No Future - The Cost of Extraction

Elvis Booth-Claveria, Fiona Clark, Hamish Garry

Enjoy Contemporary Art Space
211 Left Bank, Cuba St Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington

30 August – 11 October 2025

Opening Friday 29 August, 5pm

NO FUTURE – The Cost of Extraction brings together artists who are listening to the land, registering its wounds, and refusing the narratives that allow extraction to continue. Fiona Clark’s Gaslands project is anchored in decades of photographing and responding to the oil and gas industries that dominate Taranaki. Her photographs of gas flares, fracking sites, and the people who work within them capture not only the extensive industrial violence of these operations, but also the quiet endurance of communities living under their shadow. In performances such as Listening to Fracking (with Raewyn Turner), Clark attends to the subterranean tremors of whenua, reframing penetration as a deeply gendered and violent intrusion into land and body. From a lesbian perspective, her work subverts the patriarchal coding of penetration as conquest, instead proposing a model of contact grounded in reciprocity, attention, and consent. Her new performance speculates on what the art sector in Aotearoa might look like stripped of oil and gas sponsorship, asking what cultural ecosystems could emerge if art refused to be underwritten by the industries accelerating planetary collapse.

Clark’s longstanding photographic practice in Waitara also examines the colonial signage that still honours British military figures who seized and divided the land, now mirrored in the Americanised street signs marking new suburban developments. This visual continuity speaks to the persistence of a settler logic that treats whenua as a commodity under changing empires. Through The Waitara Project, Clark worked alongside local communities to protest the fossil fuel industry’s pollution of the Waitara River and foreshore. Together they created and installed banners—some by residents, others by artists such as Murray Ball—calling out the poisoning of the environment and the erasure of local sovereignty. This embedded, collaborative approach positions Clark’s art as both witness and weapon, a practice that records what extraction takes away, while actively participating in the resistance to it.