Liss Fenwick, The colony cares for everyone
Opening 1 August 2024
To align with the 2024 Photobook NZ Festival we will be exhibiting a new video work by Australian artist Liss Fenwick in the gallery foyer.
Liss will be giving a presentation about her Photobook Humpty Doom at the Festival on Friday 9 August.
"The colony cares for everyone is a video set at a lithium mine in the Northern Territory, featuring a termite colony consuming what I term ‘settler fanfiction’ books: literature that celebrates the history of colonialism, and the extractive industries that underpin it. My connection with this termite colony began on Larrakia/Wulna land, where I grew up. Termites were eating my late father’s shed, and I began to feed them his books, eventually expanding their diet to include both current and historical settler fanfiction, and related books. The termites deconstruct and transform the books, making space to imagine a future unraveling of Eurocentric and anthropocentric knowledge systems, rooted in resistance and interspecies care."
Liss Fenwick, 2024