Antje Barke
I'll place it in the water, and remove myself once more
A play on intention, failure, and states of transition, this project explores the intersection of two power relations, two tensions through the focus on two forms: a carpet, removed from Elam and put in the ocean at North Piha Beach, and an interpretation of a full-scale roofline of a worker's hut from the same location, an image critical to New Zealand's Architectural history - 'The Whare in the Bush'.
Built out of deconstructed studio walls, the works engage with a discourse of challenging, destabilising and correcting histories by bringing into view a colonial tension of power relations. Site-practice, in this instance, talks to the narratives of absence and isolation attributed to the Pakeha nationalist ideal of the 'man alone'. Dually, it takes a pointed approach of challenging these similar power relations used in another structural form: minimalist sculpture.
The works' exploration of temporality and instability attempts to engage feminist approaches to subversion and rejection in order to turn these dialogues on their head. With a preference for intentional failure - breaking down photography as documentation and formal sculptural reproduction allows open-ended poetics and subjectivity to take its place.
This project sits within a tension; a colonial tension, a structural tension - and in recognising the discomfort of this position, it seeks to lean into it in a process of self-reflection. Through this method, the project aims to sit within and bring tensions to the foreground through open-ended failures, to spatialise these processes and explore self-reflexivity as subversive action.
