One-take video [12 min, MiniDV]

Filmed in Wellington, New Zealand as the largest private residential ship on the planet – named The World – departs from Queen's Wharf.


Screened as part of:

Projection Series #11: An Oceanic Feeling (2018)
Curated by Erika Balsom
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery
New Plymouth, New Zealand

High Tide: New currents in art from Australia and New Zealand (2006)
Curated by Simon Rees & Magda Kardasz
Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland
Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius, Lithuania

Square2 (2005)
City Gallery
Wellington, New Zealand

Take: 001 (2004)
Curated by Louise Menzies
Enjoy Public Art Gallery
Wellington, New Zealand

"A single take filmed from Queen’s Wharf in Wellington, The World Leaving bids farewell to the cruise ship The World as it departs the shore. Maddie Leach evokes the deceptive simplicity of A Boat Leaving the Harbour (1895), but in place of the small rowboat that appears in Louis Lumière’s film she captures the largest private residential ship on the planet—a substitution of great allegorical power. This dilated remake of one of the very first films is nothing less than a portrait of the 21st century, of its obsession with luxury, scale, and global mobility, and of the lies it tells itself about them."
Erika Balsom, 2018.