Benjamin Ord

Revised and retitled.

5 December - 24 January 2026

Revised and retitled. Installation view 2025
Artor Contemporary, Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland 

Revised and retitled. is a new solo exhibition by Benjamin Ord. Working from fragments of the artist’s personal choreographic and moving image archives, the exhibition repurposes these remains to create a distinct live encounter within the gallery. Although not seen in their entirety, various performances act as the base material from which other forms may emerge. Grounded within a paradox of ephemerality and material presence, the exhibition echoes how choreography alters each time it is reactivated by a live body.

A new film entitled A display of steps rather loosely strung together featuring UK-based dancer Catarina Carvalho takes fragments of choreographic material from a previous solo performance and restages them for a recording on black and white Super 8 film. Through a process of video editing, these fragments are re- choreographed to move freely across multiple temporalities, the dancer’s body appearing to shift its own image as it pushes against the grain of the film. Heard through a portable speaker, an accompanying musical playlist remains both aligned with and seemingly unfixed in its relationship to the images. Within the projected presence of the dancer in the gallery space, the film unsettles the boundaries of the live, the recorded, and the yet to come.

The exhibition also features the recent video work Fountain (The Touch of You). Treating the fountain as a camp choreographic form, the work commits to one looping gestural phrase that renders movement as an object able to be perpetually transported and re-staged. Embedded with queer notions of desire, the repeating tempo of the loop plays out against the real time of the viewer’s encounter and intermittent duration of an instrumental track by high school funk band the Equatics.

Scattered throughout the space are a series of silk chiffon scarves printed with film stills taken from a staged for camera video of a prima ballerina’s experimentation with improvisation. Entitled Affectations Can Be Dangerous, the work subverts the familiar function of an archive to rescue that which is at risk of being lost, instead performing a deliberate distortion where the image ceases to become a document and rematerialises in a new form. These effete objects on the edge of function, are never finite, but always exist on the threshold of becoming something else.

Revised and retitled. is supported by Creative New Zealand.

Benjamin Ord, A display of steps rather loosely strung together, danced by Catarina Carvalho, single-channel projection, Super 8 film transferred to digital, portable speaker, sound, 13 mins, 2025

Benjamin Ord, Fountain (The Touch of You), single-channel video, Super 8 film transferred to digital, CRT monitor, intermittent sound, 16 mins 51 sec, 2022

Benjamin Ord, Affectations Can Be Dangerous, printed silk chiffon scarves, 2025

Benjamin Ord is an artist and choreographer born in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa New Zealand and based in London, U.K. His practice, primarily based in performance and moving image, explores how the body pushes against the fixed surface of a finite image, object or linear time. Frequently using methodologies and forms that are lo-fi and queer, his work points to an expanded notion of liveness that intervenes in the present moment in order to gesture towards the transformational potential of the future. He has shown work at venues including RM Gallery (Auckland), Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof (Hamburg), Close-Up Film Centre (London), APT Gallery (London), Spike Island (Bristol), DAAD Gallery (Berlin), and The Place (London). As a dancer for over a decade he worked for several major dance companies including Company Wayne McGregor, as well as performing in work by Sriwhana Spong, Tino Seghal, Pablo Bronstein, and Mark Wallinger among others. Benjamin holds an MA Artists’ Film and Moving Image from Goldsmiths, University of London, an MA Creative Practice from Trinity Laban, and is currently a PhD candidate at the Kingston School of Art at Kingston University, London.