Radically local: an urgent exhibition

Comment: Te Hau Whakatonu | A Series of Never-Ending Beginnings at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery (until February 11) has been a long time coming – an exhibition whose frame of reference, appears to be, at first glance, culturally safe… works from the permanent collection.

However, since the 2023 general election Te Hau has become something it probably didn’t intend to be, quite radical. By dint of its kaupapa: a survey of art by Māori artists in Aotearoa with the accent on the local, Te Hau Whakatonu has run into the cultural sweet spot, the eye of the storm, zeitgeist-defining. It also heralds the emergence of a new curatorial talent.

Since 1970, the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in Ngāmotu New Plymouth has been a contemporary art powerhouse in Aotearoa, staging legendary exhibitions of international art and commissioning iconic projects of resonance and stature. The gallery has presented shows from California, Japan, Korea and China. A roll call of New Zealand artists have received their big break in the fertile spaces of this unique whare toi. Two major works in Te Hau Whakatonu, by Ana Iti and Brett Graham, are finalists in the 2024 Walters Prize and were commissioned by the Govett-Brewster.

First, an apology. I should have got to Ngāmotu much earlier. The exhibition opened in August last year, two months before the 2023 election. Now, as the programme of the ‘three-headed taniwha’ is revealing itself as no less than the erasure of Te Tiriti principles in our national life, Te Hau Whakatonu patiently and elegantly illuminates the kaupapa of Mana Whenua. This exhibition is an urgent advocate for local histories of resourceful, peaceful resistance and an exemplar of the artistic riches by Māori artists to be found within iwi rohe, in this case Te Atiawa and Taranaki whanui.

Such thoughts were front of mind as, just before I visited the exhibition for the second time, I stopped to take in Act party leader David Seymour’s State of the Nation address on Sunday, January 28. That a junior partner of a coalition Government that received 8.6 percent of the vote should indulge in such hubris was addressed with some clarity by Dame Anne Salmond on Newsroom the day before. The headline for her essay quoted former National Party Prime Minister Jim Bolger – ‘It’s a bloody stupid idea’.

Concepts of constituency, voice and authority were very much bouncing around my hinengaro as I entered Te Hau Whakatonu. It is an exhibition that stands on solid ground on all counts: an arrangement of mahi toi by Māori artists that acknowledges both the legacy function of the gallery’s permanent collection, places the work of the four mana whenua artists, Darcy Nicholas (Kāhui Maunga, Te Atiawa, Tangahoe, Ngāti Ruanui, Tauranga Moana, Ngāti Haua), Ruth Buchanan (Te Atiawa, Taranaki), Ngahina Hohaia (Taranaki, Parihaka, Ngāti Moeahu, Ngāti Haupoto) and Wharehoka Smith (Taranaki, Te Atiawa, Ngāruahinerangi) as defining pou that unfurl to include twenty two Māori artists from around the motu – open and welcoming to all manuhiri. To quote Gallery Director Zara Stanhope, “Founded in the principles of kaitiakitanga, manaakitanga and whakapapa Te Hau Whakatonu is the first [exhibition] to consider that toi Māori in the collection hold a shared world view and that together they comprise a body of knowledge.”

The exhibition subtitle, A Series of Never-Ending Beginnings, was coined by Māori rights advocate Moana Jackson as a means to explain the centrality of whakapapa and storytelling within Māori intellectual traditions. It is this framing of time as a cyclical, as opposed to a linear, progression, with the past, present and future being held in balance, mind and sight that curator Taarati Taiaroa (Te Atiawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Apa) realises fulsomely in her first major outing as a lead curator.

Taiaroa’s recent appointment as assistant curator contemporary Māori art follows her role at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki as assistant curator Māori art and very much head curator Nigell Borell’s right hand for the groundbreaking exhibition Toi Tū Toi Ora in 2020, which I reviewed here.

Making an assessment of curatorial contribution is akin to reviewing a film. There are many moving parts to an ensemble presentation, in this case 65 artworks by 22 artists, that isolating one individual, the curator, feels at odds with the collaborative nature of a group exhibition and some might say tikanga Māori in general terms. But Te Hau Whakatonu so clearly articulates the circular narrative of its brief and contains such a powerful opening stanza that the show runner’s response to her chosen works and their placement within the gallery is one of the experiential payoffs for the visitor.

At this point note must be made of the unique vertical structure of the Govett-Brewster gallery space as it rises steeply over three levels. Most galleries are of the open ‘plain’ or retail mall variety – the modality is horizontal. The Govett-Brewster for want of another description is volumetrically taller than it is wide and provides a forum for columnar, pillar-like sculpture. Think Sky Tower as opposed to the frieze friendly nature of most public galleries.

Curator Taiaroa has responded to this spatial challenge by leaning in – visitors are greeted with a show-stopping opening stanza – two 10-metre sculptural works that rise to the ceiling of the gallery. You will literally have to gaze into the heavens to engage with Cease Tide of Wrong-Doing by Brett Graham and its counterpart He Ara Uru Ora by Ngahina Hohaia.

These two works share a vertiginous ahuatanga and chart their own course from there, as distinct in material and sculptural intent as possible but united in giving voice to the persistent memory layered into the Taranaki whenua.

In keeping with the Govett Brewster’s long-term kaupapa of commissioning large-scale sculptural installations He Ara Uru Ora is a new, dramatic evocation of Taranaki Maunga as the central pou of the landscape. He Ara Uru Ora is assembled from thousands of huruhuru toroa or albatross feathers, which cascade in metaphorical whakapapa lines, recalling puhi rere that drape from the taurapa (stern-piece) of a waka taua into the moana. Or do they rise from that puna or spring that bubbles eternally in video form from the very floor of the gallery?

The albatross feathers also reference the Raukura symbol associated with passive resistance to colonial incursions led by Te Whiti and Tohu at Parihaka in the late 19^th Century. The three feathers symbolise honour, peace and goodwill … an activation that in this context is radically local. Ascending and descending simultaneously these graceful feather tendrils connect Te Ao Wairua (spiritual realm) and Te Ao Mārama (physical realm), the present and the past in a gossamer ballet of connectivity.

Adjacent is Cease Tide of Wrong-Doing a 10 metre re-proposition of a Pai Mārire niu, by Brett Graham (Ngāti Koroki Kahukura, Tainui). In the 19^th Century niu or news poles were sometimes adaptations of ships’ masts. In Graham’s hands the niu becomes a spear-tipped sentinel whose carved rauponga motif captures light and amplifies its soaring vertical form.  Eight pātaka structures bisect the niu, metaphors for the resources appropriated and swindled from iwi in the 19^th century. These jutting blocks are disruptors, symbols for the accumulation of personal as opposed to collective wealth and the tensions created by these conflicting world views since the earliest colonial period.

The bristling tower was first exhibited at the Govett-Brewster as part of the Graham’s 2020 grand scheme Tai Moana Tai Tangata. The niu is in effect a broadcast device, sending news and alerts around the motu. And within a few short years of the signing of Te Tiriti the news wasn’t good. These claims from letters by incoming Taranaki settlers (published in the Tai Moana Tai Tangata catalogue) in the early 1840s articulate their acquisitive intent, ‘…there is plenty of room in this one place for the exertion and capital of at least one hundred thousand Englishmen. At Taranaki, where New Plymouth is situated there is an opening for at least a million.’

The urgent need to hold the line in the face of such overwhelming odds sits at the heart of The intellectual PROPERTY of a savage mind (2015) by photographer Tia Ranginui (Ngāti Hine Oneone). The scene is set on the stage of the infamous Savage club in Whanganui. The proscenium is flanked by two striking amo from the carved house Tieke which originally stood on the Whanganui River in the 19^th Century. Somehow, in the turbulence of the colonial period these carvings were redeployed as decorative elements of a colonial period gentlemen’s entertainment club which only closed its doors after 125 years of operation in 2016. Club presidents were referred to as Rangatira and guests were welcomed by an all Pākehā-performed haka. At their peak there were 25 similar Savage clubs throughout Aotearoa.

In Ranginui’s photograph, a rifle bearing ‘rebel’ has occupied the stage, reclaiming the space, transforming this former locale of a jolly good night into a contested, transitional space available for mana whenua after over a century. In this context carved whakairo of tūpuna stand as witnesses for a future transcendence. Like many of Ranginui’s images set in and within the history of Whanganui intellectual PROPERTY is freighted with an eerie magic realism of the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction genre.

The three feathers of the Raukawa are also evident in the earliest of the four pou works and the first by a Taranaki Māori artist to enter the permanent collection, a pair of large-scale acrylic on aluminium panel paintings by Darcy Nicholas (1988). Sacred pathways and The Mountain Taranaki chart the first arrival of ancestral voyagers to Aotearoa and the mana of Te Kāhui maunga, those who preceded the arrival of the seven ancestral waka.

Onwards, Te Hau Whakatonu advances up another flight of stairs to a platform occupied by the woman whose back was a whetstone, (2021) by Ana Iti (Te Rarawa) which takes the shape of akmon forms, hefty concrete blocks used to keep the roiling tides at bay at the breakwaters of Port Taranaki. Each of these Ōamuru stone blocks bears the marks of the atua wāhine Hinetūāhōanga, a female deity associated with making, shaping and bringing form into being by grinding, cutting and sharpening. Iti is a finalist in the 2024 Walters Prize with this work that speaks to the universal theme of the hard graft of creative activation, right here on the Taranaki coast.

The exhibition continues to spiral around the Govett-Brewster, taking in works by Peter Robinson, Michael Parekōwhai, Lisa Reihana, Fiona Pardington, Shane Cotton and Ralph Hotere, artists who had star turns in Toi Tū Toi Ora and a number of whom who have represented Aotearoa New Zealand at the Venice Biennale or international exhibitions such as Oceania at the Royal Academy in London in 2018.

But it is the local that powers Te Hau Whakatonu – on contested ground where mana whenua have had to fight a rearguard action in the face of the colonial programme that began in earnest within months of the signing of Te Tiriti.

There is a grim irony to the timing of this exhibition and hence an urgency to viewing before it concludes. In artistic terms it appears that just as Māori artists are beginning to achieve a measure of acceptance, and heaven forbid some accolades on the international stage, there is now push-back at the highest level in Aotearoa New Zealand. Much of the underlying logic around the Act leader’s January address was based on fairness and equality and the lingering sense that somehow his constituency is being diddled, missing out or lacking access to opportunity.

In the Govett-Brewster’s own collection the numbers are stark. Sixty-five of the 900 works in the collection are by Māori artists – or, in terms fairness advocates might better understand, 7 percent. Based on the most recent population statistics I could find, just shy of 20 percent of the population of Taranaki identifies as Māori so some further work is required on the acquisition front for equity to be achieved. But the gallery must be congratulated for so transparently articulating where it stands on this journey.

Te Hau Whakatonu, by accentuating the local, eloquently makes the case that the haerenga will never end.

Te Hau Whakatonu | A Series of Never-ending Beginnings, Toi Māori from the curated from the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery collection, curated by Taarati Taiaroa, Ringhāpai Kaitakatū Ngā Toi Māori, Assistant Curator Contemporary Māori Art (Te Atiawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Apa) until 11 February, 2024.