New Exhibitions At Adam Art Gallery Rethink Long-Standing Power Dynamics In Photography

Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery launches its autumn season with the exhibition Things are, they do not happen, featuring photographic and moving image works by Adrienne Martyn and Sam Norton, alongside BTM Ahhh, a photographic work by Sung Hwan Bobby Park.

Experienced together, these practices propose we rethink some long-standing power dynamics in photography. From the complex inheritances of second wave feminism and images taken through a computer screen that threaten to dissolve into pixels, to a contemporary self-portrait that asserts itself as a site of queer sovereignty, these artists prompt us to consider how portraits continue to be used as expressions of identity and agency.

Things are, they do not happen presents works by Martyn and Norton, two artists of different generations who draw on photographic devices to both order and destabilise the representation of internal experience. The exhibition brings together Norton’s ongoing series of archival screenshots of Skype calls with friends and family, alongside a selection of Martyn’s work in still and moving image from the mid-1970s onwards.

Initially working in social documentary and producing photographs for newspapers and other publications, Martyn became a member of the Sydney Women’s Film Group in 1972, before shifting to a studio-based practice in the early 1980s. Framed by her moving image work, The Object, 1975, on view for the first time, this exhibition takes up the prompt of Martyn's experiences of working within the feminist movement to examine how the photograph becomes a space of confinement as well as freedom.

Norton’s series As Long as Someone’s Watching, 2023–ongoing, features experimental images that push at the boundaries of the form. Norton’s enlarged screen-captures test the contemporary interaction of spectatorship and validation, asking, ‘are we only real when someone else is watching, or when we see ourselves on a screen?’ In a blur of pixels, lush textures, and refracted blue light, Norton’s subjects emerge and recede from their own nocturnal worlds.

Attuned to the lure of artifice as well as the dynamics of the gaze, Martyn and Norton ask us to consider how subjectivities are produced with and by the camera. In turn, they disturb the conventions that structure image and body, both within and outside of the frame.

Opening at the same time is BTM Ahhh by Sung Hwan Bobby Park. In this billboard-scale portrait filling the Gallery’s front window space, the artist is depicted in a hot golden light, wearing a bangtanmo, a ceramic military helmet secured with a satin ribbon. This image sits within an ongoing series of stills documenting ceramic helmets worn by the artist. Existing as an explicit assertion of queer subjectivity and joy, the work stands in response to the harm caused to Park and his peers forced to hide their identities as queer individuals undergoing military service in South Korea.

Downstairs in the gallery we host some of the earliest photographs made in Aotearoa; upstairs the works presented offer an expanded perspective on what it means to make contemporary images of oneself and of others.

A Different Light: First Photographs of Aotearoa continues to 15 June, before travelling to the Hocken Collection in September 2025.

Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery gratefully acknowledges support from the Ronald Woolf Memorial Trust in realising Things are, they do not happen.

Exhibition details

Things are, they do not happen
Adrienne Martyn
Sam Norton
Curated by Jess Clifford

BTM Ahhh 
Sung Hwan Bobby Park
12 April–15 June 2025

A Different Light: First Photographs of Aotearoa
Curated by Shaun Higgins, Anna Petersen and Natalie Marshall
A collaboration between Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum, the Alexander Turnbull Library, and Hocken Collections Uare Taoka o Hākena.
1 February–15 June 2025

Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery

Opening hours
Tuesday–Sunday, 11 am–5 pm
Free entry.

Group visits are welcome. If your group is larger than five people and you would like a tour or introduction to the shows, contact the gallery administrator Ann Gale on ann.gale@vuw.ac.nz or 04 463 5229.

Address

Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington
Gate 3, Kelburn Parade
Wellington 6140

adamartgallery.nz

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