These are Addressed to You

Bas Jan Ader, I'm Too Sad to Tell You, 1971. 16mm film transferred to digital video, silent, 3:21 mins. Image courtesy of La Colección Jumex, México.

Bas Jan Ader, I'm Too Sad to Tell You, 1971. 16mm film transferred to digital video, silent, 3:21 mins. Image courtesy of La Colección Jumex, México.

upcoming
23 May – 4 Jul

Abigail Aroha Jensen, Bas Jan Ader, Christian Dimick, Sarah Rose, Sharon Kivland, Yana Dombrowsky-M'Baye

This exhibition brings together the work of Bas Jan Ader, Christian Dimick, Yana Nafysa Dombrowsky-M’Baye, Abigail Aroha Jensen, Sharon Kivland and Sarah Rose—artists whose practices span painting, sculpture, sound, performance, writing and moving image. 

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Curated by Jess Clifford, These are Addressed to You borrows its title from a 2025 book in letters by participating artist and writer Sharon Kivland. It explores what it means to address and to be addressed, to correspond and to be in correspondence with. As the definition of a letter encompasses both the alphabetic and the epistolic, these are practices that are attentive to the potentials of language and its transmission. Within this understanding of correspondence, address is slippery, unstable. Works by Bas Jan Ader and Sharon Kivland begin in the form of a postcard dispatched across oceans. Ader’s I’m Too Sad to Tell You (1971) is a performance and video work in which the Dutch conceptual artist cries on camera, seemingly wracked by a sadness too powerful to put into words. Kivland’s Mes horizons (2013–ongoing) is a series of found and collected vintage seascape postcards, which have been modified with layers of Indian ink that black out the skies—a gesture that displaces their function as souvenir, yet intimates a more fragile relationship with memory. 


A new sound installation by Sarah Rose continues her interest in the body of letters exchanged between American conservationist Rachel Carson and her friend and lover Dorothy Freeman, recasting absence as something heard as well as felt. Yana Dombrowsky-M’Baye’s work emerges from a speculative fiction in which a shifting protagonist addresses the resonance of nineteenth-century colonial frictions in the present. Both Christian Dimick and Abigail Aroha Jensen, in different ways, engage with expanded forms of whakapapa as sites of transformation and catharsis. What emerges—through repetition, fiction and accumulation—might be considered ways of navigating distance, both proximate and far. 


A letter is a form that unfolds; it travels, transforms and resists fixed definition. Across the exhibition, these artworks similarly elude fixity, instead embracing ambiguity and ambivalence as sites of critical and imaginative possibility. And meaning slips, as longing does, between senders. 

 

Curated by Jess Clifford

He putahitanga te whakaaturanga nei o ngā mahi a Bas Jan Ader rātou ko Christian Dimick, ko Yana Nafysa Dombrowsky-M’Baye, ko Abigail Aroha Jensen ko Sharon Kivland ko Sarah Rose anō hoki—he ringatoi ēnei me ā rātou mahi e tāpae ana i ngā toi peita, tārai, oro, whakaari, tuhi me te ata teretere. 


He mea rauhī a These are Addressed to You nā Jess Clifford, he mea mino anō tōna inoga nō tētahi pukapuka ā-reta o 2025, nā te kaituhi me te ringatoi whai wāhi mai, nā Sharon Kivland. Ko tāna he whakatōmene i ēnei mea te anganui atu ki tētahi, me te noho anganuitia ana anō, ko te kōrero atu ki tētahi, me te noho e kōrerorero ana, tētahi ki tētahi. Kei te whai wāhi mai i raro i te tikanga o te kupu reta ko te arapū, ko te mahi tuku karere hoki. He kaupapa ēnei e areare ana ki te pitomata o te reo me tōna tukunga atu. I roto i tēnei māramatanga o te tuku karere ka pāhekeheke tēnei mea te anganui. Arā ngā mahi a Bas Jan Ader rāua Sharon Kivland, ka tīmata ai hei pōhi kāri e tukuna nei whakawhiti ana i te moana. Ko tā Ader I’m Too Sad to Tell You (1971) he mahi toi whakaari, toi ata hoki, i reira te ringatoi ariā o Hōrana rā e tangi ana i mua i te kāmera. Te āhua nei kua pokea ia e tētahi pāpōuri nui rawa kia kōrerohia atu e te kupu. Ko tā Kivland Mes horizons (2013–e moroki ana) he rokiroki pōhi kāri tawhito, kua kitea noatia, kua kohia anō hoki, mō te takutai. Kua whakarerekētia ēnei ki ngā paparanga o te waingārahu Īnia e pokea katoatia ai ngā rangi—mā reira te take o ēnei hei manatunga ka kore ai, kia kōrerohia kētia tētahi hononga tikoki ake ki te mahara. 


He haerenga tonutanga tēnei puninga toi oro a Sarah Rose o tana aronui ki te pūhanga reta i whakawhitia ai e te kaitiaki-taiao, e Rachel Carson, rāua ko tāna hoa, whaiāipo hoki, a Dorothy Freeman. Ko tāna he whiu anō i tēnei korenga hei mea rangona ā-taringa tonu, ā-tinana hoki. Kei te ahu mai te mahi a Yana Dombrowsky-M’Baye i te kōrero paki whakapae, arā tētahi tuahangata pāhekeheke e anganui ana ki ngā tukunga iho o ngā tautohetohe tāmitanga i te ao hou. Ko Christian Dimick rāua ko Abigail Aroha Jensen ērā, e whai ana i tōna ake ara, i tōna ake ara, hei kōrero atu ki te whakapapa hei mea whānui ake, hei wāhi o te whakawhitinga me te whakamaheatanga. Ko ngā mea e ea mai ana—mā te tāruarua kōrero, te kōrero paki me te whakapūranga—ētahi ara pea hei whakatere i ētahi pae, tata, tawhiti hoki. 


Ko tā tēnei āhuahanga te reta he māroha mai; he hāereere, he whakawhitiwhiti, he ātete i ngā tautuhinga pūmau. Kei whakawhiti i te whakaaturanga nei, ka pēnā hoki ā ngā mahi toi nei karo i te pūmau, engari ka whai ēnei i te rangirua me te ngākaurua hei wāhi e arohaehaetia ai, e auahatia hoki ētahi pitomata. Ka mutu, ka tāheke te tikanga, pērā i te kōingo, i waenganui i ngā kaituku.

 

te reo Māori translation by Bea Joblin.