Post hoc Te Puna o Waiwhetū

First staged at the Venice Biennale, the Christchurch iteration of Dane Mitchell's Post hoc includes three simulated trees, hidden in plain sight and broadcasting lists of lost things throughout the city. They can be found on the Gallery forecourt, on the weather station lawn in the Botanic Gardens, and at 88 Worcester Street. From submerged atolls to failed utopias, extinct languages to tax havens, long lists of lost entities are announced within an echo-free chamber and transmitted to cell-phone towers disguised as trees around the city. They accumulate in the Gallery in printed form, amassing as a melancholy archive of loss. Post hoc reflects on our constant demand for growth and progress, highlighting the unrelenting new losses and extinctions occurring as our present moment becomes the past. For some, this data is all that remains.