Looking
Ivan Lupi
20th June - Saturday
10am-10pm
Location: Bus Interchange
free, durational, experimental,
For 12 hours, a body stands at a fixed point inside the Ōtautahi-Christchurch Bus Interchange. It does not sit. It does not leave its position. It takes no breaks.
It looks.
For every person who passes through the interchange and meets its gaze, the gaze is returned and held for as long as the other person allows. No words are spoken. No gesture is made. Nothing is offered and nothing is withheld. In transit spaces, eye contact is typically brief by social contract—managed, averted, dissolved. LOOKING holds it at duration. Not as an invitation. Not as a confrontation. Simply as a fact the space is asked to absorb.
Across thousands of encounters, every gaze that lands on the performer is returned. Every one.
About
Ivan Lupi is a performance artist born in Ferrara, Italy, living and working in Aotearoa New Zealand since 2016. With over two decades of practice spanning Europe, North America, and Australasia, Lupi’s work centres on the body as primary material and political argument — using tattooing, duration, and permanent physical inscription as performance media. Key works include Before and After George, Not As Simple As It Sounds, and the ongoing UNTIMELY series. Lupi holds a Masters in Queer Studies in Arts and Culture from the University of Birmingham and is included in Resetting the Coordinates (Massey University Press, 2024), the first fifty-year critical survey of performance art in Aotearoa New Zealand.