Gus Fisher Gallery: Dreaming from afar

From Seville’s customary Easter processions to the mythologised bathhouses of Orientalism and the communal mattress room of the wharenui, each of the artists probe what it means to encounter a place of tradition or history through their own contemporaneity.

The exhibition showcases major new commissions in which the artists push the boundaries of their practice through bold thematic and material experimentation.

The exhibition includes a new suite of paintings by Mumbai-born artist brunelle dias primbs made following her travels in Europe. Through a decentering of the figure, dias primbs renders observations of deceptively familiar scenes from elsewhere with those known to her to blur perceptions of origin and place.

Melbourne-based artist Gian Manik complicates notions of native and foreign, local and global, self and other, in new paintings that address his interest in the dialectics of Orientalism and queerness. Included are two site-specific artworks informed by the Italian Renaissance tradition of fresco painting.

Tyrone Te Waa (Ngāti Tūwharetoa) probes the relationship between Te-whenua-moemoeā (the dreamscape) and Te-ao-kikokiko (the physical world) through painting. Referencing the mattress storage room often found in a wharenui, Te Waa translates memories of dreams onto bed sheets evoking collective sleeping and dreaming in the safety of the marae.

Touching on ideas of Orientalism, queerness, religion and whakapapa, Dreaming from afar considers the complexities of history and nostalgia through a painterly environment that blends the physical with the imaginary.

Also, Rangi White (Rongomaiwahine, Ngāti Rakaipaaka) presents a major new commission as part of The Changing Room 2026