialogue with fellow audience members and the artists. This process, as with the Artspace Aotearoa annual question “do I need territory?”, invites the audience to pause, take stock, and scan the opportunities for exchange and relationships here in the gallery and in daily life. Consider which points on the circuit enable, which entrench, and how this could all be otherwise.