Halil Altindere (Turkey), Willie Doherty (Ireland), Daniel du Bern (NZ/UK), et al. (NZ), Terrence Handscomb (NZ/USA), Hye Rim Lee (NZ/US/South Korea), Aernout Mik (Netherlands), Markéta Othová (Czech Republic) and Kan Xuan (China).

This exhibition brought together nine artists working in various locations who posed new and compelling questions about the nature of the human subject under present conditions.

According to exhibition curator and director of the Adam Art Gallery, Christina Barton, these artists do not conceive the subject as a freewheeling individual in command of their thoughts and emotions; nor as an indeterminate construct prey to the simulacral effects of representation; nor even as someone whose identity is linked foremost to their colour, class, gender or sexual persuasion.

Instead their concerns seemed to be with a notion of the subject as a consciousness conditioned by its relation to others; for them subjectivity is contingent, a position to be articulated, negotiated, and projected. Thus, the exhibition moved past humanist, poststructuralist and multiculturalist positions, to offer a new ‘take’ on how we represent ourselves.

Working mainly with photography and video these artists recognised the ever-present role of these media today, and offered a timely set of responses that map the terrain of contemporary experience for viewers to negotiate.

Perhaps what linked and distinguished this selection of artists is that each took advantage of the formal properties of their medium to stage an encounter that drew in the viewer. By folding together form and content and refusing the kinds of ideological motivation that drive the mainstream media, they guaranteed art a vital function: to destabilise any fixed playing out of subject positions and, therefore, to enable reflection on what it means to ‘be’ in the world today.

This exhibition was staged concurrently with Te Mata: The Ethnological Portrait.