Gavin Hipkins is a photographer and filmmaker based in Aotearoa New Zealand. His work addresses representations of place, particularly reimagined communities and social and political utopias in relation to countries belonging to the Commonwealth. Set along the Brisbane River, the dual projections of The Precinct 2018 continue Hipkins’s blurring of documentary and experimental narrative film structures.

The double perspective both draws on and quotes from the first published novel set in Brisbane, The Curse and its Cure (1894) by Dr Thomas Pennington Lucas, a two-volume narrative comprising 'The Ruins of Brisbane in the Year 2000' and 'Brisbane Rebuilt in the Year 2200'. Lucas envisioned a ruined and corrupt city suffering floods and separatist wars with southern states, with nineteenth-century colonial attitudes towards Indigenous people still firmly entrenched; Brisbane is then re-imagined as a utopian moral paradise some 200 years later. With its fragmentation of sounds and sights along the Brisbane River, Hipkins’s The Precinct connotes a past that haunts the future.