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_{Installation view: Pulp III: A Short Biography of the Banished Book, 2022. Singapore Pavilion, 59th International Art Exhibition 2022. Photo: Alessandro Brasile}

Te Wai Ngutu Kākā Gallery is pleased to partner with Te Tuhi to stage the first large-scale presentation of celebrated Singaporean artist Shubigi Rao in Aotearoa.

Originally commissioned by the National Arts Council, Singapore, for the Singapore Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Pulp III explores the precarity of endangered languages, the futures of public and alternative libraries, the work of defenders of books, and the cosmopolitanism of regional print communities that have blossomed and waned in historic centres of print, such as Venice and Singapore.

This exhibition features Shubigi Rao's feature-length film, Talking Leaves, and her 400-page book, Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book, Volume III of V. Echoing its first presentation in Venice, the installation has been conceived as a commanding paper maze which partitions the gallery into a suite of abstracted studiolos(studies). In this way, we physically enter a room-scaled publication, through which Rao both stresses the physicality of print and annotates our journey into her in-depth research.

_{Image: Wen becomes Shi, 2024. Courtesy of Wen Yang and Shi Xu.}

Spurred by the recent exhibition Ken Friedman: 92 Events, Wen becomes Shi playfully continues Friedman's score-based methodology in this new dual-channel video work. Drawing from digital processing, Wen Yang and Shi Xu work with AI engines to 'merge' their bodies and identities: Wen Yang becomes 'she' (Shi Xu).

_{Image: Still from Emily Parr, Cosmosphere, 2024, dual-channel video, four-channel audio, 30 min. Courtesy of the artist.}

Between the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the Kronfeld Collection was assembled by Gustav and Louisa Kronfeld, a Jewish merchant and a Samoan matriarch. As European empires expanded throughout Moana Oceania and settler and Indigenous worlds collided, the Collection travelled to the Kronfeld family’s home in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Their house, ʻOli ʻUla, was named for a garland of fragrant red flowers from the ʻoli tree, once cultivated in Sāmoa. The taonga, measina, and treasures adorned its walls, encircled by this symbolic garland. Later, they entered Aotearoa New Zealand’s public museums.

A descendent of the Kronfeld family, Parr’s exhibition explores her great-great-grandparents’ Collection, and seeks to ‘house’ the taonga and measina and enliven their systems of relation. The artworks, or cosmospheres, render taonga and measina from the Collection as three-dimensional point clouds, and immerse them in kaleidoscopic moving-image lifeworlds. Engaging the reparative notion of ‘tuitui’ (sewing, threading, binding), Parr proposes that the rendering ancestral treasures using contemporary technologies might offer a restoration of relations.

_{Emily Parr (Ngāi Te Rangi, Moana, Pākehā) is an artist/researcher whose moving-image practice explores relational ecologies of Te Moananui-a-Kiwa. She is part of the Vā Moana cluster at AUT, a research associate with Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum, and a 2024 Springboard Award recipient.}