Exhibitions
Events
On display
E toru ngā kiriata i te Wiki o te Reo Māori / Three films for Te Wiki o te Reo Māori
Shannon Te Ao What was or could be today (again) (still) 2019. Single-channel video with sound. Cinematography: Iain Frengley. Sound: Te Awhina Kaiwai-Wanikau, Fraser Walker. Production: James Tapsell-Kururangi, Michael Bridgman. Courtesy of the artist and Hopkinson Mossman
Louise Potiki Bryant Roto (still). 2017. Single-channel video with sound
Bridget Reweti and Terri Te Tau Ōtākaro (still) 2016. Single-channel HD video with sound
Film
Past event
Philip Carter Family Auditorium
Free
Hei whakanui i Te Wiki o te Reo Māori 2020, ka whakaatahia te kiriata What was or could be today (again) (2019) nā Shannon Te Ao, te kiriata Roto (2017) nā Louise Potiki, me te kiriata Ōtākaro (2016) nā Bridget Reweti rāua ko Terri Te Tau. Kei roto i ēnei kiriata e toru nei, ko ngā kupu Māori e koropupu ake ana i te wai māori.
To celebrate Te Wiki o te Reo Māori (Māori Language Week) 2020, we are screening Shannon Te Ao’s What was or could be today (again) (2019), Louise Potiki Bryant’s Roto (2017), and Bridget Reweti and Terri Te Tau’s Ōtākaro (2016). The three films in this programme picture bodies of wai māori (fresh water) through which te reo bubbles up.
Shannon Te Ao’s What was or could be today (again) (12 mins.) is a response to a painting his grandmother made of the same title painted at Waitetoko near Taupō. Te Ao (Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Wairangi, Te Papaka o Maui) worked with triathlete Ngarama Milner-Olsen, who is the film’s protagonist, and the film is set to music based on a verse the artist wrote five or six years earlier. Te Ao says “The idea is that you get a clear, not necessarily defined, visual reflection on what it means to live within a multiplicity and to be aware of that while you’re engaged in the world.” He teaches at the Whiti o Rehua School of Art at Massey University in Wellington.
Louise Potiki Bryant (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Mamoe and Waitaha) is a choreographer, dancer, and video artist. Roto (8 mins.) is filmed at Wānaka, and was originally commissioned for the Festival of Colour. The film is a collaboration between Potiki Bryant and her partner, composer Paddy Free. In te reo Māori roto means lake, and also within. In Roto the artists explore in dance, image and music the kaupapa of the lake within, the lake being a metaphor for our consciousness, and the surface of the lake being likened to our emotional state. With her practice, Potiki Bryant aims to honour mana wahine (the intrinsic spiritual power of women), whakapapa (genealogy) and kaupapa Māori (Māori principles and practices), and in 2019 was a New Zealand Arts Foundation Laureate.
Bridget Reweti and Terri Te Tau’s Ōtākaro (40 mins.) is a visual audio book that combines the dawn chorus of the Ōtākaro Avon River in Christchurch with the possibility of the takarangi spiral to stretch the fabric of space-time. The river has always been important for Ngāi Tahu and those living in the region, and through researching the stories of the river, Reweti (Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi) and Te Tau (Ngāti Kahungunu, Rangitāne ki Wairarapa) have created a new chronicle that speculates on parallel possibilities. Both artists are members of the Mata Aho collective. Reweti is this year’s Frances Hodgkins Fellow at the University of Otago, and Te Tau was a Postdoctoral Fellow at CARE at Massey University in 2018 and 2019.
Related reading: Film, Free event, 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
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)
Resource
Tunnel Beach
Bridget Reweti, 2020
Single-channel HD digital video, re-coloured photographs, sound, duration 50 sec
Thanks to Flogging a Dead One Horse Town for their song 'Dork Tomahawk'
Bridget Reweti (Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi) often draws from her everyday experiences of being in a place and reflections on the history it contains, layering these ways of thinking about a site. Here, Reweti re-coloured black and white photographs taken on her state sanctioned walks to Tunnel Beach, the nearest to her new home in Ōtepoti. An old-fashioned technique, hand-tinting of photographs was common in the nineteenth century, and her use of this method reflects an ongoing interest in the history of photography, its role in documenting colonial life and landscapes as well as the agency Māori have within photography.
film
Shannon Te Ao speaks on the use of Te Reo in his work
For Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori / Māori Language Week 2015, Te Puna o Waiwhetū Christchurch Art Gallery invited five Māori artists to talk about the use of te reo in their work.
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.
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
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.
