Established in June 2000 as an artist-run initiative, Enjoy Contemporary Art Space is a leading independent gallery located in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand.
Located on Cuba Street, they generates and facilitates contemporary art projects to support the development of new work and promote critical discourse across contemporary art practices.
This kaupapa is carried out through exhibitions, an annual residency, an open call for proposals, offsite projects, public programmes and publications. Enjoy provides both emerging and established practitioners with opportunities to develop new and innovative work.
Dreaming of Lulu is a solo exhibition by Pōneke-based artist Christopher Ulutupu. Reimagining music videos for 1970s Samoan love songs from groups such as Punialavaa, Penina Tiafau and Tiama’a, this is the first iteration of a new body of work by Ulutupu called 5 songs that explores music’s ability to travel across diasporic, cultural and intergenerational spaces.
Ulutupu’s performative moving image works actively question the colonial gaze, the construction of dominant narratives, and the role of the viewer. In the past, this has involved weaving together personal experiences, pop culture, and historical representations of Pacific peoples and landscapes.
Ulutupu develops work almost exclusively in chapters, positioning them as fragments within an ongoing narrative thread that resists singularity and resolution.
With a background in art direction and set design, collaborative processes of filmmaking are central to the artist’s practice. This includes working with family and friends as actors and crew in his films, and using locations that encourage viewers to re-think familiar backdrops, creating cinematic experiences that are tender, critical and surreal.
The exhibition includes a moving image work centred around the fictional character Lulu, a Samoan woman who performs as singer in local bars, accompanied by a showreel of short greenscreen film clips, outtakes and tests.
This pairing begins to play with the filmic construction of what is presented to the audience, including costume and set design, hair and makeup, exploring what is put in place to set the stage for Lulu.
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