The Blue Dome: Selina Ershadi w/ Ruth Buchanan: 5th June, 2026

The Blue Dome by Selina Ershadi is Artspace Aotearoa’s current exhibition, which continues in the gallery's exploration of their annual question, “Which History?” Selina Ershadi is an Iranian-born, Tāmaki-based artist who primarily works amongst a practice of experimental filmmaking and writing. Drawing from personal histories and lineages of storytelling through acts of documentation, and the navigation of familial archives. 

Within The Blue Dome, Ershadi presents various foraged visual material and audio that draw from her two recent trips back to Tehran. Constructing these complex autobiographical works that speak to moments of lived reality and attempts of self-orientation. Although autobiographical in nature, these works complicate this idea of the linear narrative of autobiographical filmmaking and storytelling. Shifting the linear concept/framework of the documentary, through Ershadi's experimental approach to the capturing of imagery and dialogues, as well as the construction of the film itself. Allowing for these slips of failure to seep into the captured frame, resulting in a documentation that questions its own stability of account.

But through this instability, moments of reception appear. These intimate works that draw from Ershadi’s familial histories become open to a kind of reception–an interwinning of spaces, dialogues, and histories.  

Maya caught up with Artspace Aotearoa Kai-tohu Director Ruth Buchanan about the exhibition.