Forthcoming
Ana Iti: Ngahere Behind a Pile of Metal
7 March –
26 July 2026
Ana Iti, research image 2025
An immersive installation considering the legacies of deforestation and significance of kauri trees.
In this new commission, Ana Iti (Te Rarawa, Ngāi Tūpoto, Ngāti Here) references kauri logging, an industry that flourished in Te Tai Tokerau during the nineteenth century. Drawn using charcoal from burnt kauri timber, large saw teeth cut into the substructure of the gallery. Chain and metal pipes hint at the form of a marine crane, or how logs are bound for transport in waterways. The relationship of rākau to wai, or tree to water, reflects the kinship of kauri to tohorā, the Southern right whale. Both now face the threat of extinction, a sign of broader ecological devastation.
Ana Iti is currently based in Te Matau-a-Maui Hawkes Bay, Aotearoa New Zealand. She has a BFA (Sculpture) from the Ilam School of Fine Arts in Ōtautahi Christchurch (2012) and MFA from Toi Rauwharangi Massey University in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington (2018). Iti has shown extensively throughout Aotearoa in leading institutions and project spaces, including The Physics Room (2023) and City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi (2022). In 2024, Iti was the recipient of New Zealand’s premiere contemporary art award, the Walters Prize. She is also a recipient of the 2025 Harriet Friedlander residency.
My Gallery
Related
Commentary
Unutai e! Unutai e!
Unutai e! Unutai e!
Ko te wai anake, te au e riporipo ana ki mea roto, ki mea awa, ki te nuku o te whenua?
Aue taukuri e!
Pupū ake a Muriwai Ōwhata i a roimata He manawa piako te Papa ā-Kura o Takaroa
Waimate haere ana te waiora Kai hea rā taku ika e?
Kai hea rā te oraka mō taku iwi e!
What has transpired?
Only the rippling waters of this lake and of that river can be heard flowing across the land
Muriwai Ōwhata is over-flowing with tears
The great hīnaki of Māui, Te Papa ā-Kura o Takaroa, is like a hollow and empty heart
The life-giving waters are turning brackish and undrinkable
Where have our fresh water fish species gone?
Where are our people able to thrive?
Commentary
Pauline Rhodes: Blue Mind
Painted blue and patterned with rust, the thin plywood panels and screens lean nonchalantly around the walls of the gallery and form a skyline of sorts. Across the floor sculptures intersect the space, with groupings of tall rods, waist-high enclosures, clusters of plywood shapes and a small kayak frame on salvaged seaweed and driftwood. Islands for the audience to navigate. The forms are roughly human in scale and relative to the body, generating an intensity and making this an immersive installation to wade through.
Commentary
The Edge of the Sea
A vision of New Zealand’s past from 1995:
Europeans first imagined New Zealand as “a garden and a pasture in which the best elements of British society might grow into an ideal nation”... When the smoke of the colonists’ fires cleared at the end of the 19th century, New Zealand had become a different country. Māori had lost their most precious life-support system. Only in the hilliest places did the forest still come down to the sea. Huge slices of the ancient ecosystem were missing, evicted and extinguished. Our histories, however, have had neither the sense of place nor ecological consciousness to explain what has happened.
Interview
Power Play
In November 2017, Simon Denny’s The Founder’s Paradox opened at Michael Lett Gallery in Auckland, the first solo exhibition Denny had made specifically for New Zealand audiences in several years. His starting point for the project was local: the news, broken by New Zealand Herald journalist Matt Nippert in early 2017, that the billionaire tech investor and Donald Trump supporter Peter Thiel was in fact a New Zealand citizen.
Commentary
Of Braided Rivers and Hydro-Traders
“With 14,000km of coastline, over 180,000km of rivers, and 3,820 lakes, there’s more to the land of the long white cloud than land…” So began an advertisement in a recent Sunday Star Times. It might have been the opening gambit for a campaign devoted to water conservation but was, in fact, a promotion for the latest model jet ski: “And all you need to unlock it is the all-new Yamaha Waverunner FX HO… SAME PLANET, DIFFERENT WORLD. Yamaha-motor.co.nz.”
Commentary
The Lines That Are Left
Of landscape itself as artefact and artifice; as the ground for the inscribing hand of culture and technology; as no clean slate.
— Joanna Paul
The residential Red Zone is mostly green. After each house is demolished, contractors sweep up what is left, cover the section with a layer of soil and plant grass seed. Almost overnight, driveway, yard, porch, garage, shed and house become a little paddock; the border of plants and trees outlining it the only remaining sign that there was once a house there.
Collection
Ralph Hotere Dawn/Water Poem
For the exhibition Untitled #1050 (25 November 2017 – 14 October 2018) this work was displayed with the following label:
“There are very few things I can say about my work, that are better than saying nothing.”
—Ralph Hotere, undated
