Photosynthesisers: Women and lens is an exhibition of photographs and videos by 41 women artists and collectives from Aotearoa and Australia, including fa`afafine¹, queer, and trans women, and those with ancestral ties to Aboriginal, Māori, and diasporic communities. Produced between the 1960s and 2024 by four generations of artists, exhibited works collectively offer cross-cultural and intergenerational perspectives on the social, political, and cultural conditions that impelled their capture.  

The exhibition title draws on photosynthesis, the process by which plants absorb, transform, and redistribute light energy. Likening this alchemy to that of lens-based practices, Photosynthesisers holds that exhibited photographs and videos transmit sociopolitical energy through a similar adaptation of light. Passed through the lens of one context, light forges images that are preserved for others, forming pleats in time, carrying manifold, often quiet conditions that produce and reproduce history with shifting resonance as time develops. The camera enables this world-building transformation, channelling information through a socio-material network, like a root system. The gendered framework for Photosynthesisers derives its shape from a similarly diverse and evolving complex of positions and pulses—identity is taken as a malleable form of expression, rather than a fixed category. 

From feminist utopias to traumatic domestic memories, nuclear fallout to patriarchal monuments, gay liberation to motherhood, interpersonal relationships to cultural heritage and ecology, housing and labour to forms of violence, the effects of time to gender, sexuality, love, and community, the photographs and videos in this exhibition map wide-ranging social and political concerns—many from queer and feminist positions. Numerous works feature the artists themselves, functioning as self-portraits to varying degrees of performativity. Others document local communities, events, or actions. Some are documentary or diaristic in nature, while others relay personal, interpersonal, or societal circumstance through constructed imagery. All share in the astute and caring observation of their makers, whose materialised visions connect us to the diversity of human experience through intimate details, subversive ideological positions, and ranging emotional registers—all of which might otherwise be lost to sweeping accounts of history. Importantly, the rendering of these observations into shared aesthetic experience is not an endpoint, but rather a passage through which lens-based practices transmit energy in the form of images and desires that exhort critical reflection.  

The exhibition is accompanied by a reader, which collates 30 texts produced between 1981 and 2024 by artists, curators, and writers from the region. These texts take the form of article, essay, interview, lecture, review, thesis, or subchapter, collectively tracing parallel ideas, exhibitions, and histories.

Curated by James Gatt. 

¹ Fa’afafine is a third gender. This Samoan term translates as ‘in the manner of a woman’.

Presented in association with Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki Auckland Arts Festival 2025.