Group Exhibition at Art Attic Gallery, Invercargill New Zealand 2025
January 17th to February 9th 2025
This exhibition was generously supported by the following sponsors: Canada Council for the Arts, Invercargill City Creative Communities Scheme (Creative New Zealand), Re-Woven Therapy Charity Trust, Community Trust South, Boosted New Zealand, Chengdu University College of Chinese and ASEAN Arts
Artists included in this show:
Alex Close (Canada)
Nour Hassan (New Zealand)
Carlos Alejandro (USA)
Lida Sherafatmand (Malta)
Nemanja Boskovic (Serbia)
*the following photos include artwork by all 5 artists
Between Gestures // Shared Thresholds
Text by Emily Esterline
“…When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back…” [1]
What does it mean to make a home far from where you began? Is home a place, a feeling, or a story you inhabit?
In Wrap Wrangle Wring, The Kollectiv’, a group of five artists from around the globe weave their distinct practices into a fragmented whole, exploring home, perspective, and reciprocity.
Through textiles, movement, mark-making, video, and collaboration, they approach home as deeply personal and inherently shared—shifting, nostalgic, and found in adaptation. For these diasporic makers, home exists in the in-between: where perspectives meet, where resistance gives way to understanding.
“Where must I stand to hear your voice?” [2]
The Kollectiv’s collaboration spans distances—gestures offered, reshaped, and returned. Artworks emerge from immediate collaboration, like Carlos Alejandro’s video work filmed with Nemanja Boskovic in Serbia, or through dissolving authorship, as in Lida Sherafatmad’s floral textiles, fragmented and reassembled by Nour Hassan and Alex Close. Their iterative making reflects the tensions and possibilities of collaboration, crafting works that are open-ended yet cohesive.
The group moves fluidly between their individual and collective voices, challenging the idea of singular authorship. Boskovic’s dance-based practice, rooted in embodied movement, is captured on film by Alejandro, exploring the body’s relationship to space and its endurance. Hassan’s charcoal animations extend this, transforming Boskovic’s movements into gestural sketches that come alive in digital video. Her animations bring his presence into the gallery, holding his form despite his absence.
Similarly, Sherafatmad’s delicate works are reassembled by Close and Hassan, embodying shared creation and dissolving boundaries. Throughout the gallery, traces of habitation appear—barely visible projections, an installed assemblage, soft deconstructed sketches, and translucent textiles activated by the movement of the body. These elements engage with abstract perspectives, inviting play and interaction as the method to understand. More directly, Close’s interactive mural in the main gallery invites visitors to color its abstract forms, transforming the work into a collective gesture—a way of engaging with the big questions being asked by the artists—that lingers long after the exhibition ends. These acts of co-creation reflect The Kollectiv’s ethos: embracing difference, adapting through shared inquiry, and allowing for the evolution of ideas. By questioning the problems of individual authorship, they create a space where practices intersect and can build something greater than the sum of its parts.
The Kollectiv, bringing their diasporic perspectives to Wāhiopāi—a place with its own complex histories of belonging—challenge us to reflect on our own relationships to place, community, and movement. For the artists, Wrap Wrangle Wring suggests that home is a continual process: fractured, messy, and deeply human.
Word Meanings:
Diasporic: of, being, or relating to any group that has been dispersed outside its traditional homeland, either
involuntarily or by migration and/or relating to, characterized by, or arising from the social phenomenon of
dispersion, constant mobility, and rootlessness.
[1] Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, 2000
[2] Pier Paolo Pasolini, Medea, 1969
Press: