Close Encounters

Close Encounters

Caryline Boreham and Oleg Polounine

RM Gallery and Project Space
Samoa House Lane, Karangahape Rd, Auckland

9 April – 17 May 2025

Opening 9 April at 6pm

Recognising a shared interest in each other’s art practice has led to the development of this exhibition which explores the UFO phenomenon.

UFO sightings are often fleeting and poorly recorded, at the same time, a UFO is visually mesmerising and ontologically shocking. Oleg Polounine’s practice has always been about what you see and how you perceive and in this show he sets up visual experiments as a means of attaining better understanding of the subject matter.

Since ‘the great airship flap’ in 1909, reported sightings of flying objects in New Zealand have been constant. Caryline Boreham has worked with Defence Force and other UFO archival records from Aotearoa since 2016, using the accounts, visual descriptions and correspondence as a foundation for her photographic and moving image works. In working with these artefacts, Boreham plays with a space between the event and its recounting, where the actual UFO sighting becomes secondary to the conviction of its truth.