The two works in My throat/a shelter withhold from us, offering only the edges of stories, peripheral views and moments clipped from longer narratives. Selina Ershadi’s combines home video from her family’s archive with footage captured through a 16mm Bolex camera. The work’s two channels mirror each other, moving in opposite directions through the same sequence of images—a form that the artist describes as an ouroboros, the snake devouring its own tail. Homman is almost entirely black and white. It follows Tapsell-Kururangi’s branching whakapapa through tūpuna connected by the name Homman.[02] Beginning beside his father, the work spirals out- wards, retracing the footsteps of his forebears through Hong Kong and Copenhagen—the artist’s own ouroboros journey that returns us, by the end, to his father’s home in Paengaroa.

This might be too much exposition for two works that don’t themselves offer solid narrative footholds. But the films are not long (each just over eight minutes) and reward patient viewing, offering dots to be connected by our own memories, desires and emotional thickets. Both artists work intuitively, trying to figure out how to navigate such personal material. They shoot for pure feeling, creating works that evoke the experience of eavesdropping (which is how all family history comes to young ears). Recognising the sympathy between these two artists, curator Amy Weng brings them together, as if to compare notes and share possible answers to Tapsell-Kururangi’s guiding question: “What is art’s use to me—and my friends and family?”[03]

The works are heavy with the artists’ desire for intimacy with their parents: Tapsell-Kururangi with his father, Ershadi with her mother. Some of Ershadi’s footage was captured as she accompanied her mother to an eye clinic. In the attention both works pay to eyes, vision and deterioration into darkness, there’s an obsession with looking; with seeing as far back into the family as their parents do, before it’s too late. They are desperate to see what they see. “I was like that friend who had turned to Photography only because it allowed him to photograph his own son,” wrote Barthes.[04]

Tapsell-Kururangi’s camera hovers over his father’s shoulder as he fillets three fresh fish. Looking down at his hands, it’s almost—but not quite—his father’s point of view, as if the artist is trying to inhabit his father’s body. Ershadi imagines this another way (influenced by Barthes and the Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum), seeing the working of film footage as a working of her mother’s body, or, by extension, the body of her motherland or mother tongue.[05] There is a moment in Ershadi’s work when both channels show the same pair of hands, smooth though spotted with age. The hands angle a coffee cup to read the residue that remains. The hands peel the thick skin from a grapefruit with a small knife, adept and precise. We are all obsessed with watching our parents and grandparents do these things: peel a grapefruit, cut fish from the bone. We want to bottle these images, these feelings.

Parents and grandparents gift us our mythology, and we treasure them for their connection to worlds beyond our own. Seeing Homman and side by side, motifs common to these familial myths float to the surface. Kotahi te whare. The House. The specificities of our own families slot themselves into these images. The Orchard. These are the images in our mind’s eye, where our feelings lodge themselves with human rhythm. The Mother / The Father. Their capable hands, carrying out a task they’ve done countless times before. The Night. Te Pō tangotango. The deep, deep darkness of night.