Forthcoming
Kāi Tahu and Anne Noble: Unutai e! Unutai e!
13 December 2025 –
19 April 2026
Anne Noble Waikirikiri Selwyn River entering Te Waihora Lake Ellesmere 2024. Digital print, pigment on paper. Collection of Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu
Unutai e! Unutai e! harnesses the power of contemporary art to shed light on an urgent environmental crisis: the deteriorating state of fresh water across the Ngāi Tahu takiwā.
In 2020, Ngāi Tahu filed a statement of claim with the High Court in Ōtautahi Christchurch, seeking recognition of our rakatirataka (authority) over wai māori (fresh water) within our takiwā (territory). To support this claim, Te Kura Taka Pini, the division of Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu responsible for the case, enlisted photographer Anne Noble to capture and document the crisis. Her role was to provide an impartial perspective—capturing our people in their chosen waterbodies while also revealing the widespread environmental degradation we witness daily across Te Waipounamu. What began as a photographic assignment evolved into an extensive visual archive, illustrating not only the devastation but also the resilience of whānau, hapū, and iwi striving to restore wai māori, uphold rakatirataka, and protect mahika kai practices.
These practices are integral to Ngāi Tahu identity and survival. They compel us to ask the existential question: Who are we when we can no longer feed our manuhiri (guests) with the kai for which we are renowned?
The individuals in these photographs represent the many who have supported us over the past decade, and we are deeply grateful for their dedication, wisdom, and commitment. The landscapes captured are just a glimpse of the hundreds of waterways that are taoka (treasures) to Ngāi Tahu.
This exhibition begins at the pūtake mauka—our ancestral mountains, the source of fresh water. It then journeys through the polluted waterways before concluding with a vision of hope—projects dedicated to restoring balance and finding solutions. But this is not just our story—it is a shared responsibility. The degradation of wai māori is not isolated to our takiwā; it is a crisis that affects us all. Water is the essence of life, binding us together across cultures and generations. The images you see are not just records of loss but calls to action. They remind us that with knowledge, persistence, and collective effort, we have the power to heal our waters, restore our ecosystems, and honour the legacy of those who have come before us.
Without our collective efforts, the status quo remains. The future of our wai māori, our people, and generations to come depends on what we do now.
Exhibition toured by Dunedin Public Art Gallery.
My Gallery
Location:
Ravenscar Gallery
W A Sutton Gallery
Exhibition number: 1189
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
