How does a group form? The five Tāmaki Makaurau based artists in this exhibition were invited independently to make new artwork. They have all produced semi-fictional worlds that raise questions about authority, participation, and meaning. Each of these worlds is interested in a process of transition. Cabins, shelters, underworlds, and purgatories introduce characters who experience uncertainty, misunderstanding, and boundaries. This exhibition asks what happens when we find ourselves part of a system we cannot fully understand or control.
This exhibition is presented with the support of our strategic partner the Chartwell Trust. The programme participants were also supported by The Karekare House Artist Residency and Eden Arts Trust.
Biographies:
Lolani Dalosa is a Samoan and Filipino artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Using CCTV material, online imagery, industrial and readymade objects, Dalosa produces films, sculptures, photographs and installations drawn from urban life in South Auckland. These constitute an ongoing study of ambivalence, examining the underlying determinants of choice, engagement and participation within everyday structures and systems. Recent projects include Spades, 2026, Aotearoa Art Fair; Slow Races Nowhere, 2025, Nathan Homestead; Dalosa, Lafo & Iva, 2025, The Physics Room; and Character Studies, 2024, Te Tuhi.
Ken Faber is a painter and sculptor whose work draws on deep time, prehistory and extinction to rethink present-day system collapse. In recent works, chimera avian species—native birds grafted with dinosaur ancestors—face impending meteors. Egg tempera is posited here as a 'non-binary' emulsion of oil and water, suggesting a genderqueer transcendence of the binaries underpinning the Capitalocene. Drawing on Biblical grammar, Faber reads unconscious fantasies of extinction in the 'prophetic perfect tense': a crisis at once arriving and already decided. They completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Anthropology at the University of Auckland in 2025 and are currently completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts Honours.
Lily Greig is an artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau, working across sculpture and installation. Her work draws on the way archetypes are used in psychoanalysis to understand and resolve defensive responses to trauma. Incorporating Egyptian magico-religious texts, the Cult of the [decapitated] Head in Iron Age Europe, and the tradition of bodily relics in Catholic material culture, Greig's practice recalls archaic modes of meaning-making through objects. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Elam School of Fine Arts in 2025.
Ton Ray is a filmmaker and visual artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. His work tests the limits of non-teleological narrative and world-building in still and moving images. Using repetition, recursion and micro-variation, he constructs worlds in which time is fragmented and events are connected not by causality but by recognition and memory. Alongside his moving-image work, Ray maintains a sculptural practice that uses found photographs and frames to reorganise borders and recontextualise them. He holds a Master of Fine Arts from Elam School of Fine Arts, 2023 and, in 2024, founded Strawhouse, an artist-run space in Mount Eden.
Rangi White of Rongomaiwahine is a sculptor and installation artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. He has exhibited at Gus Fisher Gallery, Treadler, Ivan Anthony and William Austin. He holds a Master of Māori Studies from Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland.