Poetry readings

A Blind kind of violence

a publication by bad apple

Thursday 1 August, 6.30pm

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. Copies are available for free.

Film screening

Naughty little peeptoe

with NZIFF

Friday 16 August, 9pm

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

In Conversation

with Peter Saxton and Cheryl Ware

Saturday 7 September, 2pm

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.