Window

Window Onsite is pleased to present Bepen Bhana, What Would We Do Baby, Without Us? for the month of November. Exploring the agency and power of social structures and cultural artefacts, What Would We Do Baby, Without Us? refers to the opening introduction sequence of popular U.S sitcom Family Ties, a production that ran for seven seasons from 1982 to 1989. The premise of the show effectively inverted the typical sitcom paradigm of the time in that it depicted liberal baby boomers attempting to guide their comparatively conservative children. Thus, What Would We Do Baby, Without Us? communicates one of the intriguing cultural inversions characteristic of the 1980s era, where a conservative younger generation aspired to wealth, material success, and traditional values, as inheritors of the socio-political world the liberal, presumably activist, culturally experimental generation of adults, who had experienced the 1960s, helped create.

Perhaps Bhana’s work also evokes the current cultural refraction, where successive generations find themselves locked into a system of debt and consumption that their predecessors supposedly fought against but, since neoliberalism, have also helped to construct. The exhibition, as framed by the university institution, draws attention to current debates about the role, value, and ‘price’ of tertiary education in New Zealand. What Would We Do Baby, Without Us? considers not just the cultural ironies of politically conservative youth, but the equally powerful paradox of liberal conscience.

Bepen Bhana is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, writer and academic who is a Doctorate graduate of Elam School of Fine Arts. In 2005, he was the recipient of the Ryochi Sasakawa Young Leaders Scholarship. Bhana is currently exhibiting in the Open Window program at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth. He also lectures at Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design, and lives and works in Auckland.