Final week of Maximum Potential NOW

Posted: Thursday Jun 06, 2024

This is the final week of Maximum Potential NOW, an exhibition with Tāmaki Makaurau-based artists Samantha Cheng, Matt Joils and Sophie Sutherland.

Its last day will be Saturday, 8 June; opening hours can be found on our here.

The exhibition draws from the multiple, and ever-pervasive, languages and realities of consumer capitalism—what writer Jia Tolentino refers to in her essay ‘Always Be Optimizing’ as the “chopped-salad economy’s accelerationist nightmare.”

One of these realities is the feeling of failure; felt through an acute lack, an inability to measure up to the expected standard, or how active opposition or resistance to capitalism can become, ultimately, subsumed back into the norm. Much of the language of commercial advertising exploits anxieties around failure. A language often shared by the self-help and wellness industries: are you surviving or thriving?

Documentation of the exhibition can be found on here.