Join artists Beth Dawson and Benjamin Ord for a conversational walk through the neighbouring exhibitions ‘Ain’t you wanna cut it out? Don’t you wanna wait around?’ and ‘A Dance But No Figure’ currently hosted in the Karangahape non-profit art spaces of the Audio Foundation and RM. The conversation will enliven ideas around the exhibition format as a mode of utopia that draws on a perpetual loop of ephemerality.

In these exhibitions there is a celebration of the loose artistic collaborations between friends and an embrace of temporality, particularly in the materials employed. One of the key texts for Dawson and Ord is Cuban American academic José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia : The Then and There of Queer Futurity, Sexual Cultures in which he writes that such a celebration “signals a refusal of mastery an insistence on process and becoming”. A value is placed value on non-hieratical relationships that are strengthened through communities living in proximity and when there are shifting moments in which a place is inhabited.

Artist bios:

Beth Dawson

Beth Dawson aka Ducklingmonster is an audio-visual artist from Onehunga, Auckland | Tāmaki Makaurau, New Zealand | Aotearoa. She investigates out-of-bounds areas through a range of practices with a focus on community empowerment. Publicly her work has predominantly been in experimental sound performance, most notably in the group The Futurians, and solo as Ducklingmonster. Blatantly and happily ignoring the restrictions of media she works in sound, ink, video, broken electronics, and whatever else takes her fancy. She is a founding member of the art collective Uniform. In 2022 she completed a Masters Of Visual Art at AUT receiving the Head of School award for her practice-based research into elevating and valuing that which is temporary, collective, amateur, and improvised. She is currently working toward a PhD at AUT that will continue this research.

Benjamin Ord

Benjamin Ord is an artist and choreographer born in Aotearoa | New Zealand and based in London, U.K. He works across dance, performance and moving image to explore how the body pushes against the fixed surface of a finite image, object or linear time. His work has been shown at venues including Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof (Germany) Close-Up Film Centre (U.K.), APT Gallery (U.K.), Spike Island (U.K.), The Place (U.K.), DAAD Galerie (Germany), and Siobhan Davies Studios (U.K.) As a dancer for over a decade, he worked with Company Wayne McGregor and the Royal New Zealand Ballet, among others. He has collaborated with Sriwhana Spong on several internationally exhibited video installations and performed in the work of artists such as Olafur Eliason, Pablo Bronstein, Mark Wallinger, Alexandra Bachzetis and Tino Seghal. Benjamin holds an MA Artists’ Film and Moving Image from Goldsmiths, University of London and an MA Creative Practice from the Trinity Laban.