Whakaaturaka
Exhibitions
Taipoeka
Events
E Whakaaturia ana Ināianei
On display
Shannon Te Ao
Shannon Te Ao Untitled (Malady) 2016. HD digital video file. Gift of Sheelagh Thompson marking her 86th birthday and honouring director Jenny Harper's dedication to Christchurch Art Gallery during the five years of its closure after the 2010-11 Canterbury earthquakes
Talk
Past event
Philip Carter Family Auditorium
Free
Artist Shannon Te Ao (Ngāti Tūwharetoa) will talk about his work Untitled (Malady) in Māori Moving Image: An Open Archive, and consider recent work that in various ways resonates with a conception of time found in the whakatauki Ka mua, ka muri, ‘walking backwards into the future’.
Also a writer, curator and the winner of the 2016 Walters Prize, Te Ao is a senior lecturer at Massey University’s Whiti o Rehua School of Art in Wellington. The majority of Te Ao's recent artistic output has involved investigation and response to material drawn from Māori paradigms, and testing the implications of alternative creative, social and linguistic models in relation to contemporary video art and other performative practices.
Related reading: Māori
Exhibition
Māori Moving Image: An Open Archive
23 August 2019 – 26 January 2020
This dynamic exhibition explores the history of Māori artists who have used animation, film and video as a medium.
Exhibition
Shannon Te Ao: Tēnei Ao Kawa Nei
11 March – 23 July 2017
Tenderness and human longing are revealed in Shannon Te Ao’s award-winning video installations.
Collection
Shannon Te Ao Untitled (malady)
In Untitled (malady), Shannon Te Ao layers multiple historical references to create a poignant work that considers contemporary intimacy, politics and the human condition. Firstly, it is a reimagining of a scene from Charles Burnett’s 1978 film Killer of Sheep, in which a husband and wife dance to Dinah Washington’s rendition of the song ‘This Bitter Earth’. However, Shannon replaces the soundtrack with the dancers’ breathing and the gentle shuffling of their feet. The title Untitled (malady) gives the viewer another reference: ‘A Song for a Leprous Malady’ is a mid-1800s waiata written by Te Rohu of Ngāti Tūwharetoa about contracting leprosy from her lover and the traumatic death of her father, Te Heuheu, in a landslide. These references are grounded in intimate relationships, yet speak to the social politics of their times. With this work Shannon makes space for us to imagine the complexities of our own personal relationships and ways of relating to each other.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- 21 July 2024)
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.
Interview
A Torch and a Light
Shannon Te Ao is an artist of Ngāti Tūwharetoa descent. In 2016 Te Ao won the Walters Prize for his works, two shoots that stretch far out (2013–14) and okea ururoatia (never say die) (2016). Working in video and other performative practices Te Ao investigates the implications of various social and linguistic modes. Assistant curator Nathan Pohio, himself a nominee for the 2016 Walters Prize, discussed working practice with Te Ao in December 2016.
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.
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.
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.
