New York
Set against the collapsing tides of the Anthropocene, Aotearoa New Zealand artist Gill Gatfield’s current installation (on view through September 20, 2025) brings the urgency of habeas corpus to New York City, a place long mythologized as a refuge, but also pulsing at the crossroads of data, capital, and control. At the heart of her work is the ancient writ demanding the body be brought forward, a call to be seen and protected against unchecked power. Today, this guarantee erodes: refugees languish in detention, reproductive rights are stripped away, and algorithms calculate our freedoms. The questions of who owns the body, and who decides what counts as life, have never been more urgent. Using the “master’s tools” with deliberate precision, Habeas Corpus stages a rupture, becoming a synecdoche for our moment. It condenses the structures of surveillance, desire, and power that shape life in the age of AI, alongside the realities of geopolitical and psychological warfare.
This engagement with systems of power extends across Gatfield’s broader practice, which interrogates law, institutions, and cultural norms by reworking the legacies of classicism, Minimalism, and Futurism into 21st-century hybrids. Her columns, arches, and proportional geometries, formed from stone, wood, glass, and gold, invoke and subvert the authority of monuments. Alongside these signifiers, she inserts the ephemeral and ethereal, where mercurial materials shimmer with temporal depth, conjuring deep time and the aura of the biosphere. Surfacing the intangible and drawing the viewer into a sensorial encounter, Gatfield becomes an alchemist, transforming matter into a conduit for beauty, presence, and speculation.
Habeas Corpus unfolds across several interrelated components: The Wall, CHIP (and its IRL relatives), Freehold, and the AI-augmented Operating System. Together, they form an ecosystem in which physical structures, sculptural signals, and digital flows interlock, pulling the viewer into circuits of care, control, and surveillance. Inside the installation, a weaving of disposable diapers rises, soft yet suffocating, saturated with contradiction. Its repetition recalls intimacy and dependence while exposing the invisible labor and gendered economies that underpin care. Alluring and unsettling, The Wall is both a testament to humanity and a critique of the privileges against which difference is judged.
In contrast to The Wall‘s padded landscape, CHIP turns to portraiture, encoded through 23-carat gold engraving. Perched atop a marble column, it functions as a sculptural element and system object, a node through which signal, surveillance, and interpretation flow. It is an oracle and a glitch, while its iconic structure is its strength. An I-figure, mirroring the viewer’s unsettled place in the networked systems governing our lives, it stages the encounter between ancestral and machine intelligence, where ancient materials—stone, gold, and wood—meet the emergent forms of AI, AR, and algorithm.
To encounter this system is to recognize ourselves as data. Phones, our most intimate companions, become portals and prosthetics, choreographing our bodies into predictable patterns. Neuroscience reminds us that perception is never passive: the brain anticipates as much as it receives, layering memory with sensation. Gatfield’s augmented reality exposes this scaffolding, showing that vision is shaped as much by imagination as by presence. In activating CHIP, the viewer is also activated, becoming conduit and co-creator. For some, the gesture feels intimate and awe-inspiring; for others, it recalls the violence of borders and the precarity of controlled bodies. This unease, veiled in classical beauty, echoes the systems that promise connection while thriving on exploitation, and claiming transparency while hoarding truth. Its elegance reveals the hidden architectures of our digital lives, where intimacy is mined, desire manipulated, and agency quietly stripped away.
Straddling physical and virtual realms, Habeas Corpus evokes Donna Haraway’s feminist theories of situated knowledges and speculative fabulation. Gatfield challenges the illusion of neutrality and opens space for alternative futures, while staging a multiplicity of bodies, technologies, and worlds still coming into being. Her I-forms extend these concerns, embodying individual sovereignty and the collective body politic, a duality exemplified in Freehold. This padded portrait, anchored by Lincoln Memorial marble, marks a threshold to the freedoms promised in the Fourteenth Amendment—citizenship, equality, and the fragile protections of life, liberty, and law.
Habeas Corpus is a radical work shrouded in a synecdoche, standing in for a vast and entangled system. Each part opens onto the whole, offering a glimpse of the structures that shape our lives. Elemental and intangible forces flow through the installation: gold embedded in CHIP’s marble column, drifting sounds, moisture drawn into diapers, virtual beings, and I-shadows slipping between presence and disappearance. In this ephemerality, the work holds the tensions that stir empathy, memory, and resistance. It also illuminates the ways in which art allows the world to come into sharper focus—not only its beauty, but also the dangers we risk ignoring.
Habeas Corpus was presented as part of NARS’ International Artist Residency Season III Exhibition 2025 “It would hurt us—were we awake—” curated by Daniela Mayer.
