Winter inaugurates the search for partners and courtships amongst raptors anticipating spring and a new breeding season. For this time, Richard Frater is designing a site-responsive structure at the ruin, adapted to local raptors that he had been observing onsite over the spring and summer.
In conjunction, the artist presents a comparative video-study that studies the shrinking and expanding territorial ranges of avian species—whether into increasingly remote and hostile environments or into urban expansion—as two unsettling threads of the same conservation reality today. The temporal differences touches on Frater’s own experiences of birdwatching and avian conservation. On one timeline, raptors inhabit the cliff-like skyrise buildings surrounding the Klosterruine complex. On the other timeline, it is summer in Aotearoa. There are traps being monitored along trails in the Ruahine Ranges of Aoteroa, New Zealand, where whio (Blue mountain duck), a fast-flowing river species, threatened and endemic, are reported to remain.

For the exhibition’s finissage, Frater’s video study is joined by one more screening event. In this video, Frater records his own biological father’s reflections of their trans-identity and gender journey, Here, too, dominant notions of biological determinism, environmental and cultural constructs are combated, however this time through an anthropological moderation of such questions.