Image: Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre, London
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre will open 'Economies of Deferral' on 8 August 2026, a group exhibition that looks at development and abandonment within the heart of Aotearoa New Zealand’s energy industry. Running until 15 November, the exhibition brings together artists from Taranaki, elsewhere in Aotearoa and overseas to examine the economic, social and political transformations of the past four decades, with a particular focus on the impact of the energy sector and industrial retreat.
The exhibition is curated by Simon Gennard and includes work by Fiona Clark, Matthew Galloway, Ngahuia Harrison, Ho Rui An, Darcy Lange and John Miller. According to the gallery, the project is concerned with artists working between the 1980s and the present whose practices bear witness to, advocate from within, and trouble the effects of those long-term changes. The opening day programme on 8 August will include artist talks and a performance lecture.
At the centre of the exhibition is a renewed engagement with Darcy Lange’s 1987 video 'Lack of Hope: Co-op a new future', made in collaboration with John Miller. The gallery says the work was developed three years into the neoliberal restructuring of New Zealand’s economy and documents the voices of unemployed workers and groups organising in their interests in Taranaki, Tāmaki Makaurau and Tairāwhiti. Miller’s contribution is also described through photographs taken on a 1986 journey around Te Tairāwhiti with Lange while the latter was filming the video.
Fiona Clark’s archival and newly developed work records the social and ecological change caused by extractive industries near her home in Tikorangi, alongside community-led efforts to hold powerful actors to account. The gallery describes Clark’s work as a social history of Taranaki seen through the artist’s eye, shaped by farming traditions, car culture and a prevailing masculinity. Clark’s talk on opening day will be paired with John Miller’s, and the gallery notes Miller has spent nearly six decades documenting labour struggles, anti-war and anti-apartheid movements, Māori political organising, environmental campaigns and other movements for social justice.
Ngahuia Harrison’s newly commissioned work turns to sites of industry around Whangārei te Rerenga Parāoa, or Whangārei Harbour, to examine economic dependency, ecological harm and Indigenous authority. The gallery says the work returns in particular to Marsden Point after the termination of its oil refinery operation in 2022, and considers the site’s unresolved place in local memory and the deferred reckoning of industrial retreat for workers, mana whenua and the land and water on which industry depends. Matthew Galloway’s new work, meanwhile, looks at the political and physical infrastructures of energy production and circulation through the afterlives of the 1979 oil crisis and the Think Big projects developed in response.
Ho Rui An will present 'Between Two Trees' as a free performance lecture in the Len Lye Cinema on 8 August from 4.30pm to 5.30pm. The gallery says it is his first presentation in Aotearoa. The exhibition also includes artist talks by Clark and Miller from 11am to noon, and by Harrison and Galloway from 2pm to 3pm, all on the opening day. 'Economies of Deferral' runs at Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth from 8 August to 15 November 2026, with additional artist talks, performances and workshops scheduled across the exhibition period.
