Asylum Pieces

Changes in official attitudes to mental illness are reflected in the architectural history of the New Zealand psychiatric institutions in Kathryn Dudding's delicately layered, emotionally loaded essay film. Dudding's film takes off from an unfinished photographic project undertaken with a partner who didn't stay around to see it through. Photographs of the abandoned Porirua Asylum would, emulating a Japanese tradition, evoke the poignance of impermanence and the passage of human suffering.