Not a figure of speech (Side A) - Auckland

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 the Gus Fisher Gallery and the Asia New Zealand Foundation.

Not a figure of speech by Grace Samboh (2026)

"This programme 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 A - Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland 6pm, Wednesday 1 July 

●    Ary “Jimged” Sendy & Heru Sukmadana, Sharing anxiety (2015)

●    Hikaru Fujii, あかい線に分けられたクラス [The classroom divided by a red line] (2020)

●    Nadiah Bamadhaj, Ketidaknyamanan [Insecurity] (2023)

●    Julian Abraham “Togar” & Oni Imelva, Sesuatu yang diam, sesuatu yang nyata [That is real, that is ignored] (2025)

Full Programme Notes

"I have long been drawn to works that do not simply present a social question, but try it out. Rather than explaining a problem from a distance, they construct situations through which concerns become shareable, structures become visible, and positions become palpable. What interests me is not whether these works provide answers, but how they allow a question to be inhabited for a duration. The works gathered on this side of the mixtape move through a casting call, a classroom exercise, a ceremonial gesture, and a conversation. Each begins from a particular situation. Across the sequence, we move between observation and participation, between recognising a structure and finding ourselves somewhere within it. A brief pause interrupts the programme before the final work. When it resumes, many of the earlier questions remain, but the frame through which they are encountered has expanded." - Grace Samboh

1) Ary “Jimged” Sendy & Heru Sukmadana, Sharing anxiety (2015) 
19 minutes 27 seconds

When does a concern become shared? And how does one come to care about a problem that seems distant from everyday life? Ten housewives are invited to what appears to be a television advertisement casting. Scripts are rehearsed, lines repeated, gestures adjusted. Yet the advertisement itself concerns a topic rarely associated with everyday consumer choices: the palm oil industry and its environmental consequences. Borrowing the familiar format of commercial production, the work unfolds through participation, hesitation, and repetition. As the opening work of this mixtape, Sharing anxiety begins with a proposition rather than a position. Concern is not presented as something already held in common, but as something rehearsed, tested, and circulated. What follows continues this movement, asking how social structures become visible through participation, observation, and bodily experience.

2) Hikaru Fujii, あかい線に分けられたクラス [The classroom divided by a red line] (2020)
21 minutes 54 seconds

How does discrimination become visible? And at what point does witnessing it become participation? In a classroom in Mito City, neighbouring Fukushima Prefecture, elementary school students take part in a workshop modelled after educator Jane Elliott’s Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes exercise. Here, however, division is not made through race but through geography: whether one lives inside or outside the “red line” associated with radiation exposure following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. As the classroom reorganises itself, gestures of exclusion, discomfort, and authority begin to emerge. The work unfolds as a situation rather than a lesson. Students, teachers, filmmakers, camera operators, and viewers alike occupy shifting positions between witness and participant. Following Sharing anxiety, the classroom becomes another space in which social relations are not simply discussed but enacted, inviting us to consider how easily one becomes part of the structures one observes.

3) Nadiah Bamadhaj, Ketidaknyamanan [Insecurity] (2023)
4 minutes 26 seconds

How does power become felt when it remains outside the frame? Accompanied by the measured sounds of kentongan and gong, a group of abdi dalem—palace attendants—move slowly away from the camera. Their pace is deliberate, their bodies lowered, their movement restrained. What first appears ceremonial gradually becomes difficult to settle into. Duration stretches attention; repetition shifts the scene from observance toward unease. Positioned between the classroom and the longer work that follows, Ketidaknyamanan alters the rhythm of the programme. Hierarchy is no longer discussed or enacted directly, but registered through distance, posture, and bodily relation. As the attendants slowly recede, we are quietly left to consider where we stand.

~~~ short break ~~~

4) Julian Abraham “Togar” & Oni Imelva
, Sesuatu yang diam, sesuatu yang nyat [That is real, that is ignored] (2025)
61 minutes 56 seconds

What happens when a work exceeds its own subject? And what remains after listening? The film unfolds through an encounter between artist-cum-drummer Togar and human rights advocate-cum-vocalist Oni Imelva. Within Togar’s BIOSPOKE—part studio, part gathering space, part cinema—percussion, voice, and hikayat move between memory, storytelling, and political reflection. Behind the projection screen, an automated percussion system repeats and interrupts, extending rhythms that are at once bodily and mechanical. What begins as conversation gradually exceeds the frame of dialogue. Through stories of women’s resistance, contested histories, and the long afterlives of violence, the film remains attentive to acts of articulation themselves: how memory is carried, how histories are spoken, and how concerns are shared. Arriving after a brief pause, the work expands many of the relations encountered earlier—authority, participation, distance, and responsibility—while refusing to resolve them. What remains to be done with what one now knows?

Image: Julian Abraham “Togar” & Oni Imelva, Sesuatu yang diam, sesuatu yang nyata [That is real, that is ignored] (2025)