Requiem For An Airport: POSTPONED

To celebrate the opening of our new exhibition 'Terminal' five speakers deliver a Requiem for an Airport.

At the start of 2020, no one could have predicted that the global aviation industry would be–could be–grounded and then in various states of financial freefall. The airport once the locus of productivity is now relatively...quiet.

Our five writers and speakers offer entertaining and thought-provoking takes on the airport. Will their requiems feel nostalgic? Zeitgeisty? Problematic? Dystopian? Does the airport even deserve a requiem? After all, just because you’re down, doesn’t mean you’re out.

Queue the requiems...

Speaker Bios:

Steve Braunias
Steve Braunias is the author of 10 books, including Civilisation: 20 Places on the edge of the world, and The man who ate Lincoln Road. He is a staff writer at the New Zealand Herald and serves as literary editor at Newsroom.

Rajorshi Chakraborti
Rajorshi Chakraborti is an Indian-born, Wellington-based novelist, short story and freelance writer. He is the author of six novels and a collection of short fiction. His latest novel, Shakti, was published by Penguin Random House in February.

Frey Daly Sadgrove
Freya Daly Sadgrove is a writer and performer from Pōneke. She is the architect behind Show Ponies, described by Anna Jackson as “the poetry highlight of the millennium”. Her first poetry collection, Head Girl, was published in February with Victoria University Press.

Jordan Hamel
Jordan Hamel is a Pōneke-based poet and performer. He was the 2018 New Zealand Poetry Slam champion and represented Aotearoa at the World Poetry Slam Champs in the US. He is the co-editor of Stasis Journal and co-editor of a forthcoming Climate Change Poetry Anthology from AUP. He has words in Poetry NZ, Landfall, The Spinoff, takahē, Sport, Sweet Mammalian, Mimicry and elsewhere.

Melissa Laing
An artist, theorist and curator Melissa Laing’s work focuses on the intersections of ethics, politics and art. Her recent projects include Boat Dates, an ongoing series of conversational exchanges taking place on water, Controlled Environment Laboratory, a history of the National Climate Laboratory in Palmerston North and Walking about, a curated series of performative and participatory walks that travel across Auckland with Te Hau ā Uru – the West Wind. Her PhD, from the University of Sydney, focused on the legal, social and architectural frameworks of international aviation as seen through the lens of contemporary art.