Exhibition opening

Derek Jarman: Delphinium Days

Friday 14 June, 2024

Join us for the exhibition opening of Derek Jarman: Delphinium Days at Gus Fisher Gallery. Celebrate the first Aotearoa New Zealand exhibition of artist and activist Derek Jarman (1942-1994).

This exhibition has been co-developed by Gus Fisher Gallery and City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi. The exhibition is co-curated by Lisa Beauchamp, Curator of Contemporary Art at Gus Fisher Gallery, Aaron Lister, Senior Curator (Toi) at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi, and Michael Lett.

Photography by Richard Ng.

Performance

Celluloid Reverie

Saturday 15 June, 2024

Celluloid Reverie is a contemporary dance performance inspired by the life and practice of Derek Jarman. It has been created in response to Jarman’s film My Very Beautiful Movie (1974), also on display in the exhibition. Choreographed by Kelly Nash and performed by Caleb Heke and Oli Mathiesen, Celluloid Reverie is an interconnected, responsive dance performance that traverses between two performers, the film’s sound and scenery, and the presence of the artist.

Photography by Jinki Cambronero.

Tour

Co-curator tour

Saturday 15 June, 2024

Join exhibition co-curators Lisa Beauchamp, Curator of Contemporary Art at Gus Fisher Gallery, Aaron Lister, Senior Curator (Toi) at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi, and Michael Lett for a guided tour through Derek Jarman: Delphinium Days.

Film screening

Caravaggio

in partnership with The Capitol Cinema

Saturday 22 June, 2024

Derek Jarman’s most profound reflection on art, sexuality and identity retells the life of the celebrated 17th-century painter through his brilliant, nearly blasphemous paintings and his flirtations with the underworld. Caravaggio (1986) incorporates the painter’s precise aesthetic into the movie’s own visuals, while touching on all of Jarman’s major concerns: history, homosexuality, violence and the relationship between painting and film.

Runtime: 93 minutes

Film screening

The Angelic Conversation

in partnership with The Capitol Cinema

Saturday 22 June, 2024

Reminiscent of Jarman’s music videos for The Smiths or The Pet Shop Boys; comparable to earlier work by the likes of Jean Genet or Kenneth Anger. Like being submerged into someone’s private fantasies.

Intense, dreamlike, and, poetic, The Angelic Conversation (1985) is one of the most artistic of Jarman’s films. With a painter’s eye Jarman conjures an evocative and radical visualisation of Shakespeare’s love poems narrated by Judi Dench, charting the relationship between two men, in a beautiful palette of light, colour and texture.

Jarman called it, “My most austere work, but also the closest to my heart.”

Runtime: 78 minutes

Film screening

Wittgenstein

in partnership with The Capitol Cinema

Sunday 23 June, 2024

Wittgenstein (1993) is a humorous portrait of one of the 20th century’s most influential philosophers. This self-tortured eccentric, who preferred detective fiction and the musicals of Carmen Miranda to Aristotle, is a fitting subject for Jarman’s irreverent imagination.

A visually stunning and profoundly entertaining work about modern philosophy and the dark genius that revolutionized it.

Runtime: 72 minutes

Film screening

The Garden

in partnership with The Capitol Cinema

Sunday 23 June, 2024

Half waking dream and half fiery polemic, The Garden (1990) was born of director Jarman’s rage over continued anti-gay discrimination and the sluggardly response to the AIDS crisis—he had been diagnosed HIV positive in 1986.

Starring Tilda Swinton, this uniquely kaleidoscopic film shows the filmmaker’s genius at its most coruscating, making space in its breadth of vision for an over-the-top Hollywood-style musical number, nightmare images of tar-and-feather queer persecution, and footage of the particularly menacing-looking nuclear power plant that overlooks Jarman’s own garden, the point from which his film begins, and a cherished spot which he must keep to tending even as his body begins to betray him.

Writhing with sorrow and anger, and yet so vividly alive to the loveliness of being, The Garden is a baleful and beautiful epistle from the brink of the beyond

Runtime: 92 minutes

Film screening

Blue

in partnership with The Capitol Cinema

Sunday 23 June, 2024

Sometime in 1992, during a trip to St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, the filmmaker, writer and painter Derek Jarman was told his eyesight was fading.

‘Fizzy holes’ had appeared in his vision: the result of an AIDS-related complication that would, by the end of the year, leave him blind in one eye. In this growing darkness, to his surprise, he started seeing flashes of bright Yves Klein blue. This had always been his favourite colour – the blue of his boiler suits, or the skies over the Dungeness coast – and, during the last months of his life, it inspired his final, most personal film.

In Blue (1993), he wrote straightforwardly about his body and the illnesses besieging it: the night sweats, aching glands, headaches and ‘scrambled reflexes’.

Narrated by John Quentin, Tilda Swinton, Nigel Terry and Jarman, the text is an unflinching account of his fear, uncertainty and courage in the face of impending death. By pairing it with a single shot of blue, luminescent and unchanging throughout its 79-minute running time, viewers experience for themselves the terror of Jarman’s diminishing eye-sight, but also the freedom of transcending it: he wonders, at one moment, what lies beyond the sky.

Runtime: 77 minutes

Workshop

Abstract painting for kids

Saturday 6 July, 2024

Jump-start the school holidays by bringing your whānau to Gus Fisher Gallery for an introductory abstract painting workshop. In collaboration with Māpura Studios, tutor Tim Danko will encourage tamariki to explore the medium of paint, taking inspiration from the tactile and textural impasto paintings of Derek Jarman.

Tim has been producing comics for 35 years in Melbourne and Auckland and has had his work published and exhibited in both countries, as well as in France, Canada, Latvia and Croatia. His comics have been acquired in the print collection of the Australian National Gallery in Canberra. He has been a tutor in digital animation and design at Natcoll as well as running comic workshops for all ages in Australia and New Zealand. The Māpura cartooning group’s comics have been awarded multiple best of zinefest awards in Wellington, Hamilton and Auckland zinefests over the last four years, and comic publications from the group have been preserved in the Silent Army Archive (Melbourne) and The New Zealand Cartoon and Comics Archive, National Library of New Zealand.

Workshop

Out of Bounds

Queer knitting with Kat Aucamp

Saturday 13 July, 2024

“There are no walls or fences. My garden’s boundaries are the horizon.” – Derek Jarman, Modern Nature (1989).

In the desolate, hostile landscape of Dungeness, Jarman created an unconventional, uneven and random paradise with his garden at Prospect Cottage. Here he gardened without convention or constraint, finding therapeutic comfort and peace. Tāmaki Makaurau based artist Kat Aucamp shares a kindred approach in their knitwear design practice. Knitting without patterns or rigid frameworks, Aucamp champions learning through doing and experimenting, rejecting stuffiness and conformity.

This workshop will demystify knitting as a craft, offering a starting point for queer people wanting to design and make their own original clothing. Aucamp will breakdown the process of knitting a garment from start to finish, using an item of clothing that you already own as a framework. There will also be a focus on how to knit cheaply by sourcing from opshops.The workshop is open to anyone from the rainbow and takatāpui communities of any age. No knitting or design experience is required. Experienced knitters are also welcome to attend and learn an alternative approach!

Workshop

Pasture Painting

with Sarah Smuts-Kennedy

Saturday 27 July, 2024

One of Derek Jarman’s long lasting legacies is that of his home at Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, England, surrounded by his cherished garden cultivated from scratch.

Inspired by Jarman’s passion for gardening, join us in collaboration with artist Sarah Smuts-Kennedy (co-founder of For the Love of Bees) and Aaiotanga Trust for this wellbeing-focused workshop where you will contribute to the making of a Pasture Painting on the Emily Place Reserve. Through sowing quick-growth seeds in a geometric shape, we will codesign and create a temporary artwork that will flourish over the course of the exhibition and explore how connecting with nature through gardening can promote healing.

Poetry readings

A Blind Kind of Violence

with bad apple

Thursday 1 August, 2024

Gus Fisher Gallery and bad apple present the newly commissioned zine-style publication, A Blind Kind of Violence. Created in response to the life and work of Derek Jarman, this publication features writing from four emerging and established queer arts practitioners based in Tāmaki Makaurau. With essays from Sam Te Kani and Micheal McCabe, and poetry from Ruby Macomber and Hannah Patterson, A Blind Kind of Violence filters Jarman’s artistic practices through the lens of contemporary, queer Aotearoa. Join us for an evening of readings to celebrate the launch, where the participating writers will share their contributions alongside excerpts from Jarman’s own writing.

This publication’s creation was facilitated by bad apple editor Damien Levi with cover art and design by Brandon Lin.

Talk

Layers of representation

with Greg Minissale

Saturday 3 August, 2024

Join Professor of Art History at the University of Auckland Greg Minissale for a discussion on the influence of Derek Jarman’s art practice. Greg will explore the parallels between Jarman and queer artists working in Aotearoa today, opening up discussions around where Jarman fits into the art history canon and notions of legacy.

Greg will be joined in conversation by artists Shannon Novak and Steve Lovett, alongside Gus Fisher Gallery Curator of Contemporary Art Lisa Beauchamp.

Film screening

Naughty Little Peeptoe

Friday 16 August, 2024

Screening as part of the NZIFF 2024 Aotearoa Film Focus Weekend at the ASB Waterfront Theatre.

Best known for his cultish debut feature, Jack Be Nimble, as well as prolific work in television across both sides of the Tasman, Garth Maxwell here offers a deeply personal film, co-directed by the late Peter Wells, in Naughty Little Peeptoe. An ode to friend, fashionista and foot-fetishist Doug George, Maxwell along with collaborator Debra Daley recorded the caustic, chaotic narration from George, retelling the story of how high heels saved his life.

The featurette was recently picked up by MoMA as part of its permanent film collection, with film curator Ron Magliozzi dubbing it a “witty testimony to the durable, liberating spirit of a queer perspective”. Peeptoe will be preceded by a screening of Maxwell’s first ever film Come With Us, a short collaboration with Simon Marler.

Following the screening, queer erotic fiction writer Samuel Te Kani will perform an excerpt in response to Naughty Little Peeptoe, before hosting an informal discussion with Maxwell around his body of work, and his approach to art and cinema.

Talk

Kōrero in the community

a panel discussion

Saturday 17 August, 2024

Join Aotearoa’s leading community organisations in the gallery for a special kōrero to discuss the impact of stigma currently facing rainbow whānau. The discussion will weave through parallels across each organisation’s advocacy, exploring the role of creativity, collectivism and community-building.

Panellists include Dame Catherine Healy (New Zealand Sex Workers’ Collective), Fuimaono Karl Pulotu-Endemann (Moana Vā), Chase Wright (Gender Minorities Aotearoa) and Thom McDonald (Body Positive). The panel will be moderated by Aych McArdle (Curative).

Talk

In conversation on hiv

with Peter Saxton & Cheryl Ware

Saturday 7 September, 2024

Join us for a conversation between Peter Saxton and Cheryl Ware as they discuss how the landscape around HIV has shifted in Aotearoa, exploring the activism that emerged out of the epidemic.

Associate Professor Peter Saxton is a researcher and advocate in the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, Waipapa Taumata Rau | University of Auckland. Peter leads Aotearoa’s largest studies on gay men, sex and HIV, most recently the Sex and Prevention of Transmission Study (SPOTS). He is an author of over 500 research outputs, the recipient of Leadership (2016) and Innovation (2022) Awards from the Australasian Sexual and Reproductive Health Alliance, and is the inaugural Burnett Foundation Aotearoa Fellow. Peter’s first encounter with Derek Jarman’s work was the music video for the Pet Shop Boys’ “It’s A Sin” as a teenager.

Dr Cheryl Ware is a historian of sex, gender, and health in the late twentieth century Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. She is the author of HIV Survivors in Sydney: Memories of the Epidemic (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and Untold Intimacies: Histories of Sex Work in Aotearoa (Auckland University Press, forthcoming 2025). Cheryl is an experienced oral historian and has conducted over 120 in-depth interviews across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, many of which focused on individuals’ experiences of the HIV and AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s.

Workshop

Perspex Portraits 

with Hannah Ireland

Saturday 14 September, 2024

Explore the playful side of painting and join artist Hannah Ireland for this experimental painting workshop. Using Perspex as your canvas, Hannah will guide you through making your own self-portrait, taking inspiration from her contemporary approach to painting which embraces gesture, humour and spontaneity.

Hannah Ireland (Ngāti Hine, Ngāpuhi) is a contemporary artist, born in 1995 and lives in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland. Hannah is a portraitist in a very loose sense of the word. Her work bears the hallmarks of the genre in that they hint at personhood and individual character. The spacing of features such as eyes, lips, and nose are roughly around where they should be. Or just enough for them to be read as faces. Figures don devilish smirks, exaggerated black eyelashes or smushed-to-the-photocopier type noses. In this way, Hannah is simultaneously evasive and generous with the information she decides to dole out. It’s evasive as you’re not ever really afforded certainty at what you’re looking at, but it’s generous in that I don’t think certainty is the point. The open-endedness of it all allows the viewer their own interpretation.

Film screening

Sebastiane

in partnership with The Capitol Cinema

Saturday 14 September, 2024

In conjunction with the closing of Derek Jarman: Delphinium Days at Gus Fisher Gallery, experience Sebastiane (1976), one of Jarman’s most important cinematic achievements.

Rome, AD 303. Emperor Diocletian demotes his favourite, Sebastian, from captain of the palace guard to the rank of common soldier and banishes him to a remote coastal outpost where his fellow soldiers, weakened by their desires, turn to homosexual activities to satisfy their needs. Sebastian becomes the target of lust for the officer Severus, but repeatedly rejects the man’s advances. Castigated for his Christian faith, he is tortured, humiliated and ultimately killed.

Runtime: 86 minutes

Workshop

Seed Sowing

with Organic Market Garden

Saturday 28 September, 2024

Get ready for springtime with this beginner-friendly seed sowing workshop at Organic Market Garden (OMG). Led by For the Love of Bees co-founder Sarah Smuts-Kennedy, you will learn all about seeds, their importance, and how we can foster healthy ecosystems and biodiversity in our everyday lives. Located at OMG Urban Farm on 257 Symonds Street, Eden Terrace, you will take away germination techniques along with your own seedling pot.

For The Love of Bees began in 2016 when Sarah Smuts-Kennedy was commissioned by Auckland City Council to create a new Social Sculpture centred around bee welfare. For the Love of Bees is the work that emerged from this invitation. Inspired by collectively imagining a city safe for bees and growing pesticide-free flowers, For The Love of Bees has evolved into a not-for-profit trust focused on teaching and modelling regenerative organic horticulture. In the face of biodiversity loss and the climate crisis we work to inspire change in our food system; growing food that is safe for our pollinators, our people and our planet.