Exhibitions
Events
On display
FULL - Waitangi Day: Land Marks with Areta Wilkinson
Areta Wilkinson, the artist working on Whakapapa I (from Moa-Hunter Fashions series) 2018. Waimakariri and Rakahuri river stones, tree stumps, kōkōwai (red ochre), silver. Image courtesy of the artist and Two Rooms Gallery, Auckland
Areta Wilkinson Hei Tupa 2013. Oxidised sterling silver, polyester. Collection Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, purchased 2016
Workshop
Past event
Meet in the exhibition
$20
Apologies, this event is fully booked
Join artist Areta Wilkinson (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Mamoe, Waitaha) in a hands-on 50-minute workshop.
Using copper pieces and river stones from the Waimakariri and Rakahuri rivers, Wilkinson will demonstrate the stone-hammering method she uses to create her adornments, guiding participants to create their own unique wearable piece to take home.
Through studio practice and applied research Wilkinson expresses concepts of Ngāi Tahu whakapapa (genealogy links and relationships) and mahinga kai customary sites of natural resources and cultural production. Like her ancestors before her she utilises local resources for the task at hand – hammerstones from the Waimakariri and Rakahuri Ashley Rivers, local pigments, clays and gold.
Layers of relationships to the past are ever present. Through photograms of moa butchery bones and refuse from early campsites, 3D prints of archaic artefacts used for mark making on ceramics, shapes and forms referencing historic Ngāi Tahu visual culture.
Moa-Hunter Fashions is a new iteration of the project Wilkinson made for the the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art.
All materials provided and bookings essential.
Related reading: Workshop, 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- )
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.
