RELOAD was a series of three installations showcasing recent digital moving-image works by Shannon Te Ao, Hito Steyerl, and Eddie Clemens. Each revisited a charged history and loaded sites (of incarceration and hard labour, war and corporate sponsorship, past disaster and futuristic conflict) by a canny re-deployment of digital media.

Shannon Te Ao (b. 1978, Sydney) is a Wellington-based artist, writer and curator currently teaching at Massey University School of Art. Follow the Party of the Whale is a two-channel video projection that merges the strategies of performance art with a poignant reflection on the fate of the Māori prophet leaders Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kākahi and their followers, during their two-year incarceration in Dunedin after removal from their pacifist community at Parihaka in Taranaki in 1881.

Hito Steyerl (b. 1966, Munich) is a Berlin-based documentary filmmaker and writer who uses photography and video to ‘think through’ the circulation of media. Is a Museum a Battlefield? is a performance/lecture produced for the 2013 Istanbul Biennial, which uses the aerodynamic form of an empty bullet casing as a device to link together a mass grave in Turkey, contemporary museum culture, the arms industry, and arts sponsorship.

Eddie Clemens (b. 1977, Rotorua) is an Auckland-based artist known for his manipulation of objects and images to facilitate a slippage between digital and material realms. Collector’s Edition Glitch uses the Adam Art Gallery’s architecture as prop for, and feature in, a work that montages scenes and outtakes from various movies by and about James Cameron.

This exhibition was staged concurrently with Kim Pieters: what is a life?