Name: Merata: How Mum Decolonised the Screen
Location: Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū

Merata: How Mum Decolonised the Screen

Film

Past event

Philip Carter Family Auditorium

Free

See this extraordinary film about Merata Mita (Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāi Te Rangi), a true pioneer of Indigenous cinema who changed ideas about the place of women in filmmaking.

“The revolution isn’t just running out with a gun. If a film I make causes indigenous people to feel stronger about themselves, then I’m achieving something worthwhile for the revolution.” (Merata Mita)

Directed by Mita’s son, Heperi Mita, this documentary details her work as a filmmaker interrogating political issues arising from the colonisation of Aotearoa, and her feature films that explore te ao Māori. Merata shows how Mita’s filmmaking intersected with the lives of her children and Indigenous filmmakers globally, and features rare archival footage dating back to 1977. Through the process of making the film, which shows Mita through the eyes of her children, director Heperi Mita more fully discovers his mother the filmmaker he recently lost. (2018, 95 mins)

Take this opportunity to see Merata Mita’s stunning portrait by Kevin Capon in Te Wheke: Pathways Across Oceania.

Related reading: Film, Māori

Exhibition

Te Wheke: Pathways Across Oceania

30 May 2020 – 3 July 2022

Experience the Gallery’s collection from the perspective of our place in Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, the Pacific Ocean.

Collection

Kevin Capon Merata - Film Maker

Kevin Capon and Carol Te Teira were in their mid-twenties when they set off from Ōtautahi / Christchurch in an old Thames van to photograph forty artists throughout Aotearoa New Zealand. “We were out on an adventure to meet people we thought were doing interesting things and to immerse ourselves into the land.” Filmmaker Merata Mita had finished her documentary Patu! and was working towards her feature film Mauri. Capon draws a connection between Māori and whenua (land): “The camera lens would move slowly over their skin like a slow-motion aerial landscape and I would only get a brief glimpse of them at the time of clicking the shutter.”

(Te Wheke, 2020)

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.

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.

Continued

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.

Continued

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.

Continued

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.

Continued

B.

Merata: How Mum Decolonised the Screen

Exhibitions

Events

On display

Merata: How Mum Decolonised the Screen

Film