Solo exhibition
Meanwhile Gallery
Te Whanganui-a-Tara
July-August 2026
Images by Samson Dell.
a rainbow haunts us is a video installation that wades into physical, familial, and political entanglements with the chemical weapon Agent Orange. It speculates on the uncertainty of a chemical haunting of bodies and ecologies through video, sound, and text.
My father served in the Vietnam War where Agent Orange was deployed against local peoples and ecosystems, decimating forests and crops, and leaving a toxic legacy that lingers today in soils and waters. Now a banned carcinogen and mutogenic pollutant, the use of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War has been called the first case of ecocide.
Agent Orange persists epigenetically through successive generations, expressing itself in strange, uncertain, and ambiguous ways. Its slow violence haunts my family, passed from my father to me and on to my son. This pales in comparison to the continuing chemical damage to the landscapes and peoples of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. a rainbow haunts us explores how this damage ripples backwards and forwards in time, while also asking how agential Agent Orange might be in this haunting.
Works
1. a rainbow haunts us (2026), HD video, 30 mins (looped), stereo sound.