Exhibitions
Events
On display
Waitangi Day: Areta Wilkinson and Mark Adams – Repatriation: Also known as The Great Moa Hunt
Areta Wilkinson and Mark Adams developing a Moa bone photogram in the darkroom at Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge, 2017. Photo: Jocelyne Dudding
Talk
Past event
Philip Carter Family Auditorium
Free
Hear the artists discuss Repatriation, a collaborative project addressing the situation of the artefact and Ngāi Tahu taonga within museums in Aotearoa and abroad.
A residency at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at University of Cambridge, UK between 2009–17 allowed the artists to respond to those parts of collections with personal significance housed in English and German imperial museums. The pair produced unique silver bromide photograms of taonga and the tools and materials of their making. For Wilkinson, the project allowed a direct engagement with her whakapapa as a maker, and to produce new works from the absences in these photograms, which directly reference the mātauranga Māori of her ancestors. For Adams, the project opened a way of engaging with the colonial relationships these artifacts and taonga are enmeshed in without messing with them. Their collaborative practice and the body of work titled Repatriation intends to return the shades of this cultural material and presents new manifestations of it to our eyes here.
Mark Adams is an artist who was born in Christchurch, and attended Canterbury University School of Fine Arts from 1967 to 1970. He subsequently became well known for work concerned with cross-cultural histories in Rotorua, Te Waipounamu and other regions of New Zealand. Samoan tatau (tattooing) among the diaspora in New Zealand, the voyages of Captain Cook and other dimensions and issues of colonial history in New Zealand, the Pacific and Europe. His work has been exhibited at the São Paulo Biennial, and otherwise in Australia, Canada, Britain, USA, Europe and New Zealand. Most New Zealand public galleries have collections of his work. He has benefited from grants from Creative New Zealand, the Leverhume Trust (UK) and the Getty grant program (USA).
Areta Wilkinson is an artist of Ngāi Tahu descent, a Māori tribal group of Te Waipounamu the South Island of New Zealand. Wilkinson’s practice explores whakapaipai concepts of Māori personal adornment in the context of bicultural New Zealand. She is concerned with histories of contact, tribal knowledge, and drawing maker connections between the cultural production of her ancestors and her own objects. Her recent work represents an ongoing investigation into the history of Māori wearable taonga, prized possessions particularly relevant to her iwi community in Te Waipounamu, the South Island where she lives. These ideas are articulated in her 2014 PhD Creative Arts with Massey University. Wilkinson’s work is seen in New Zealand public collections and on exhibition currently Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū.
Related reading: Photography, Māori
Exhibition
Areta Wilkinson: Moa-Hunter Fashions
18 September 2020 – 8 February 2021
Artist Areta Wilkinson recalls whakapapa through object making.
Collection
Areta Wilkinson Hei Tupa
Areta Wilkinson combines her contemporary jewellery practice anchored in an awareness of the body with traditional Māori systems of knowledge, in which objects are often used to make connections between people and to convey stories. Previously she has made works that relate to the taonga whakarākei (personal adornments) of her Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe and Ngāi Tahu ancestors. “These works do not seek to replicate an existing image of the world”, she has said, “but instead alert me to a new way of seeing from the world in which I stand, whilst still maintaining a relationship with the past.”
Hei Tupa is a contemporary take on a tupa, or scallop shell, necklace from Rāpaki near Ōtautahi Christchurch. In making this work, Areta asserts the role of Ngāi Tahu tūpuna as the first artists working in the region.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )
Collection
![Rapanui [Shag Rock], Opawaho/Heathcote and Otakaro/Avon River Estuary, severely damaged in the earthquake of 22 Feb 2011. Photograph taken 25 August 1988, printed 2011.](/media/cache/47/33/47331fa7ab6033e1cd67d879b02d780c.jpg)
Mark Adams Rapanui [Shag Rock], Opawaho/Heathcote and Otakaro/Avon River Estuary, severely damaged in the earthquake of 22 Feb 2011. Photograph taken 25 August 1988, printed 2011.
Rapanui, which in te reo Māori means ‘the great sternpost’, stood for thousands of years near Matuku-takotako Sumner, where the Ōpāwaho Heathcote and the Ōtākaro Avon rivers drain out to sea. Māori used the rock as a marker for passage into the estuary, an important mahika kai (food and resource gathering area) where Ngāi Tahu gathered shellfish, eels and harakeke. A naturally occurring seastack, known to many locals as Shag Rock, Rapanui was eight metres tall before the destructive earthquake of February 2011 reduced it to a heap half that high. Mark Adams’ photograph, taken twenty-three years earlier and reprinted following the earthquake, highlights that shocking transformation. It also calls attention to the many overlaid histories – human and natural – of this place.
(Absence, May 2023)
Collection
Mark Adams The ‘Food Basket of Rakaihautu’ from Horomaka, 31 March 1991
In the early 1990s, artist Mark Adams took photographs at a number of significant sites in Te Waipounamu South Island. Accompanied by a book with texts from the late historian Harry Evison, the collection of images was titled Land of Memories and described by Tā Tipene O’Regan in the foreword as “a textured blend of visual and written statements on a beloved land – scarred by memory”. This photograph looks out at Waihora Lake Ellesmere, also known as Te Kete Ika-a-Rākaihautū, the fish basket of legendary explorer Rākaihautū. Evison describes the scene: Gaunt remnants of the once-extensive totara forests of Horomaka litter the mountain slopes, more than a century after the settlers’ fires which destroyed them to make way for pasture. Immediately below lies the valley of Kaituna, formerly clad with lush forests but now also mainly converted to pasture. The Kaituna (eel-food) river was regarded by Māori as one of the main nourishers of Waihora. Therefore […] Ngai Tahu asked to keep Kaituna. This was denied them.
He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil (from August 2024)
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.
Notes
Largest ever Fiona Pardington exhibition opens in Christchurch
Death, sex, flesh and the female gaze are among the many themes explored in the Gallery’s newest exhibition, Fiona Pardington: A Beautiful Hesitation.
Artist Profile
Larence Shustak
Welcome to the world of Larence Shustak—a rule-breaker and image-maker who came of age in the creative cauldron that was New York City in the 1950s. He used a camera as a paintbrush, documenting as well as creatively interpreting his subjects: street people and nudes. Old folks and children. Jazz legends.
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
Representing Women: Ann Shelton’s Dark Matter
What is ‘dark matter’? For theoretical physicists it is matter that cannot be directly observed but whose existence is nevertheless scientifically calculable – productively present yet simultaneously invisible. In a similar vein, the everyday phrase ‘dark matter’ describes objects, conditions and situations that harbour unease or trauma. Trauma that is often concealed, repressed, or buried. Both definitions are active in Ann Shelton’s mid-career review exhibition Dark Matter, and they provide a rich point of entry into this compelling collection of her photographic work. These are photographs that bristle with intensity and refuse to let their subjects die a quiet archival death.
Commentary
Laurence Aberhart
New Zealand artist Laurence Aberhart is internationally regarded for his photographs of unpeopled landscapes and interiors. He photographs places redolent with the weight of time, which he captures with his century-old large-format camera and careful framing. But he’s always taken more spontaneous photographs of people too, particularly in the years he lived in Christchurch and Lyttelton (1975–83) when he photographed his young family, his friends and occasionally groups of strangers. ‘If I lived in a city again,’ he says, ‘I would photograph people. One of the issues is that I even find it difficult to ask people whether I can photograph a building, so to ask to photograph them – I’m very reticent. I also know that after a number of minutes of waiting for me to set cameras up and take exposure readings and so on, people can get rather annoyed. So it’s not a conscious thing, it’s more just an accident of the way I photograph.’
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.
Artist Profile
The Devil’s Blind Spot
Te Puna o Waiwhetū Christchurch Art Gallery has a long-standing tradition of curating exhibitions of emerging and early-career artists. We do this in order to contribute to the ecology of the local art world, as well as because – quite straightforwardly – we’re interested in the practices of artists at all stages of their careers, and would like to bring the work of outstanding younger artists to wider public attention. The Devil’s Blind Spot is the latest in this ongoing series, but unlike earlier exhibitions, it’s concerned with a single medium – photography.