Strange Goods

Hand made booklet featuring 20 photographs from Michael Mahne Lamb’s various travels around Europe, USA, NZ and Australia between 2015-2019. Printed on off white 80gsm stock. Dimensions are 195mm x 135mm, 24 pages, staple bound with bevelled edges. Edition of 100.

Thank You, OK is an alternative travel diary, bringing together scanned notes and objects, iphone pictures, stills from camcorder videos, and 35mm colour photographs into a dizzying narrative of New Zealand-born Megan Alexander’s experience during a month long exchange in Xian, Beijing and Shanghai. This book serves as a visual thank you letter to the people and places that she encountered during her short but intense time in China, 2015.

One endless summer when I was fourteen // I began to speak with a great arrogance // as wide as a river mouth, imagining I was // witty and charming and full of my own cream. Plumb creates through the written word, Otto through line; this book combines their two narratives. The image/text conflation moves between form over meaning, and meaning over form. Otto’s exuberant gestures interact with Plumb’s luminous humour, as if two performers are present on the page together. As Much Gold as an Ass Could Carry showcases Plumb’s poetry, fiction and drama, from a twenty-year literary career. Within these large, funny, barbed, affecting themes, the power of the social construct ­­– of what it means to be female ­­– is laid bare. Otto’s graphic wit ornaments and underwrites Plumb’s written traceries. This collaboration between artist and writer was initiated by split/fountain, as part of their ongoing engagement with publishing as a performative act.

Combining magazine fragments, archival images, interviews, collages and newly commissioned texts, Time to Think Like a Mountain documents New Zealand-based artist Louise Menzies’ distracted meanderings through one of the largest collections of underground and self-published material in the United States. Drawing directly on content from the Alternative Press Collection at the University of Connecticut, where she was artist in residence during 2014, this third issue of distracted-reader continues Menzies’ attention to the printed world of the historical fringe. Contributors Pat Arnott, Dan Arps, Elle Loui August, Jon Bywater, Amy Howden-Chapman, Tessa Laird, Barry Rosenberg, Allan Smith, Graham Stinnett, and George Watson provide contemporary responses to aspects of North American counterculture and its echoes in Aotearoa New Zealand. Publication design by Narrow Gauge. distracted-reader seeks readerly parkour through selected terrain of art and design. We see rhythmised literacy of image-text-concepts. We do thinking as making, and publication as speculative thought. With the general art monograph as coffee-table artefact, and university presses not funding experiment, our printed project marshals conjecture, scattered reflections, and textured locale. Less clarion call to a vanishing new, more through-lines with incidents and discernible increments, writing and thinking as marked-up copy, stuttered narration; material view.

Dirt is an experimental cookbook that digs into the relationship between food and words. Twelve earthy recipes from chef Gemma Walsh are accompanied by a collection of stories, poems and conversations from some of New Zealand’s contemporary writers. Contributors include Courtney Sina Meredith, Lana Lopesi, Rosabel Tan, Dominic Huey, Vanessa Crofskey, Natasha Matila-Smith, Owen Connors, Liam Jacobson, Amy Weng, Reem Musa, Gabi Lardies and Sam Walsh. Edited and designed by Katie Kerr.

Still Looking Good is a triadic collaboration between siblings Oliver Connew (dancer/choreographer) and Alice Connew (photographer) that brings together dance, sound and a visual aesthetic that are drawn from and reference pervasive socio-political forces that organise modern human activity, as understood by the artists. Originally presented by Oliver as a performative piece titled Things That Move Me, Oliver invited Alice to aid him in reimagining the concepts as a short film and Still Looking Good was born. The book was initiated by Alice and concludes the collaboration.

Wishing Well // Ma‘u Pe Kai is published alongside solo exhibitions by Wai Ching Chan and Matavai Taulangau held at Enjoy in August 2019. These were the first exhibitions at Enjoy’s new galleries at 211 Left Bank, and the first time in our institutional history that we’ve been able to programme two solo exhibitions concurrently. Accordingly, the publication unfolds as two sets of responses; developed separately, but anchored, like both Chan’s and Taulangau’s projects, in questions surrounding migration, labour, cultural identity and its continuity. Part of an ongoing research project, Wishing Well was developed by Wai Ching Chan following two knotting workshops held at Enjoy in May 2019, during which the artist led participants in learning three traditional Chinese knots 中国结. These events were an invitation to make conversation, to consider the symbolism of these knots and to engage in broad dialogue with others on the relationship between tauiwi and tangata whenua in Aotearoa New Zealand. Chan’s section of the publication includes new texts by Arapeta Ashton, Hēmi Kelly and Kirsten Wong, alongside documentation of Chan’s workshops and Wishing Well. Describing his practice as part of an ongoing effort to “reestablish his connection with [his] culture,” Matavai Talangau’s exhibition Ma‘u Pe Kai documents three kumala harvests: one by the Tongan community in Okaihau in Northland, one by the artist’s mother in nearby Kaikohe, and one by the artist in Tāmaki Makaurau. Taulangau’s section includes new writing from Simone Kaho and John Vea, an extended conversation between Taulangau and filmmaker Vea Mafile‘o, alongside documentation of the exhibition.

Look out, Fred! revisits Evangeline Riddiford Graham’s exhibition of the same title, held at Enjoy in April 2017. Considering the interplay between contemporary myth-making and classical texts, Riddiford Graham’s exhibition interrogated archetypal characters and modes of storytelling. Drawing on an atmospheric and suggestive script, Riddiford Graham worked with two voice actors to develop spoken word audio pieces questioning the relationship between the cowboy ‘Fred’, and his Echo or alter-ego. The publication, designed by Ella Sutherland, translates this script into a playful typographic score that explores language as material, and blurs distinctions between performance, notation and document. Accompanied by essays by Akil Kirlew and Sophie Davis, Look out, Fred! also includes a newly commissioned photographic series by Tim Wagg, developed in response to the exhibition.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Namesake, The sea brought you here brings together newly commissioned responses alongside found photographs, phone snapshots, sketches, texts and previous work by Quishile Charan and Salome Tanuvasa. Elaborating on the concerns of both artists, Hanahiva Rose employs the metaphors of threads and waves to connect the practices of Charan and Tanuvasa in her essay “A Pacific Diaspora: how might we trace the movement?” while Temporary Vanua: Decolonisation and textile making, a revised text by Charan, contextualises her approach to textile-making. Shorter snippets of text by Tanuvasa also give insight to her working process. Finally, Transcribed records an informal conversation between two friends attempting to unpack the way the language of ‘decolonisation’ is currently being employed.

Living in diaspora, the health and beauty practices of people-of-colour have often been questioned and made fun of until they catch on to become popular Western fads. Herbs, spices and remedies used by our ancestors are then co-opted and sold at a ridiculous profit margin at your local organic store. "Goodbye Turmeric Latte” is a zine collated by Jasmin Singh @jasminkb and Helen Yeung @chinesgoth which aims to reclaim these health and beauty methods that our families and ancestors have used and shared with us, practices that we may continue today.

In 2019, Mercury Plaza closed its doors to make way for Karangahape Station as part of the City Rail Link project by Auckland Council. Mercury Plaza has shared significance for many migrants of colour who arrived in Aotearoa in the mid-nineties, and continues to act as a reminder of home for newer migrants, with an array of restaurants which are reminiscent of street food stalls in Asia. In the light of this, Migrant Zine Collective collated “Memories of Mercury Plaza”, a zine to archive memories of the space.

Have you ever been with an Asian woman before?” was curated by Helen Yeung @chinesegoth in collaboration with Gemishka Chetty @chetty_g and Aiwa Pooamorn @mama_aiwa for an interactive art installation for First Thursdays in July, 2019. This zine aims to offer a space for Asian women to release their pent up anger on experiences of being exoticised, fetishised and treated as the Other, and celebrate their unruly, bold and unapologetic voices.

Food plays an important social and cultural role for many migrants-of-colour. It is a way in which we interact with our families, show love to the people around us, teach people about our cultures, and how we remember our homes. Snack Zine Club was established by Helen Yeung @chinesegoth and Eda Tang @eda_tang of Migrant Zine Collective, as a way of building solidarity and bringing together migrant communities in their love for snacks.