Exhibitions
Events
On display
Māori Moving Image: An Open Archive artists
Nathan Pohio Sleeper 1999. Two-channel video. Courtesy of the artist
Rangituhia Hollis O.P.P. (Other People’s Property) 2015. St Paul St Gallery, Auckland University of Technology. Courtesy of the artist
Talk
Past event
Meet at the front desk
Free
Artists Nathan Pohio and Rangituhia Hollis in conversation about their works in Māori Moving Image: An Open Archive and the exhibition project as a whole.
Pohio (Waitaha, Ngāti Māmoe, Ngāi Tahu – Ngāi Tūāhuriri) is on the curatorial team of the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, and his work, that draws on poetics of photographic, filmic traditions and Te Ao Māori, was included in the most recent Documenta project in Athens. His billboard work Raise the anchor, unfurl the sails, set course to the centre of an ever setting sun! is currently installed in Little Hagley Park in Ōtautahi.
Hollis (Ngāti Porou) is an artist known for his searching work in digital, documentary and political space, such as his animated video Oho Ake: Development of the Ford Cortina at Te Tuhi in 2016, and his recent animations and stills for the opera Alofagia at the Nathan Homestead in Manurewa. He is an educator, teaching 3D animation among other matters, living in Tamaki Makaurau.
Nau mai haere mai—meet at the front desk and join the artists in conversation.
Related reading: Video art, Māori
Exhibition
Māori Moving Image: An Open Archive
26 January 2020
This dynamic exhibition explores the history of Māori artists who have used animation, film and video as a medium.
Collection
Shannon Williamson Continuous Positive i
In its capacity to be experimental territory, drawing offers a space where different states of mind can be explored. Each of the artists here has taken the practice eyond the realm of obvious observation or recording into something more internal, psychological and uncertain.
Shannon Williamson describes her drawing as “navigating this very intimate and personal space that we can’t access – our internal self.” Here, she uses different kinds of mark making – scientific notations, anatomical drawings, erasures and urgent scribbles resembling biometric readouts – to show how psychological experiences and anxiety are expressed through the body.
(Die Cuts and Derivations, 11 March – 2 July 2023)
Collection
Shannon Williamson Continuous Positive iii
Shannon Williamson is an artist who trained as a sleep scientist. Her drawings begin with the data she gets from recording sleep. In the ‘Continuous Positive’ works, she includes medical notes and translates records of sensory experience into specific colours and reoccurring motifs like rainbows and circles. The drawings are like maps of the circadian rhythms of the body, the natural processes of regulation and repair that occur within sleep and intimately affect the way people function and how they feel about themselves. The title refers to the form of sleep therapy Williamson works with, Continuous Positive Airway Pressure. It also suggests the state of mind necessary to keep going through difficulty. “I needed money to make art, but I needed time to make art, which was hard with a day job—I had to be continually positive about my practice,” she says.
(Now, Then, Next: Time and the Contemporary, 15 June 2019 – 8 March 2020)
Exhibition
Sione Tuívailala Monū and Edith Amituanai: Toloa Tales
New video works trace migratory threads across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa as the artists return to their ancestral homeland.
Exhibition
Bridget Reweti: Ziarah
Ziarah is an Arabic word that refers to an ancestral or spiritual pilgrimage to a gravesite. Developed while artist Bridget Reweti was on residency in the Indonesian city of Jogjakarta, this work traces her attempt to find the unmarked graves of navigator Tupaia and his nephew and apprentice Taiata on nearby Damar Besar Island.
Exhibition
Meg Porteous and Rea Burton: Nancy Treadler
In this moving-image work, artists Meg Porteous and Rea Burton take inspiration from preening pigeons outside their studio to create an exaggerated mimicry of the art world.
Commentary
Memory Pictures
… it suits me to take pictures on celluloid that were formerly pictures of the mind, memory pictures, pictures of the imagination …
Exhibition
Max Fleury and Anna Brimer: Glory
A playful video of impromptu water fountains made from everyday objects.
Exhibition
Aydriannah Tuiali: Kōwhai
In Te Ao Māori, waiata (songs) are often used to retain memories, knowledge and whakapapa. The meditative chant that artist Aydriannah Tuiali’i performs here urges us to reflect on our ancestors, to look for sustenance and future wellbeing through our connections to the past.
Notes
A Quick Q&A with James Oram
Over lockdown, Ōtautahi artist James Oram made a new work for our online exhibition Spheres: An Online Video Project. I asked him a few questions about the making of the work, which is up on our website until the end of October.
Exhibition
Spheres: An Online Video Project
An online series of moving image works exploring social distance and personal environments including works from Xin Cheng, John Chrisstoffels, Conor Clarke, Ronnie van Hout, Sonya Lacey, Janet Lilo, Sione Monu, James Oram, Nova Paul, Bridget Reweti, Sriwhana Spong and Matavai Taulangau.
Commentary
Curating Oceania
The idea for an exhibition of Oceanic art originated from the Royal Academy itself, proposed in 2012 by its then artistic director Kathleen Soriano, an Australian. The exhibition was imagined to fit within the Academy’s occasional programme of ‘civilisation’ or ‘world art’ exhibitions, inaugurated in 1996 with the ground-breaking Africa: Art of a Continent, and followed by exhibitions such as Aztecs (2002), China (2005), Byzantium (2009) and others. These exhibitions sat among the gallery’s more usual fare of historical European, modern and contemporary art.
Interview
Looking at Forty Years of Māori Moving Image Practice
Māori Moving Image: An Open Archive is co-curated by Bridget Reweti and Melanie Oliver. The following text is a conversation between the two curators around co-curating, archives and Māori moving image practice.
Commentary
Te Āhua o te Hau ki te Papaioea
The ‘Operation 8’ anti-terror raids in October of 2007 were the culmination of a police investigation that led to the raiding of homes across New Zealand. The raids were conducted after an extended period of surveillance, which was enabled through use of the 2002 Terrorism Suppression Act. In 2013 the Independent Police Conduct Authority found that police had “unnecessarily frightened and intimidated” people during the raids.
Notes
Māori video artists on display in Christchurch
Works by more than twenty Māori moving image artists will be on display at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū in August.
Exhibition
Maureen Lander: Flat-pack Whakapapa
An installation of hand-woven harakeke speaks of the contemporary Māori experience
Exhibition
Rachael Rakena: Rerehiko
An immersive video installation by Kāi Tahu artist Rachael Rakena.
Commentary
Bringing the Soul
As an eleven-year-old boy from Whāngarei, sent to live in Yaldhurst with my aunt in the late seventies, Christchurch was a culture shock. Arriving in New Zealand’s quintessential ‘English city’, I remember well the wide landscapes and manicured colonial built environment. It was very pretty but also very monocultural, with no physical evidence of current or former Māori occupation or cultural presence, or at least none that I could appreciate at that time.
Exhibition
The Devil's Blind Spot: Recent Strategies in New Zealand Photography
Recent photography by an emerging generation of New Zealand artists.
Exhibition
Ship Songs
A small but poetic exhibition looking at early European and Māori representations of seafaring vessels, with the Charlotte Jane as a focal point.
Exhibition
Kōwhaiwhai
Five significant works of art that look to traditional Māori architecture to inform modernist and contemporary Māori art practice.
Exhibition
He Rau Maharataka Whenua: A Memory of Land
Canterbury modernist landscape painting from the collections of Te Puna o Waiwhetū Christchurch Art Gallery, poignantly revised from within a Kāi Tahu perspective