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Critical Condition
Open call

Proposals close Monday 22 June 2026

COMMODE is commissioning a series of essays exploring alternative methods of working within and beyond contemporary art institutions.

Critical Condition considers how artistic and curatorial practices might move beyond the atmosphere of institutional anxiety and political ambiguity that increasingly shapes the arts in New Zealand and internationally.

The series welcomes proposals from artists, writers, curators, organisers, academics, activists, and cultural workers. Contributions may be analytical, speculative, historical, theoretical, or experimental. COMMODE is particularly interested in writing grounded in lived organisational experience and in perspectives operating outside dominant institutional structures.

Alongside invited contributors, a number of commissions will be selected through this open call.

Read more about the project and how to apply on our website.

Following COMMODE founder DJCS’ recent medical developments which require a major surgery, cardiac intervention, and a lengthy recovery period, COMMODE will be transitioning away from its current model for the remainder of 2026.

Rather than pausing entirely, COMMODE is shifting toward a slower and more distributed programme, with a focus on writing and conversation. This transition emerges from necessity, and also from ongoing questions already central to the project such as what forms of curatorial and artistic practice become possible when production is shaped by recovery?

COMMODE began as an experiment in building alternative curatorial infrastructure outside dominant institutional models. That commitment remains unchanged. What is shifting now is the form through which it operates.

More information on the new programme will follow in the coming days.

Recovery Room
Open Call

COMMODE invites artists, writers and curators to respond to the question of sickness or disability as a way of working in the arts.

This proposition begins from a simple condition, that the body sets limits. Time can quickly become uneven. Our capacity fluctuates. Work, no matter how planned, can become interrupted or delayed. It may be returned to, it may not. Under these conditions, the structures that organise the arts such as deadlines, openings, or production come into tension with lived experience.

Rather than treating this as an obstacle to overcome, this call asks what happens when those conditions are taken as a methodology.

What forms of art and exhibition making emerge when time isn’t linear? How do curatorial decisions and artistic processes shift when attention is fatigued? What does it mean to curate or produce work that does not aspire to productivity?

Sickness and disability reconfigure our relations to labour. They introduce forms of knowledge that are often excluded from institutional rhythms. Rest, waiting, repetition and maintenance become daily, structuring conditions. Working can become shorter, slower and fragmented. It may unfold over time. It may not be coherent, or resolved.

We ask contributors to consider how their methods shift under conditions of constraint, how artistic production adapts to the body, and how practice might reorganise.

Contributions are written, and may take the form of a fragment, notes, correspondence, or a text that remains unfinished.

Length and structure are open. Timeframes are flexible. Writers are invited to work at their own pace, within their own conditions.

Please email your texts to info@commode.co.nz

COMMODE will publish these texts as they arrive. The project will remain open, accumulating over time. The aim is to hold a space where writing, and in turn artistic production, can operate differently.

"Perhaps ritual can exist as a political form – what are we if not a zen garden of maggots, these towering figures dragging their rake (or is it a crucifix? or the frame of a meat hook?) through, scraping furrows and skewering milky larvae.”

41 Bodies by Ruben Thomson is a reflection on HELL, a performance by Ys Blue, Veale Moss and Odeious that took place at COMMODE 9pm, 21 March 2026.

Available to read on our website now.

@irissilver_mist
@flesh_spirit
@katlang___
@fucksunjack

Documentation of HELL by Ys Blue is available to view on our website.

@flesh_spirit

Documentation of HELL by Ys Blue is available to view on our website.

@flesh_spirit

Documentation of HELL by Ys Blue is available to view on our website.

@flesh_spirit

Documentation of HELL by Ys Blue is available to view on our website.

@flesh_spirit

Wānanga: Manifesto in the Bamboo Forest concludes, for now!

The next chapter of Jieying Cai + collaborators ongoing project will manifest at COMMODE opening 1 August.

@bittermelonpomelo
@teaoemily
@te__ara
@morais.ethan
@mouldyjuice
@mathildepolmarddesign
@zedzishun

Wānanga: Manifesto in the Bamboo Forest 竹林里的誓言
Jieying Cai 蔡杰盈, Emily Lyall, Te Ara Minhinnick, Ethan Morais, Mathilde Polmard, Sage Rossie-Tong, Zed Xu 榛子瞬
7 – 9 April 2026
Offsite: Opononi, Hokianga

Manifesto in the Bamboo Forest 竹林里的誓言 is a skill sharing wānanga organised by Jieying Cai 蔡杰盈. The gathering brings together seven artists in Hokianga, focusing on the materiality of bamboo as a vessel for discourse around migration and transnational belonging. Where belonging is collectively shaped through care and coming together otherwise.

This wānanga extends from Jieying Cai 蔡杰盈 exhibition with COMMODE opening on 1 August this year.

Supported by COMMODE, and the Asian Artist Fund administered by Satellites @aksatellites

Jieying Cai 蔡杰盈 is a first-generation Chinese New Zealander with ancestors from Ganzhou 贛州. She is a multimedia artist and curator, currently exploring themes of belonging and identity in natural fibre and installation.

@bittermelonpomelo
@teaoemily
@te__ara
@morais.ethan
@mathildepolmarddesign
@mouldyjuice
@zedzishun

Video documentation of the opening performance of HELL is now available to view on our website. Viewtime 1:17:21

@flesh_spirit
@katlang___
@fucksunjack
@ritualheaps

Video documentation of the opening performance of HELL is now available to view on our website. Viewtime 1:17:21

@flesh_spirit
@katlang___
@fucksunjack
@ritualheaps

Video documentation of the opening performance of HELL is now available to view on our website. Viewtime 1:17:21

@flesh_spirit
@katlang___
@fucksunjack
@ritualheaps

See you tomorrow 😈

You can still DM or email us to come to Hell.

HELL
Ys Blue

Opening performance with Veale Moss and Odeious
Saturday 21 March, 9pm

R18
Registration essential: info@commode.co.nz

Ys Blue opens HELL in collaboration with Odeious and Veale Moss on Saturday 21 March at 9pm, with a performance that acts as the project’s initiating gesture.

Drawing on necropolitical frameworks, HELL considers the power dynamics that determine which bodies are protected and which are exposed to death and suffering. The performance situates the body within a longer lineage of post-nuclear and Cold War imaginaries, where faith, apocalypse and military futurism collapse into one another. HELL reflects on how contemporary regimes of security mobilise religious narratives alongside technological violence, particularly within militarised contexts where apocalyptic belief systems are entangled with geopolitical strategies. Here, the body is caught within the weaponisation of ideology itself.

The performance establishes the conceptual ground from which Blue’s exhibition HELL emerges, foregrounding the body as a battleground within systems of belief, surveillance and control.

Supported by Ritual Heaps.

@flesh_spirit
@fucksunjack
@katlang___
@ritualheaps

Catgirl Exhaust Fan
Cassie Gilmore-Freeth

Presented by COMMODE and MESH for Newtown Festival.

@roach_corpse
@dirt_x_mesh
@newtownfestnz

Catgirl Exhaust Fan
Cassie Gilmore-Freeth

Presented by COMMODE and MESH for Newtown Festival.

@roach_corpse
@dirt_x_mesh
@newtownfestnz

Catgirl Exhaust Fan
Cassie Gilmore-Freeth

Presented by COMMODE and MESH for Newtown Festival.

@roach_corpse
@dirt_x_mesh
@newtownfestnz

Catgirl Exhaust Fan
Cassie Gilmore-Freeth

Presented by COMMODE and MESH for Newtown Festival.

@roach_corpse
@dirt_x_mesh
@newtownfestnz

Catgirl Exhaust Fan
Cassie Gilmore-Freeth

Presented by COMMODE and MESH for Newtown Festival.

@roach_corpse
@dirt_x_mesh
@newtownfestnz

Catgirl Exhaust Fan
Cassie Gilmore-Freeth

Presented by COMMODE and MESH for Newtown Festival.

@roach_corpse
@dirt_x_mesh
@newtownfestnz

Catgirl Exhaust Fan by Cassie Gilmore-Freeth is a one day only installation, today, 10am–8pm. Presented with MESH at the MESH Alley Stage as a part of Newtown Festival.

Cassie will perform at 5.05–5.20PM

📍Donald McLean Street, Newtown.

@roach_corpse
@dirt_x_mesh
@newtownfestnz n

Catgirl Exhaust Fan by Cassie Gilmore-Freeth is a one day only installation, today, 10am–8pm. Presented with MESH at the MESH Alley Stage as a part of Newtown Festival.

Cassie will perform at 5.05–5.20PM

📍Donald McLean Street, Newtown.

@roach_corpse
@dirt_x_mesh
@newtownfestnz n

Catgirl Exhaust Fan by Cassie Gilmore-Freeth is a one day only installation, today, 10am–8pm. Presented with MESH at the MESH Alley Stage as a part of Newtown Festival.

Cassie will perform at 5.05–5.20PM

📍Donald McLean Street, Newtown.

@roach_corpse
@dirt_x_mesh
@newtownfestnz n

Catgirl Exhaust Fan by Cassie Gilmore-Freeth is a one day only installation, today, 10am–8pm. Presented with MESH at the MESH Alley Stage as a part of Newtown Festival.

Cassie will perform at 5.05–5.20PM

📍Donald McLean Street, Newtown.

@roach_corpse
@dirt_x_mesh
@newtownfestnz n

Catgirl Exhaust Fan by Cassie Gilmore-Freeth is a one day only installation, today, 10am–8pm. Presented with MESH at the MESH Alley Stage as a part of Newtown Festival.

Cassie will perform at 5.05–5.20PM

📍Donald McLean Street, Newtown.

@roach_corpse
@dirt_x_mesh
@newtownfestnz n

Catgirl Exhaust Fan by Cassie Gilmore-Freeth is a one day only installation, today, 10am–8pm. Presented with MESH at the MESH Alley Stage as a part of Newtown Festival.

Cassie will perform at 5.05–5.20PM

📍Donald McLean Street, Newtown.

@roach_corpse
@dirt_x_mesh
@newtownfestnz n