Not a figure of speech (Side A) - Auckland

Grace Samboh is a curator, writer and researcher based in Yogyakarta. She is visiting Aotearoa as CIRCUIT’s 2027/28 Curator-at-large. Not a figure of speech is a screening of recent artist works from her trans-national practice, some of which feature Grace as collaborator. The screening is followed by a conversation between Grace Samboh and Mark Williams (CIRCUIT).

Presented as a two different but connected screenings in Auckland and Wellington, Grace describes Not a figure of speech; 

“Comprising seven works made between 2015 to 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 of these works emerged from 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.

Over the years, I have found myself returning to artistic practices that do more than represent a question or a social condition. They try things out. They construct situations, however modestly, through which concerns become shareable, structures become visible, and positions become palpable. Rather than asking what a work means, I am often drawn to what a work allows us to experience, inhabit, rehearse, or recognise together.

The works gathered on (the Auckland) 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.

Across the two sides of this mixtape, a number of 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 Samboh