Image: Dunedin Public Art Gallery
‘Heaven’s Blade’ is presented as two unique exhibitions premiering concurrently at Dunedin Public Art Gallery and Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga Hastings Art Gallery over the summer of 2026–27. The exhibition is scheduled from 10 October 2026 to 21 February 2027.
The film unfolds within a speculative world where the sun has become too intense for people to safely inhabit the outdoors, and it was shot across Hawke’s Bay and Central Otago. Its observational approach follows two young girls in a multigenerational household as they navigate their relationship to light, visibility and the consequences of exposure.
Combining black-and-white photography, infrared imaging, live-feed video and surveillance technologies, the work constructs an immersive and unsettling cinematic environment where ecological, historical and psychological forces converge. Carpenter’s practice explores the construction and mediation of images, perception and subjectivity through an experimental engagement with filmic technologies and image-making processes.
Carpenter is an artist and filmmaker from Aotearoa New Zealand, now based in Berlin. In 2024, she was nominated for the Walters Prize for her outstanding contribution to contemporary art in Aotearoa New Zealand.
An opening weekend talk will celebrate Juliet Carpenter’s new exhibition ‘Heaven’s Blade’.
