Create a fantasy and tell your story on the cinematic stage of Heather Straka’s immersive new exhibition.
A cocktail of drama, art history and cinematic vision, Isolation Hotel is multidisciplinary work combining photography, performance, installation and set design. Heather Straka, an Auckland-based artist, has recreated the look and feel of a 1930s German hotel foyer, once opulent and now run-down, on an elaborate stage set inside the museum.
The set also provides a backdrop for visitors to take their own photos and tell their own stories. Straka invites them to project their own dreams, desires, and anxieties onto her set.
Isolation Hotel hints at present-day social issues; Covid lockdowns and managed isolation, #metoo, LGBTQIA+ aesthetics and liberation, the housing shortage and contested monuments to a colonial past.
On display 27 November 2021 – 20 March 2022
(Text from Cantebury Museum website)