After working with a demoralised, disorderly ward of neurotic soldiers at Northfield Hospital, Birmingham, during the Second World War, psychiatrist Wilfred Bion developed a theory of the group as an autonomous mentality with an unconscious of its own. ¹ Groups, he found, are secretly organised by shared fantasies—the most telling being a longing not to work together, but to be saved. ² On the threshold of becoming its true self, the group searches for a leader, an enemy or an exit, placing its authority anywhere but in the room.

Every work in this exhibition is built on a threshold. A permeable curtain, a bus stop, a portal, two extinction events and a group in a cabin who never quite form. Within them, characters step forward to test their frame, splitting themselves between the constructed world of the work and the structural reality of the gallery.

A trio flattened in an Auckland Transport bus stop reanimate a South Auckland waystation long watched by Lolani Dalosa. Shot, cut and mounted like photo-object props, these are subjects in transition, wavering between freedom of choice and indifference to it. In this diorama the withheld arrival of a redemptive vehicle gives way to what Cady Noland saw as a pernicious game: an arena of synthesised tactics “where advantage can be gained in an oblique way.”³

In a scene staged by Lily Greig, a free-standing door opens onto the Duat, the ancient Egyptian netherworld where the dead must pass through gates guarded by demons who grant entry only when named correctly. Here, door and demon form a union, the image charges the object that carries it, together they invoke an idea of sculpture not as ornament but as apotropaic object—a functional vessel that might act, not merely depict. Curled at the base, a not-yet-real boy with a Pinocchio nose feigns sleep, perhaps to defer judgement—but his growing nose gives away his fate.

Rangi White’s Rastafari metal chain curtain, remade in the vernacular of cool minimalist sculpture, delineates another threshold. One side draws on a history of cultural resistance sown on the East Coast—Ruatoria, Ngāti Dread, Aotearoa roots and the 1979 Bob Marley show at Western Springs that inspired them. The other enters a lineage of curtain-works staged in New Zealand art institutions, enveloping Ilse von Randow’s 1957 loom-woven commission for the Auckland Art Gallery through the artistic vocabulary of Artspace Aotearoa Kaitohu Director Ruth Buchanan. If Babylon, in Rastafari, denotes the order that absorbs whatever rises against it, this work anticipates that conclusion by taking on the idiom of an art-Babylon that will inevitably aestheticise it.

A grammar for that inevitability—the prophetic perfect tense—is found in the Bible, where events yet to happen are phrased as already finished. The future told in the past. Ken Faber works in this grammar. Across rimu-veneered doors, found curtains and taxonomic sculptures of bird feathers, sea glass and alpaca wool, Faber imagines worlds where native birds are spliced with their dinosaur ancestors. These chimeras create a loop between the extinction event that closed the Cretaceous period and the one underway now, in the Capitalocene.⁴ They circle a catastrophe still arriving and already decided.

Prophecy comes by way of a riddler in a surreal docu-fiction psychodrama by Ton Ray. Four strangers appear in a cabin, confused, unable to connect, assembled for a reason none can name. The sudden arrival of a godhead in a question-mark suit reprises what Bion observed: when a group cannot bear to be one, it conjures a redeemer. This oracle promises hope, but his muffled, cryptic answers exacerbate the chaos. The group tries to reify him and discover their purpose, but as they fail, the camera turns on them. It reveals the apparatus of the film’s own making and recasts the group as administrators of its meaning.

Bleeding into one another through narrative and matter, these planes produce a type of spectatorship, one that moves by metalepsis: in and out of fiction, between worlds and through the surreality of the institution they occupy. As each scene shuffles authority elsewhere—to the next bus, gate, institution or epoch—a spectator appears just in time: messiah, administrator of meaning.