LOCATION DETAILS
Artist will be on a boat in the water off freyberg beach, there will be a spot at freyberg beach people can watch/listen with binoculars and then there will be a location in mount street cemetery where people can watch with telescopes.

Three telescopes are installed near Adam Art Gallery, and a pair of binoculars placed at Freyburg Beach wharf. Each item has a pair of headphones attached. By looking through them audiences can watch a figure rowing a little boat in tight circles across the bay. A book faces him in the stern. Through the earphones the audience can hear the artist reading aloud from the book as he rows.

Penelope’s Window is part of a practice that originates from, is presented in, and made in relation to marine environments to critique and unsettle geo-political politics and familiar regimes of performance presentation. The work explores colonial and post-colonial issues propelled by the white male protagonist, using the waters of Te Whanganui-a-Tara as the stage for a satirical performance about journeys of ‘myth’ and ‘discovery.’

Central to this performance are notions of male absence, futility, exploration, dominion, and a preoccupation with the sublime. It reduces the performing figure to a tiny shape labouring in the harbour and travelling in circles. The work also explores embodied performance as seen over a long distance and extended durations, using view-finding devices and the site of colonial 18th-century gravestones to frame the experience.