Curating Otherwise, 2025
DJCS

Curating, for me, has always been more than the development of exhibitions. It is a methodology of resistance, a framework for critique, and a space for imagining other ways of living and knowing. Over the last decade, my practice has developed at the intersection of institutional critique, queer theory, and settler colonial studies. I understand exhibition making as a political act deeply entangled with questions of visibility, historiography, and power.

Giorgio Agamben reminds us that visibility itself is political. To be recognised is to enter into a field of power where inclusion is conditional and often violently policed. Achille Mbembe’s theorisation of necropolitics further illuminates how states and institutions regulate who is seen and who remains invisible, who is grievable and who is not. Within this terrain, curating becomes a strategy for intervening in systems of representation that too often reproduce exclusion.

One of my first significant exhibitions, Under Your Skin You Look Divine (2018), was staged at Basement Specialist Adult Store and Cruise Club, one of the longest running gay venues in Aotearoa, itself under threat from the gentrification of Karangahape Road. It was also my place of work for five years. Bringing together performance and video works, the exhibition foregrounded the erotic as a queer epistemology, asserting pleasure as a mode of resistance. In situating art within the architecture of the cruise club, the exhibition brought visibility to the business and drew audiences who not only encountered the work but supported the venue economically. This project resonated with José Esteban Muñoz’s reflections on queer utopia as emerging in the ephemeral traces of performance and cruising worlds, and with Jack Halberstam’s critique of heteronormative spatiality that often erases queer ways of being. The exhibition was a declaration that curating could exist outside the white cube, embedded instead in spaces where queer life is lived.

My relationship to galleries has been marked by exclusion, censorship, and struggle. My own graduate work was thrown in the bin by my art school—I turned up to my grad show to find my work in a nearby wheelie bin. On one occasion I arrived at the opening of a group exhibition and couldn’t find my work, only to discover it had been trashed. Another time, after the opening event, I was told the jockstraps I had made were “not art” and they were removed. I once endured a three-hour argument with two painters who insisted I had no right to paint or draw, and that I was not allowed to be a curator. At other times, I have learned that curators went behind my back to ask co-exhibitors if they would feel more comfortable with my work removed: “Let me know if there are any works you don’t like and I’ll remove them.” I have been given token budgets only to discover that my straight co-exhibitors were supported with thousands more, and I have been locked out of galleries when arriving with my community to view an exhibition at an appointment that had been confirmed but then ignored. These patterns of dismissal, erasure, and inequity are not incidental, they are symptomatic of wider structural discomfort.

When I have fought to remain in the room, I have been cast as difficult or even threatening. When I have spoken out, I have been met with eye-rolls, dismissal, or warnings that my career would be “ended.” On one occasion, an individual even attempted to have funding withdrawn from an organisation I was working with because I had spoken publicly against Zionism. This dynamic reminds me of Sara Ahmed’s “feminist killjoy” and the figure of the complainer, with those who insist on naming structural violence are often themselves framed as the problem. These experiences have made clear to me that queer practitioners are tolerated only when they conform or there is something to gain from them, but punished when they resist. My curatorial practice emerges directly from this lived struggle as a commitment to making space for what institutions would rather erase.

My recent years as Director of Enjoy Contemporary Art Space (2022–2025) sharpened this conviction that curating can be a revolutionary tool. At Enjoy, I carried forward its legacy of experimentation while pushing it into new critical terrain. NO FUTURE – The Cost of Extraction (2025) interrogated the legacies of extractive industries in Aotearoa, featuring Fiona Clark, Elvis Booth-Claveria, and Hamish Garry. The exhibition combined archival photography and ephemera, a sculptural model derived from LINZ data, and new performance works. It confronted the techno-legal apparatuses that fragment land into commodities, while also holding space for embodied and intimate connections to whenua. Importantly, it facilitated intergenerational exchange between Clark and Booth-Claveria, underscoring the continuity of resistance across generations of queer practice.

Guided by Silvia Federici’s critique of capitalist enclosures, the exhibition framed extraction not only as an ecological crisis but as a continuation of colonial violence, showing how dispossession is reproduced through both physical and digital infrastructures. It also tested the institution at the level of its own protocols. Performances demanded audiences confront the limits of what was permissible within its walls, and who funded them. In doing so, the project positioned extraction as an institutional condition, echoed in the ways resources, labour, and visibility are allocated.

Similarly, An Ethics of Witnessing (2025) asked what it means to bear witness in the time of genocide, featuring Fetishini, Aroha and Frankie Matchitt-Millar, and p Walters. A key gesture involved taking Walters’ banner quoting Aimé Césaire from the gallery into the streets during a National Day of Action for Palestine. This underscored Judith Butler’s insistence that to witness is to remain accountable to what is seen and to resist complicity through silence. The exhibition also included a performance that tested the limits of institutional policy, such as negotiating the right to piss safely on the gallery floor, reframing bodily presence as both refusal and demand for care. To hold this, I introduced a code of conduct for audiences, insisting on shared responsibility in the encounter. Works like Fetishini’s performances stage queer and trans embodiment against the gaze of spectators, exposing the politics of visibility itself. This project reflected the through line of my practice to challenge institutions at the level of body, audience, and infrastructure, and create conditions where art unsettles the very frameworks that govern its visibility.

Directing Enjoy also meant interrogating the institution itself. Following Michel Foucault’s insights on the microphysics of power, I recognised that galleries are active producers of norms, exclusions, and hierarchies. My approach prioritised artists and responsiveness to community need rather than market pressures, and opportunities for artists and emerging curators to participate in decision making, enacting an engaged pedagogy. I also invited activist groups to take over the gallery, treating the space as a platform for organising as much as for exhibiting. Enjoy became, in this way, both a gallery and a site of institutional critique.

Before Enjoy, I founded Parasite (2020–2022), an artist-run platform created in response to my 2018 research showing that only 0.06% of Auckland Art Gallery’s collection was digitally catalogued as LGBTTQIA+ related. This absence illustrated Muñoz’s “ephemeral traces” of queer history - the lives and practices erased from official archives. Parasite operated at the margins, feeding off institutional resources while refusing assimilation. We staged exhibitions in unconventional sites somewhere between public and domestic, and foregrounded queer temporalities. Parasite demonstrated that queer curating could be both critical, celebratory, resistant, and sustaining.

As Assistant Curator at Artspace Aotearoa (2021–2022), I encountered curating at a larger scale, navigating bureaucracy, producing major exhibitions, and collaborating across networks. This sharpened my understanding of how institutions amplify but also constrain. Across nearly 15 years working in galleries, from artist-run initiatives to commercial and public institutions, I have witnessed the precarities of artists and the extractive tendencies of various markets. Roberto Esposito’s reflections on community and immunity help me articulate this. Institutions often immunise themselves by excluding. My work seeks to invert this, cultivating porous and generous structures that welcome.

Drawing these threads together, my next step is the establishment of COMMODE, an independent gallery dedicated to critical discourse, queer visibility, and political urgency. COMMODE builds on the agility of Parasite and my institutional learnings but rejects state or corporate logics. Its commitments are clear: treat exhibitions as research and knowledge production, centre queer artists, address colonial violence and extraction, and operate with integrity.

COMMODE embodies my belief that curating can be a revolutionary tool. It seeks, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, to “brush history against the grain”, to enact queer utopias in the present, and to hold space for new forms of appearance. Looking back across my career, I see a throughline - visibility, care, and resistance. My practice continually asks who is missing from our cultural narratives, how can exhibitions become sites of accountability, and what forms of knowledge can they produce? Curating, for me, is about creating conditions for life, for the survival, flourishing, and recognition of those too often denied it.


Further reading:

Agamben, G. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press, 1995.
Ahmed, S. Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press, 2017.
Benjamin, W. Theses on the Philosophy of History. In Illuminations. Schocken Books, 1940/1968.
Butler, J. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Harvard University Press, 2015.
Esposito, R. Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life. Polity, 2011.
Federici, S. Caliban and the Witch. Autonomedia, 2004.
Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977.
Halberstam, J. In a Queer Time and Place. New York University Press, 2005.
hooks, b. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, 1994.
Mbembe, A. Necropolitics. Public Culture, 2003.
Muñoz, J. E. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York University Press, 2009.