Photosynthesisers: Women and the lens

Edith Amituanai, Fiona Amundsen, James Barth, Minerva Betts, Lauren Brincat, Juliet Carpenter, Fiona Clark, Barbara Cleveland, Lisa Crowley, Margaret Dawson, Destiny, Deacon, Bonita Ely, Selina Eshradi, Sue Ford, Helen Grace, Ngahuia Harrison, Ponch Hawkes, Alana Hunt, Alexis Hunter, Andrea Illés, Yuki Kihara, The Kingpins, Joanna Margaret Paul, Burchill McCamley, Angelica Mesiti, Kate Mitchell, Tracey Moffatt, Fiona Pardington, Nova Paul, Debra Phillips, Meg Porteous, Lisa Reihana, Bridget Reweti, Ava Seymour, Marie Shannon, Ann Shelton, Diana Baker Smith + Veronica Tello, Sriwhana Spong, Salote Tawale, Aliyah Winter, Christine Webster

Curated by James Gatt

Te Uru
420 Titirangi Rd, Titirangi, Auckland

16 February – 25 May, 2025

Exhibition & Publication Launch: Saturday 15 February, 4pm

Helen Grace, *And awe was all we could feel*, 1978-80, (detail)

Photosynthesisers: Women and the lens is an exhibition of photographs and videos by 41 women artists and collectives from Aotearoa and Australia, including fa`afafine, queer, and trans women, and those with ancestral ties to Aboriginal, Māori, and diasporic communities. Produced between the early 1960s and 2024 by four generations of artists, exhibited works collectively offer cross-cultural and intergenerational perspectives on the social, political, and cultural conditions that impelled their capture. The exhibition title draws on photosynthesis, the process by which plants absorb, transform, and redistribute light energy. Likening this alchemy to that of lens-based practices, Photosynthesisers holds that exhibited photographs and videos transmit sociopolitical energy through a similar adaptation of light. Passed through the lens of one context, light forges images that are preserved for others, forming pleats in time, carrying manifold, often quiet conditions that produce and reproduce history with shifting resonance as time develops.

The exhibition is accompanied by a reader, which is intended as a discursive adjunct, collating 30 texts produced between 1981 and 2024 by artists, curators, and writers from the region. These texts range in form, tracing ideas, exhibitions, and histories apposite to Photosynthesisers, and addressing manifold concerns gleaned from the relationship between women and the lens, affirming its indispensable place in art history. With contributions from: Judy Annear, Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku, Kirsty Baker, Bruce Barber, Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow, Cassandra Barnett with Ann Shelton, Christina Barton, Geoffrey Batchen with Lisa Crowley, Susan Best, Burchill McCamley with Mary Kelly, Sandy Callister, Sophie Davis and Lucy Hammonds, Bonita Ely, Blair French, Helen Grace, Ella Henry, Natalie King with Yuki Kihara, Anne Kirker, Tessa Laird, Shaune Lakin, Anne Marsh, Kyla McFarlane, Anne O’Hehir, Bridget Riggir-Cuddy, Pat Rosier, Lisa Sabbage with Alexis Hunter, Haruhiko Sameshima, Diana Baker Smith, Zara Stanhope, Andrew Paul Wood with Fiona Pardington.

With over 70 contributors in total across the exhibition and publication, Photosynthesisers: Women and the lens is one of the most substantial regional surveys of art and discourse pertaining to women’s lens-based media in recent history.