57Dunedin
Nocturnal Projections and Other
Small Happenings
17–31 July
EDWARD HANFLING
Opening night was a blast. Over two
hours, at the Gasworks Museum in
South Dunedin, there was a succession
of contrasting sound works: Fuckault
with Kerian Verain, followed by Ivan
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the Argentinian duo A Ghost Within.
So began Nocturnal Projections and
Other Small Happenings, the brainchild
of Dunedin artist Cath Cocker, and
envisaged as a biennial event for the
city. It is an admirable attempt to
warm, enliven and brighten the city’s
dismal mid-winter nights and its
gothic architecture, with a combination
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and sensory enigma. This last quality
was most evident in the work of
Cocker herself, Enlightenment; Private
View and Tonal Frequencies, also shown
at the Gasworks, in which water spits
and bubbles into exquisite patterns,
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sound frequencies derived from
recordings of the wind.
The event is held over a couple
of weeks, in a mixture of prominent
and inconspicuous public locations,
indoors and out. It is equally
approachable for those in the know—
diligently following online and in
pilgrimages to odd places at indecent
hours—and to those who stumble
across a particular work by chance.
Most likely to grab the attention of the
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coloured light on the western façade
of the First Church of Otago, coupled
with Leben Young’s light projection on
panels erected near the opposite side
of the building.
Sempiternal, by Hamiltonians Luke
McConnell and Jeremy Mayall, was
less auspiciously sited in the ground-
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Library. There, on a giant cube covered
with screens, McConnell’s graphics,
however rewarding they might be
for someone who knows they are
supposed to look at them for a long
time (the title of the work actually
means ‘ever-lasting time’), would
likely have appeared to the library’s
patrons as some kind of calculatedly
bland backdrop, marginally enhancing
a vacant space. Indeed, I could
not help but be reminded of thoseinfuriatingscreen-savergraphicsthat
used to bounce around our inactive
computer screens.
A short stroll around Moray Place
leads to Layne Waerea’s Maori Lane
(2012), in the small Rear Window
space used by the Dunedin Public Art
Gallery for displaying videos. Waerea’s
work is perhaps not an obvious
candidate for the Nocturnal Projections
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artist at her incisively irreverent best.
Via the phone-camera attached to her
body, we become implicated in her
actions, lurching out onto Auckland’s
busy Symonds Street, during gaps
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the work’s title onto the road. The
night-time segments accentuate the
impression of a covert operation, while
the work lends a welcome subversive
element to an event that, after all, takes
its name from an early 1980s New
Plymouth post-punk band. One of the
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is exhibiting some of their posters
at OLGA Gallery next door to Rear
Window.
But the Gasworks was the venue
that really got me switched on—
an inspired choice of setting. The
building from which gas was once
reticulated through the city is now
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outlandish apparatuses amongst
extravagant brick-work, buried in the
backstreets of ‘South D’. It seemed to
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atmospherics and mechanical
throbbing. The cavernous interior
accentuated the tunnel-like spatial
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by A Ghost Within. And the gloom
made a white-clad, spiky-haired Chris
Hesitation look especially manic, as he
pummelled the entrails of 1980s pop
music. OHIW ,9$105ä,ý
I Can Hear You With My Eyes 2019
Projected moving image
(below) Chris Hesitation performing at the
Gasworks, as part of Nocturnal Projections
and Other Small Happenings, July 2019