Gavin Hipkins is an Auckland-based artist who works with photography and film. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Auckland and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia. He is currently Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland. His photographs and moving image works interrogate how images create meaning through modernist technologies. His work explores the nation state, particularly in colonised countries in an era of re-imagined communities and ideas of social and political utopia. His recent moving image works engage film as a cinematic art that blurs conventional genres of essay film, documentary and experimental narrative structures. In 2014, Hipkins’ first feature film Erewhon — an essay adaptation of Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon, Or Over the Range — premiered at the New Zealand International Film Festival and Edinburgh Art Festival. His work has been exhibited widely over the last two decades, with recent screenings including: 25FPS International Experimental Film and Video Festival, Zagreb; Recontres Internationales Paris/Berlin (2020); Videoex, Zurich (2019); 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia (2018); International Film Festival Rotterdam (2018, 2015); International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (2017, 2016).