Not a figure of speech is a screening of artist videos made in the Czech Republic, Japan, and Indonesia between 2015 and 2026. The programme brings together works encountered through collaborations, exhibitions, research projects, and long-term conversations.

Not a figure of speech is curated and presented by Grace Samboh, a writer, researcher, and exhibition-maker living and working in Yogyakarta, Jakarta, and wherever her friends are. Her work develops through long-term conversations with artists, researchers, educators, and cultural practitioners, often returning to questions of history, entanglements, care, and being together. Grace Samboh is CIRCUIT's 2027/28 curator-at-large. Her visit is supported by Gus Fisher and the Asia New Zealand Foundation.

"Not a figure of speech takes the form of a mixtape. Not because the works gathered here arrive at the same conclusions, nor because they can be reduced to a single theme, but because I have come to know them through time, repetition, and return. Some emerged through collaborations, commissions, research projects, and long conversations. Others I have encountered repeatedly through exhibitions, screenings, and ongoing exchanges with artists whose practices continue to accompany my own thinking. In some instances, I also appear within the works themselves. This is therefore not a survey assembled from a distance, but a temporary arrangement of works and relations that have remained useful to think with.

 Across the two sides of this mixtape, questions recur in different forms. How does a concern become shared? How does discrimination become visible? What does it mean to remain in relation across differences of experience, authority, generation, or history? At what point does observation become participation? What remains to be done with what one now knows? The mixtape does not propose answers to these questions. Nor does it suggest that the works agree with one another. Instead, it follows a series of echoes and returns. One work leaves something unresolved for another to pick up. Certain questions disappear only to re-emerge later in a different form. Even the pauses between works are part of this choreography, allowing an encounter to linger before the next one begins. A mixtape assumes that sequence matters. One thing follows another, changing how both are experienced. What emerges from that sequence, however, remains open."

Grace is visiting Aotearoa as CIRCUIT’s 2027/28 Curator-at-large, with support from Asia New Zealand and Gus Fisher. Each screening is followed by a conversation between Grace Samboh and Mark Williams (CIRCUIT).

Side B - CIRCUIT, Wellington 3pm Saturday 4 July

● Anchan/Anna Daučíková and Tamarra, Talking to you (2021)

● Nadiah Bamadhaj, Terpesona dengan kegelisahan [Charmed by anxiety] (2022)

● Griya Seni Hj. Kustiyah Edhi Sunarso, Hyphen—, Tom Nicholson with Ary "Jimged" Sendy, Aufa Ariaputra, Nasikin, Omar Aryarindra, & Munadi Alianto (Xonad), Sesudah banjir itu: No. 44 [When the flood is over: No. 44] (2026)

Full Programme Notes:

"I have also found myself returning to works that remain attentive to relation: between people, generations, institutions, and histories. Not because they resolve these relations, but because they stay with the labour of negotiating them. Communication, authority, memory, and care appear differently in each work, yet all of them ask what it means to remain in relation to something larger than oneself. The works gathered here move through a conversation, a choreography, and an act of collective historical care. Across this side of the mixtape, questions return in altered forms, shifting between intimacy and collective life, lived experience and inherited history. A short pause separates the final work from those that precede it, allowing certain questions to linger before they return again through memory, disagreement, and the ongoing work of understanding." - Grace Samboh

1) Anchan/Anna Daučíková and Tamarra, Talking to you (2021)
33 minutes

How does one remain in relation across differences of age, geography, language, and lived experience? Across different geographies, generations, and lived experiences, Anchan/Anna Daučíková) and Tamarra meet through gesture, conversation, and movement. At times spoken, at times non-verbal, Talking to you unfolds as an attempt at communication shaped less by certainty than by attention. Words appear, hesitate, and recede; gestures echo, diverge, and return. As the first work on this side of the mixtape, communication is approached not as agreement but as an ongoing practice of relation. Understanding remains partial, uneven, and unfinished. Rather than resolving differences, the work stays with it, inviting us to consider what kinds of connection become possible through the continued effort to speak, listen, and respond.

2) Nadiah Bamadhaj, Terpesona dengan kegelisahan [Charmed by anxiety] (2022)
16 minutes 10 seconds

What becomes visible when a familiar spectacle is slowed down? And where do we find ourselves within its structure? A battalion of uniformed bodies moves through a shared choreography. At first, what we hear is difficult to place: a slowed-down collective chant, stretched until its familiarity becomes strange. Gradually, figures emerge from darkness. Bodies move in synchrony, following gestures initiated by two commanders standing before them, their backs turned toward us. Produced amid the circulation of viral military and police performances across Indonesian social media, the work revisits a familiar spectacle through slowness. What once appeared celebratory, amusing, or assured begins to feel effortful, heavy, and uneasy. Following Talking to you, attention shifts from relation to hierarchy, yet both works remain concerned with how bodies move together, communicate, and inhabit structures larger than themselves. As rhythms slow and gestures repeat, we are quietly positioned within the choreography we observe.

~~~ short break ~~~

3) Griya Seni Hj. Kustiyah Edhi Sunarso, Hyphen—, Tom Nicholson with Ary "Jimged" Sendy, Aufa Ariaputra, Nasikin, Omar Aryarindra, & Munadi Alianto (Xonad) 
Sesudah banjir itu: No. 44 [When the flood is over: No. 44] (2026)
60 minutes 2 seconds

How does one inherit a history? And what forms of care emerge when history remains unfinished? The film moves between personal memory and collective labour. In one movement, recollections of the West Irian Liberation period unfold through lived experience, carrying stories that drift between diplomatic histories, overlooked figures, and memories that sit uneasily beside official narration. In another, civilians gather to remake and conserve National History Museum of Indonesia’s diorama No. 44—The Liberation of West Irian, May 1, 1963—through discussion, sculpting, repainting, and debate. Arriving after a brief pause, the film expands questions that have surfaced throughout the programme: relation, hierarchy, responsibility, and collective life. Rather than treating history as fixed or complete, it follows how historical understanding is continually negotiated through people, institutions, materials, and memory. As conservation becomes a form of conversation, we are invited into history’s ongoing remaking, where care and disagreement remain inseparable.

Image: Anchan/Anna Daučíková and Tamarra, Talking to you (2021)

Contact the host of Not a figure of speech (Side B) - Wellington

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