Femisphere 4

Colophon

femisphere.co.nz

This issue was made possible thanks to a Creative New Zealand Suffragette 125 Fund

Front and back cover art: Sriwhana Spong,
Tasseograghy of a Rats Nest (extended), 2018
Design and development: Eva Charlton, evacharlton.com
Proof reading: Marie Shannon
Femisphere is compiled by Judy Darragh and Imogen Taylor
Typefaces: Laica A Medium and Whyte Book

Thanks to:
All of our current, past and future contributors
Roxanne Hawthorne
Creative New Zealand
Strange Haven
Enjoy Contemporary Artspace
The Physics Room
Blue Oyster Art Project Space

Get in touch with us:
Email: femispherepublication@gmail.com
Instagram:@femispherezine
Facebook:@femispherenz

Femisphere 4

Biographies

Alice Alva is a multi-disciplinary artist and art educator based in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, New Zealand, who works across drawing and illustration, embroidery and textiles, painting and graphic design. Her work is situated at the intersection between art and craft and the act of making. Alice has exhibited her work across Australia and New Zealand, including at the Wallace Gallery, Toi Pōneke, RM Gallery and Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s Rear Window Project. She was a finalist in the 27th Annual Wallace Art Award and the Parkin Drawing Prize 2018.

www.alicealva.com Instagram @glassandbones


Greta Anderson (b. Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand) completed a Master of Visual Arts Degree at Sydney College of the Arts in New South Wales (2006) and a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland (1999). Atmospheric and visually striking, Anderson’s draws cinematic qualities into her still photographic images, embuing them with mood and drama. Anderson often captures figures and objects in intermediary states, moving from day into night, stillness into potential. Her notable solo exhibition The Stand Ins was held at Te Tuhi, Pakuranga, Auckland (2003) and she has since been the recipient of several grants and awards. Anderson has been selected for numerous major exhibitions at important venues for contemporary art and photography including Gus Fisher Gallery (Auckland), the Australian Centre of Photography (Sydney), The University of Sydney, the Museum of Photographic Arts (San Diego), the Ringling Museum of Art (Sarasota) and the Archibald Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney).

Anderson’s work has been featured in numerous photographic compendiums including Picturing Eden by Anthony Bannon and Deborah Klochko (2006), Future Images by Mario Cresci (2010), PhotoForum at 40: Counterculture, Clusters, and Debate in New Zealand by Nina Seja (2014), and See What I Can See: New Zealand Photography for the Young and Curious by Gregory O’Brien (2015). In addition, Anderson has a comprehensive commercial portfolio, having been invited to photograph campaigns for high-profile advertising agencies including Saatchi & Saatchi, DDB, and Mojo, and for editorials in the New Zealand Herald, Metro Magazine and the Australian Financial Review.
www.gretaanderson.com


Hana Pera Aoake (Ngaati Hinerangi, Ngaati Mahuta, Tainui/Waikato) is an artist and writer based in Waikouaiti on stolen Waitaha, Kaai Tahu and Kaati Mamoe whenua.


Grace Bader is a practising artist based in Auckland, New Zealand. Observing relationships between line and shape, her work plays with abstraction and the human figure. The idea of connection is central to her practice. She says, “I paint because I have to; it makes me feel. To feel is to be alive.” Grace is represented by Melanie Roger Gallery.

www.melanierogergallery.com www.gracebader.com Instagram @grace.bader


Gemma Banks is an Ōtautahi-born artist, designer and arts administrator. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (First Class Honours) in Graphic Design. During her study she interned at Ilam Press, designing and printing artist’s books. From there she worked in-house at the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū. She has been involved in designing and Risograph printing a number of award-winning poetry books for Canterbury University Press and has recently been published in Share/Cheat/Unite and Hamster. She was nominated as a finalist in the AGDA Awards 2019 and the DINZ Best Awards 2019 for her work on Heart of Glass for Enjoy Contemporary Art Space.


Jen Bowmast is a studio artist living in Ōtautahi Christchurch, creating installations to explore themes around spirituality. Jen considers the idea that art, both the making and experiencing, is a way to connect with other realms of experience, to interpret an inner vision, or as a mode of knowledge in itself. Within her art practice, encounters with clairvoyants are catalysts for haptic intuitive making with raw materials such as bronze, clay and stone. These artefacts are offered as transitional objects betwixt one place and another, reflecting the moment of exchange between artist and reader during esoteric meetings. Jen is interested in the position of the artist as querent, researching real and imagined relationships between artist, objects, materials and the space they inhabit. www.jenbowmast.com


Stella Corkery’s art practice traces emergent connections, operating among the diverse realms of painting, music and the feminine. Stella tends to bypass preparatory devices such as drawing and creates the work with some immediacy directly onto the canvas, improvising and problem solving in situ. References within her work can stretch across art history, contemporary art, popular culture and musical influences – for example post-punk and free jazz. The result is work that often appears to be traversing the non-linear yet still operates within conceptually unified systems. Stella also works outside of visual media, playing experimental music as a solo project and as part of the duo White Saucer.

Recent exhibitions include Paradises, Michael Lett, 2020 (solo); A Short Run: A Selection of New Zealand Lathe-Cut Records, The Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt, 2020 (group); Year of the Head, Olga Gallery, Ōtepoti, 2020 (solo); I’ve Seen Sunny Days, Goya Curtain, Tokyo, 2018 (solo); Theme for a Science Fiction Vampire, Michael Lett, 2017 (solo); Necessary Distraction: A Painting Show, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2015, (solo). Stella is represented by Michael Lett, Auckland, and lives and works in Auckland, New Zealand.


Lisa Crowley works in photography and moving image, and her practice draws on diverse lineages of feminist practice. These different strands of thought, spanning the scientific, the mystic and the creative, share an understanding of the natural world through embodied and speculative orientations.

Working with the traces of these practices, and by embedding them in the immanent and granular materiality of the analogue, Lisa proposes a different a logic for being. Her works reveal various forms of feminist ‘doing,’ the visual signs of which are dispersed amongst imagery of the animal and the mineral at work. In pairing the traces of the labour of embodied knowledge-making with the materiality of the world-in-process, Lisa’s work proposes a different kind of intelligence – one that speaks to affective and distributive forms of being. She lives and works in Auckland.


Andrea Gardner was born in California and completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the University of California at Santa Cruz and a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from the University of Iowa. She has lived in numerous places including Montana, New York City, Rome, Italy and since 1995 has lived in Whanganui, New Zealand. She works primarily in photography and mixed media sculpture. She has work in the collections of The Dowse Art Museum, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, the Sarjeant Gallery and the James Wallace Trust.
www.andreagardner.co.nz


Gill Gatfield is a sculptor and author with a background in human rights and law reform. Across a wide range of media – physical, extended reality and text, she explores political and philosophical issues, and offers sensory encounters that can shift attitudes and ideas. Gill’s artworks transform unusual and unique materials into emotive abstract forms. Her work is exhibited and held in collections in New Zealand, Australia, North America and Europe.


Nikau Hindin (Te Rarawa, Ngāpuhi) is a multi-disciplinary artist with a revivalist agenda to re-awaken and remember the process of making aute (Māori tapa cloth). Her mission to re-learn this practice was influenced by the revitalisation of voyaging, navigation and her involvement with waka haurua throughout Te Moana-Nui-a-Kiwa.

This new wave of knowledge is recorded in Nikau’s new works. She articulates the mathematical precision of celestial navigation and uses the star compass to inform the marks created on her aute. She creates star maps in which every line denotes a star’s exact rising position on the horizon. These maps are spatial and temporal, to help her remember the declination of stars, as well as the way the night sky changes through the seasons.

Nikau created this piece in support of the Black Lives Matter Movement in the USA, and donated proceeds to the movement. Inherent in being a Moana person is the knowing that we are all connected, and oppression and racism affects us all.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Martin Luther King Jr.


Priscilla Howe is an artist, designer and writer from Ōtautahi Christchurch. Her practice is concerned with phenomenology, queerness, the supernatural and theatricality in the everyday. This enquiry spreads itself across her different media, predominantly using drawing to reimagine spaces, creating worlds that embrace female sexuality, queerness, supernatural forces and sex work. She views her design and writing practice as similar spaces to explore and embrace the unknown through intuition and playfulness.


Vicktoria Johnson is a designer of Niuean and Māori heritage, living in Papakura, South Auckland. She completed a BFA in graphic design at Whitecliffe in 2018 and is now studying in the MFA programme at Whitecliffe. Her project is around language and is conceptually driven. She is currently working for RNZAF.

Yukari Kaihori is a visual artist of Japanese heritage, currently based in Tāmaki Makaurau. She is primarily a painter; her style and methods change from project to project but she often works around the theme of cultural, temporal and physical ‘in-between-ness’: being between Western and Eastern cultural values and between the permanent and the temporary physical properties of artwork. She is currently interested in the ‘here and now’ of present time, with a Shinto and Zen Buddhist point of view. She has exhibited her work in both public and private spaces including Places, ‘in-between’, Public Record, 2020; we painted the wall with cracks, play_station, 2020; This Land is All We Know, Hastings City Art Gallery, 2019.

She began training in Japanese calligraphy at the age of five and received her license at seventeen. Her interest in nature and mountains in the South Island brought her to New Zealand in 2009.


Claudia Kogachi is a Japanese-born (Awaji-Shima) artist working in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. She graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts, The University of Auckland, in 2018 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts with First Class Honours. Claudia was the recipient of the 2019 New Zealand Painting and Printmaking award for her painting Mom Wait Up (2019). Her most recent exhibitions include Uncle Gagi, Play Station, 2020, and The New Artist Show, Artspace Aotearoa, 2020.


Huriana Kopeke-Te Aho (Tūhoe, Ngāti Porou, Rongowhakaata, Te Āti Haunui-a-Pāpārangi, Ngāti Kahungunu, Fale‘ula) is a self-taught artist and illustrator whose work is primarily influenced by their Māori whakapapa, takatāpui identity and political beliefs. They have produced work for Waikato University, Tuatara Collective, Action Station, Auckland Pride, Organise Aotearoa, SOUL, Rainbow Youth and The Pantograph Punch, among others. Their illustrations have also been featured in Te Papa’s film series He Paki Taonga i a Māui and Protest Tautohetohe, published by Te Papa Press in 2019.


Cathy Livermore’s (Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe, Kāi Tahu, Pākehā) practices are currently focused in intercultural spaces of collaboration and in new media technologies, weaving together her passions for performance, te ao Māori, healing traditions and education. As an artist, educator, activist and healer Cathy has enjoyed the past 20 years performing, choreographing and teaching (as Head of Dance at Whitireia and then as Head of Dance at the Pacific Institute of Performing Arts) around the Southern and Northern Hemispheres, beginning in Australia and now residing in Aotearoa New Zealand.


Teresa Peters is an artist and filmmaker, currently working in clay and ceramics. She is interested in bodies, earth bodies, forming and transforming. She recently showed at Auckland Art Fair 2021 with the Mothermother Archive and RM Gallery and launched DISASTROUSFORMS.COM, made with the support of Creative New Zealand. Inspired by a field trip to Pompeii with Mark Dion in 2014 and Auckland Museum Collections Online, where it is now archived as a Topic, and screened on the Auckland Live Digital Stage, Aotea Square. After five years in Berlin and New York, she completed a PGDipFA at Elam, 2015 and was the Ceramics Creative Studio Resident at Studio One Toi Tu 2018/2019. Exhibitions include: ECHO BONE 2019 at Mothermother Archive alongside Judy Darragh and Natalie Tozer, Clay Dreams - Uku Moemoea, at Nathan Homestead and New Ceramics Acquisitions, the Pah Homestead, in March 2020, alongside Peter Hawkesby. Who Is Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf, at Te Tuhi, 2007, and at P.P.O.W Gallery, NYC, 2010. She will show at RM Gallery July 2021 in a group show of women artists exploring environmental agency. @disastrousforms


Elisabeth Pointon, who lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, is dedicated to interrogating the status quo, placing a particular emphasis on systemic failures relating to marginalised communities. Her work typically centres on text, and is marked by wit and slipperiness of meaning. The artist adapts language and display methods associated with sales and showrooms (she has long worked for a luxury car dealership), finding richness within expressions and forms that might otherwise seem generic or vacuous.


Ali Senescall is an Auckland-based artist. They graduated from Elam, University of Auckland, with a BFA in 2018. Ali’s practice is multidisciplinary but has recently been predominantly video based. Earlier this year they had a show at Parasite gallery titled As Above So Below. This show intends to read as a life review; the moment before you die your life flashes before you in the attempt to save yourself from death. Except instead of real life, these flashes were captured from movies that were very formative, such as Scarlet Diva (2000) and Ginger Snaps (2000). Ali also had a short film and a photograph in the most recent May Fair. The photograph was titled 2021 and showed a woman holding a bootleg Dior saddle that the artist had made. Ali’s video works and short films can be found on YouTube and they have a movie review Instagram account under the handle @d3vilsr3j3cts.


Rachel Shearer (Pākehā, Rongowhakaata, Te Aitanga ā Māhaki) explores sound through a range of practices – recording and performing experimental music, site-specific installation, audio-visual projects, research, writing, education and collaborations with practitioners of moving image and performance. She has been active as a recording and performing experimental musician and sound artist in Aotearoa and internationally for over 35 years.


Sriwhana Spong is an artist from Aotearoa New Zealand, of both Pākehā and Indonesian descent, living in London. She works across various media, including sculpture, film, performance and sound, and underlines the complexity of subjectivity by creating relations between disparate ideas and influences. In her works, experiential knowledge, autobiography and fiction are entangled with carefully researched materials and forms that reflect their particular cultural contexts and sources. Here Sriwhana also draws on the writings of female medieval mystics, attempting to translate their ‘mystic style’ into works that explore the relationship of the body to language, how it is written, and how it exceeds and escapes this inscribing.

Sriwhana studied at Elam School of Fine Arts, The University of Auckland, and completed an MFA at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. Recent exhibitions include Honestly Speaking, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2020; castle-crystal, Edinburgh Arts Festival, Ida-Ida, Spike Island, Bristol, 2019; A hook but no fish, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth and Pump House Gallery, London, 2018; having-seen-snake, Michael Lett, Auckland, 2017; and Oceanic Feeling with Maria Taniguchi, ICA, Singapore, 2016.


Salome Tanuvasa is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Auckland, New Zealand. Using moving image, drawing, photography and sculpture, her work explores themes related to her immediate surroundings and her family life. Her Instagram account is @salometanuvasa.


Natalie Tozer is interested in the soft unfurling emergence of the next generation, in an overarching context of care, consideration, gift and long thinking. To explore and realise these interests, and as a response to Femisphere, Natalie founded the mothermother project, a permanent exhibition platform with female programming as its heart and kaupapa. This is a project that evolves as artists invite artists to explore a philosophy of exchange. The project fosters connections by providing space for artists to make contact with artists they admire, or whom they wish to thank or reach out to, or to simply acknowledge, to initiate an exchange of space. The taonga gifted to the project is the artist’s invitation to the next artist. This generational process aims to activate curatorial practice, challenging normative modes of gallery representation.

Nat’s personal practice also embodies this line of enquiry. In these modes of non-hierarchical, collective, circular thinking she is looking at symbiotic relationships, assemblages, entanglements, and improbable cohabitations and collaborations. Through surveying the ground and walking, her work explores the way we can amalgamate or fuse with our environments to access alternative futures.


Cora-Allan Wickliffe is a multi-disciplinary artist and curator of Māori and Niuean descent. A contemporary practitioner of the Niuean tradition of barkcloth known as hiapo, she is credited with reviving the ‘sleeping artform,’ which has not been practised in Niue for several generations. Her work is very important to the Niuean community and has been exhibited in Australia, Aotearoa, England and Niue. She has already had a sell-out exhibition in New Zealand and her work is in the collections of Te Papa and Auckland Museum. Cora-Allan has a Master of Visual Art and Design from AUT.


Alexa Wilson is a choreographer, performance artist, video artist and writer who has been based in Berlin for the last ten years, and is now back in Aotearoa. She has presented performance and video works across Aotearoa, Europe, Asia, North America and Australia. Her works have been performed in theatre and visual arts contexts including 21 Movements, Manifesta Biennial, 2017; Oracle, Sophiensaele Berlin, Artspace Auckland and The Physics Room, Christchurch; Breathless, Dixon Place, New York City; Peripheral Visions, Meinblau Gallery, Kule, and Ackerstadt Palast Month of Performance Art-Berlin, all 2015; 999, Morni Hills Biennale, India; Ugly Duck Gallery, London and Performance Art Week Aotearoa, Wellington. She has created full-length works for Footnote New Zealand Dance: The Status of Being, 2014, and The Dark Light, 2017. She has won four Auckland Fringe Awards for Weg: A-Way, 2011, and the Tup Lang Award for Toxic White Elephant Shock, 2009. She has curated Morni Hills Performance Residency in India, 2017, and is founder and artistic director of Experimental Dance Week Aotearoa 2019–20. She has a BA from The University of Auckland, a BPSA from Unitec, an MPhil from AUT and a PG Dip Fine Arts from Transart Institute Berlin/NYC. She is about to publish her first book, Theatre of Ocean.

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Gill Gatfield

Inclusive Monuments

Under the crystallising lens of #BlackLivesMatter, the false histories and trauma embedded in our colonial monuments are unfolding. Shadows cast by statues of glorified ‘founding fathers’ stain the ground, unravelling a legacy of oppression, exploitation and violent conquest. Challenges and calls to review and replace these symbols need a plan of action, not only with regard to the promises of Te Tiriti o Waitangi but also under the gender spotlights of #TimesUp and #MeToo.

Women in Aotearoa have protested female exclusion from the public realm since colonisation began – from being denied the legal rights of ‘a person’ in the late nineteenth century, including the right to vote, to objecting to an overarching male symbolism in public space. In the context of a then new 1977 law promising equal rights for women, Māori and other marginalised groups, Te Arikinui Dame Te Atairangikaahu, when opening the Waikato Savings Bank Building in Hamilton, pointed to the bank’s crest – “a Ram’s Head between two Bulls’ Heads,” and said:

May I suggest that it would be prudent –
in view of the Human Rights Commission Act …
if, on your shield at least one bull
were replaced by a cow.
Quotable New Zealand Women (Reed, 1994, np)

The Māori Queen’s quip made the connection between symbolism and human rights, and how these coexist in the public domain. Public cultural objects are powerful outward expressions of both the status of individuals and their values, and the state of equality in a nation or place.

Elevated notions of power and commercial value attach to masculine symbols, giving reason to a bank’s choice of rams and bulls. This translated into a University of Auckland Master of Fine Arts Painting Reader, a compilation of recommended texts – 90 percent penned by men, and almost exclusively about man-made art. On the cover, a tongue-in-cheek yet salient script from a John Baldessari painting Tips for Artists (1967-68):

Tips For Artists Who Want To Sell
…
Subject Matter is Important: It has been said that paintings with cows and hens in them collect dust … while the same paintings with bulls and roosters sell.

From paintings to sculptures, the bull reigns supreme – presiding over the pavements of Wall Street and mounted on countless pedestals. In a textbook mise en scène, Kristen Visbal’s Fearless Girl faced off with Arturo Di Modica’s Charging Bull in Manhattan for one year before being removed to stand alone, amidst complaints the Girl was a commercial ploy and faux feminism, detracting meaning and attention from the bull – itself a symbol of capitalism and full-frontal masculinity.

Across Aotearoa, a parade of colonial male muscle occupies pedestals and parks. Commemorated British-born politicians and leaders include those who orchestrated or led invasions of Māori pā and mana whenua, upheld the oppression of Māori and profited from stolen land. Among these ‘founding fathers’ are abusers and oppressors of women, and political leaders who repeatedly undermined women’s efforts to win the right to vote and used their power to deny New Zealand women the basic human rights.

In the nation’s capital alone, there are over 150 pieces of public art. Of the eighteen figurative statues, only two honour individual women – the colonial British monarch Queen Victoria and New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield. Only one Māori female figure stands in Pōneke Wellington, featured in the sculpture Hinerangi by Māori arts leader and artist Darcy Nicholas QSO, at Pukeahu National War Memorial Park. At a televised election debate between women party leaders in 2020, political promises were made to install one more monument in the Capital, honouring an otherwise absent nineteenth century Pākehā suffragist leader, Kate Sheppard.

Two memorials in Pōneke Wellington honour the British brothers William and Edward Gibbon Wakefield. They were imprisoned in England for abducting a 15-year-old girl from her school and forcing her into marriage for a ransom; a precursor to their exploits leading the New Zealand Company, a government-sanctioned enterprise that amassed and on-sold Māori land. In the Octagon at Ōtepoti Dunedin, a UNESCO City of Literature, a monument to Scottish bard Robbie Burns celebrates a sexual predator outed by poet Liz Lochhead in 2018 as Weinsteinian.

On the forecourt of Parliament, a larger-than-life Premier Richard Seddon, who actively obstructed women’s suffrage for years, stands centre stage. A 2020 #DitchDick campaign demands the statue’s removal, listing Seddon’s “opposition to women’s rights, promotion of racist policy against Chinese people, support for widespread confiscations and coercive purchase of Māori land, and attempts to invade and annex the Pacific nations of Fiji, Sāmoa and the Cook Islands, succeeding in the latter.” This is streets away from the narrative on the capital city’s official website asserting the Seddon statue “importantly injects a degree of humanity into the grounds, reinforcing the idea that Government is made of the people.”

As hidden histories emerge, how can we explain and elevate these figures’ contributions above their culpability for causing systemic and/or serious harm? If public art has power to engage human hearts, minds and spirits, then today those monuments serve only to reinforce and create further intergenerational harm. Caption rewriting cannot remedy or mitigate the cruel psychology of a glorified oppressor’s presence in public space. Such monuments belong in the Oppression Wing of an Aotearoa Museum for Women, with a shared boundary to the larger Museum of Racial Injustice – two containers for relics of a past for which there is no place in the present.

New monuments are needed of ancestors, activists and wāhine toa. The National Council of Women listed eight women worthy of a statue in the capital:

Meri Te Tai Mangakāhia – women's suffrage leader
Kate Sheppard – women's suffrage leader
Dame Whina Cooper – Māori women's activist
Princess Te Puea Herangi – Kīngitanga movement leader
Jean Batten – aviator and first person to fly solo from England to New Zealand
Kate Edger – first woman in New Zealand to gain a university degree
Whetu Tirikatene-Sullivan – long-serving MP
Elizabeth McCombs – first woman elected to parliament in New Zealand

There are many more.

A 2020 survey of 500 Māori generated a list of figures who inspired and created, including advocates, navigators, gardeners and tohunga. Tomorrow’s monuments might also honour the scientists, health-care workers, volunteers and essential services confronting Covid-19. Future monuments need not be limited to representing history and human aspiration in figure form. As Leonie Hayden (The Spinoff’s Ātea Editor) says, “What about monuments to generosity? To creation?” The project of democratising public space will allow and celebrate a refreshing diversity of expression and thought.

Attention also needs to be directed toward the commissioning process and the makers of public art. With rare exceptions (typically only when a woman is commissioned to make a statue or memorial for a woman), our public art makers are predominantly European and Pākehā men. The curated spaces of public sculpture exhibitions and sculpture parks reveal the particular function they play in creating the conditions that enable male artists to sustain a practice and to engage in public art.

At the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art Sculpture Park in Denmark, a permanent survey of international modern and contemporary work is listed among ‘The World’s Best Open-Air Museums.’ In 2015, I studied these works in what one commentator described as “all the modern masters of the art of sculpture,” and wrote in Art News New Zealand: “There’s no work by women artists in the Louisiana Sculpture Park, yet.” Five years later, there are still no women sculptors in this important collection.

In 2019, at the iconic Storm King, in upstate New York, one of the largest collections of outdoor sculpture in the world, I counted eighty-two artists in the permanent collection including long-term loans. Only fifteen of the artists were women – 18 percent. Beside Ursula von Rydingsvard’s Luba, in fading light, I staged a virtual Native Tongue, the alter ego of an ancient kauri sculpture: literally an Other I. The ephemeral companion momentarily nudged the proportion of women artists up closer to 20 percent. Numbers and pronouns are political. What’s measured, counts.

Gill Gatfield, Storm Queen, 2019.
(Native Tongue AR, 2018, with Ursula von Rydingsvard, Luba, 2009–10, at Storm King, New York)

Male occupation of public space is measured also through the pages of academia. Amazon recently delivered a much anticipated new book – Abstraction Matters: Contemporary Sculptors in Their Own Words (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019). The text expounds on the ideas of fourteen sculptors, including current practitioners, selected for being “not only eminent artists who made their mark in the contemporary sculptural landscape: they are also sharp and insightful theorists, inclined to reflect intensely upon the sense of their own work in particular and upon the nature of abstract sculpture in general.” The sculptors in Abstraction Matters are all men. The project demarcates a paradigm in which the makers’ heroic work and texts define the canon. There is literally no room for the Other. As a practitioner of abstraction, I sawed the book in half.

There’s no shortage of women contenders for sculpture books, parks and public collections. Smart public bodies like the UK Arts Council acquired 250 sculptures and installations by more than 150 women, across seventy-five years, including ‘ambitious work’ – the content for a major 2020 touring show in the UK, Breaking the Mould: Sculpture by Women Since 1945. In Los Angeles, Hauser Wirth & Schimmel’s exhibition Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947–2016 presented 100 works by thirty-four international women artists, tracing ways in which women have “changed the course of art by deftly transforming the language of sculpture since the post-war period.”

I think of Anni Albers, who was prevented from studying architecture at the Bauhaus, and directed instead to learn weaving, as “women were unsuited to the rigours of geometry.” Not content with her allocated art form being demoted to second rate, Albers disrupted that canon and built walls of fabric.

Gill Gatfield, Get Even – Abstraction Matters, 2020

Cities and sculpture exhibitions and parks in Aotearoa bulge with old and new artworks by male artists. Where doors are open, female artists demonstrate innovation, capacity and experience in making outdoor public work, and present challenging works in large numbers in successive national exhibitions such as the NZ Sculpture OnShore, a Women’s Refuge fundraiser, in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Signs of a glass ceiling surface in the commissioning of permanent public work, and in the numbers of female artists shrinking as the prestige of a sculpture exhibition and the rewards on offer increase. At the ratepayer- and patron-funded biannual Auckland Botanic Gardens Sculpture in the Gardens 2015–2016, less than one quarter of artists selected were women (24 percent). Similarly in the biannual exhibition headland Sculpture on the Gulf 2017, women artists made up just over one quarter of those selected (27.5 percent).

These numbers are reflected in the gender-skewed picture of commissioned and long-term or permanently displayed work. At the privately owned yet sometimes publicly open Gibbs Farm, of twenty-nine major artworks only 10 percent are by women. There are more artists there named Richard and Peter than there are women, giving rise to a potential art Dick Index in the same vein as the John Index, which reflects the dominance of men on company boards. Other contemporary collections conform to the norm, with the proportion of female artists ranging from one third to none at all: Brick Bay Sculpture Park, 33 percent; Connells Bay Sculpture Park, 25 percent; Auckland City Council public art collection, 28 percent; Tai Tapu, Te Waipounamu South Island, 27 percent; Auckland Botanic Gardens, 24 percent; Wellington Sculpture Trust, 18.5 percent; SCAPE Public Art, 15 percent; and at the international gateway Auckland Airport Sculpture Park, 0 percent. As if ruling with an iron fist, a giant sculpture of a male hand recently crossed the country from Ōtautahi Christchurch to Pōneke Wellington, from one public city art institution rooftop to another, a not-so-subtle reminder of who has a firm grip on public space.

A deeply engrained culture of racial and gender bias runs through our historic monuments and in the under-representation of diverse figures and artists’ work in public space. Decade upon decade, incrementally, it all adds up. Token gestures and waiting for more time to pass will not correct the imbalance, especially during a pandemic where economic and social impacts fall more heavily on women and ethnic minority groups. None of this points to a conspiracy, but turning a blind eye in the face of knowledge is effectively an act of endorsement. It is time to get even, and assess whether ‘even’ is the right goal for gender diversity given the higher proportion of women artists who have graduated in the creative sector over the past thirty years. It’s time for proactive public art plans that honour the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and deliver gender, racial and intersectional diversity. It’s time for an unbiased and inclusive public sphere.

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Alice Alva

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Grace Bader

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Lisa Crowley

Lisa Crowley, Life Seen by Life (stills), 2019, digital scans from 16mm film.
Text excerpt from Agua Viva, by Clarice Lispector.

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Jen Bowmast & Priscilla Howe

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Greta Anderson

Guru Gurl

“I encountered the female guru as an adult,” admits Greta Anderson. “The gurus were always male, until I noticed a female guru on my GP's office wall. Her name is Gurumayi Chidvilasananda.”

“The folk around me growing up were Western Indophiles. Guru culture was something I experienced on the commune [as a young person]. As a child I thought they were silly and weird. [Now], as an adult, I know them to be sometimes useful and other times abusive.”

Anderson’s latest body of work circles around the idea of suburban gurus – ones who, when removed from their ashram-style commune context, she speculates might have another role. What if a guru doesn’t lead us to enlightenment, but to infantile narcissism? Psychology lecturer Steve Taylor talks about a ‘guru syndrome,’ in which followers, “may feel a sense of oneness or bliss in the company of the guru, but this isn’t genuine enlightenment. It's more akin to the sense of oneness that a baby feels with their mother.”

This new series, still in the making, is called The Transcenders. The gender of this guru in the physician’s office struck a chord. All of the portraits in this series are of women. They pose with weirdly glowing props in a spot-lit arena. The women in these photographs span a range of life stages. They stand or sit purposefully alone; their intensity is inexplicably potent.

Continuing to use the day-for-night techniques she has used in earlier series, she produces high-contrast images that throw any background into a velvety, shadowy blackness. Her images are single-object portraits. Her subjects, whether houses, people or props, are positioned in the centre of the picture plane, heavily lit, all else darkened. The subjects are, like the guru outside of the commune, stripped of context.

The high shine, intense focus and stripped-back aesthetic all suggest the artistic equivalent of a hard stare at the trappings of new-age lifestyle. They steel us against a regression to a childlike state of irresponsibility and unconditional devotion to our spiritual teachers.

Her portrait sitters are stand-ins. “I shoot people I know. My students, friends, etc. I have done a series of men, too; for example, I shoot repair men that come to my house.” This prosaic fact recalls a much earlier body of work called The Stand-Ins, in which Anderson explored the idea of a person, place or object being a psychic or symbolic marker. Weeds, for example, are stand-ins for indigenous, displaced flora. These subtle symbolic codes are what give Anderson’s works their tension and staying power. Her residential dwellings, spot-lit and caught in an artificial twilight, might imply a concealed site of cult-led trauma, or they might simply be goading at suburban Aotearoa’s vernacular housing. Anderson’s hard stare is a point of pause, a cautionary tale, in which to stand and question as well as worship.

Hanna Scott

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Ali Senescall

Ali Senescall, The Piano Teacher, 2020

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Teresa Peters

Ode To Mother (Earthed)

all lines
converge
at the centre
not the middle
but
just outside
the picture...

Joanna Margaret Paul, “O, Seacliff,” June 1973 (excerpt)¹

Made from the same clay. Mother and daughter Maree Horner and Teresa Peters both explore embodiment within our respective practices. My current practice is based in clay and ceramics – bodies that echo the prehistoric. Maree currently works in graphic, body-scale multimedia works that are monolithic testaments to the female. These works often juxtapose and dwarf glorified monuments of culture with domestic objects, a complex interplay of the familiar and the erotic. Stemming from Familiar Monuments (1996), the archaeology of the ideas can be traced back to Chair (1973).

In the 1970s Horner became known for sculptural works that demonstrated a sensitivity of material and form. These works included precarious glass constructions, ice monoliths, and one work consisting of an electrified domestic armchair. In Chair (1973) Maree Horner harnesses pure electricity in a work that is made to shock.

A current pulses through the chair, while the floor is only for earthing and could be walked onto. The piece is very silent except for a quiet continuous tick, tick. I was thinking about suburban neurosis and the person who sits in a comfortable chair and doesn't think about anything. In order to keep the cats off, my father used to electrify his car every night with a battery and an electric fence unit like I used in the chair. I liked that idea and that image. ²

Maree Horner was a female forerunner in the development of conceptual and post-object art in New Zealand. In Groundswell: Avant-Garde Auckland 1971–79 at Auckland Art Gallery, 2018, Maree Horner and Fiona Clark stood as the two women innovators in the energetic movement that crossed institutional lines, embracing raw energy – performance, site-specific and land art.

In 2020 my ceramics are interested in bodies. Earth bodies, forming and transforming. Chemical compounds and molten entities, in intimate combustion. These raw clay and ceramic installations are interested in rhizomic multiplicity, nomadic transformation and the tentacular. Merging biomorphic and anthropomorphic forms in a poetry of touch. Ceramics is alchemy. Earth, water, air… fire. ECHO BONE (2019) “excavates primordial totems,” as we move through the Anthropocene, the epoch in which human activity took dominant effect on the environment. Navigating fetish and value in times of late capitalism and environmental dystopia. Looking to destroy categories and knock art off its pedestal, while exploring expanded fields and new understandings of environment.

Maree Horner’s 1970s work has been retrospectively celebrated manyfold in the last years. In 2019 Chair was reconstructed and exhibited at Anderson Rhodes Gallery, New Plymouth. Diving Board (1973–98) showed in 2016–17 as part of All Lines Converge and in 2019 as part of Ruth Buchanan’s The scene in which I find myself / Or, where does my body belong, both at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. On the show’s Gallery 3 mezzanine, categorised under Exception and Politics, Maree Horner’s Diving Board and Judy Darragh’s Wild Thing (1999) flank the space. They represent as two of the godmothers of New Zealand Her-story. Ruth Buchanan’s conversation utilises the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery’s collection as it seeks to embody, and at the same time dissect, the art canon.

The disproportionate under-representation of women, Māori, Pacific, and other minority artists is absolute. Here, the friction comes to life as various positions meet, squeezing up against each other and moving toward something that more closely represents our pulsating bodies. This new entity is not perfect, not flawless, not even really free, but made of bodies nonetheless, multi-layered, expansive, where skin, bone, flesh, and the diagonal forces in motion that keep us together come to the fore. Through this operation what is produced is – as American poet and activist Audre Lorde has described – a scrutiny that is intimate.

Maree Horner and Teresa Peters look to the body and earth bodies to subvert monumental paradigms. “Locating power automatically snaps to how bodies, languages, and architectures navigate, exaggerate, scramble, or reconstruct how power looks and is experienced.” As a pandemic embodies our civilisation, grinding the human institution to its ass, let us give ode to the foremothers who have fought the revolutions before us so we now can continue to evolve in power. Earthed.

1. Joanna Margaret Paul, “O, Seacliff,” June 1973 [excerpt], in All Lines Converge [exhibition guide] (New Plymouth: Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, 2017).
2. Jim Allen and Wystan Curnow, eds., “Maree Horner,” in New Art: Some Recent New Zealand Sculpture and Post-object Art (Auckland: Heinemann, 1976), n.p.
3. Ruth Buchanan, The scene in which I find myself / Or, where does my body belong [exhibition guide] (New Plymouth: Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, 2019).
4. Ibid.

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Alexa Wilson

Figures emerge from an eerie landscape at the edge of the world during a time of global collapse. Are they a gang, are they a family, are they friends, children playing, a band, animals, protesters, misfits or party goers? Framed within a time of a global pandemic, climate change, social unrest and political uncertainty, witness the dreams which may be nightmares, indistinct from our present, offering possibilities for change and connectedness.

Live performance in Covid-19: Being inspired by performers as collaborators and community

The Politics of Dreaming by Alexa Wilson is exhausted activism and questioning posed through a hybrid of dance, theatre, performance art, installation, transforming objects and bodies. It asks us to consider our desire for connection, playfulness and intense vulnerability as strategies for collective dreaming and alchemising beyond an engineered political nightmare.

With a team of performers working collaboratively, including dancers, actors, abled and disabled, the work aims to question social thinking within political dreaming which is both destructive and creative, illusory and real. Inside this global climate of momentous change, can we receive this hybrid ritual of collaborative improvisation which engages future audiences to ‘dare to dream.’

Process toward presentation

This work has been developed before and during the Covid-19 pandemic with Creative NZ funding. Collaboration and improvisation with performers have been the main influences through this climate. Rehearsals in process, snapshots of pre-performance presentation photographed between Wellesley Studios and Auckland Old Folks Association.

Please note the performing arts has been particularly affected during this climate as it relies on collaborative practice in studio and live audiences.

Performers: Lusi Faiva, Olivia McGregor, Edward Clendon, Shanelle Lenehan, Alexa Wilson.

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Claudia Kogachi

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Elisabeth Pointon

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Rachel Shearer

Waha

Waha translates as ‘gate’, an opening, though also translates as ‘mouth’ or ‘voice’. Waha reflects on how the voicing of vowels, every word ends in a vowel in te reo Māori, might facilitate specific resonating ways of being and engender openings of space and time (as in Karanga).

Voice - Cathy Livermore
Composition, production - Rachel Shearer

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Cora-Allan Wickliffe

A Storyteller from Mangaia

In 2017 I curated the exhibition Turou at the Corban Estate Arts Centre, by the Pacifica Mamas, featuring the work of Mary Ama, Tiana Epati, Annabella Hosking, Teuke Malaga, Soia Tatu and Niki Gribble.

The public programme featured Moana Pacific Storytelling, which invited orators from around the Pacific to share in an evening of stories.

During this event, artist Tuaratini Ra‘a, a takitua (storyteller) from the collective Turou Takitua, left me feeling changed. Her story Te Roimata o Turarii, in the Cook Islands language, was based on her own family story.

English being my first language, I remember being nervous about the possibility of not understanding it. However, the story began with a child taken by their father, to be raised in another land. My tears began to well.

As more drama in the story unfolded Tuaratini moved swiftly around the room, bringing a history to life as she used her whole body – depicting the mother running around distressed, looking for her child, she used the hem of her dress to blow her nose and wipe her tears.

At the time, I was a new mother, and the story pulled at my heartstrings – it made me feel the loss and the sorrow of the characters. I had not expected nor experienced this kind of storytelling before and was shaken by the connection and by the emotions she made me feel.

Reflecting three years on, I realise that I should have expected that kind of energy from the Pacific, especially in the presence of a Cook Island storyteller. I can recall on many occasions being on a plane, or at a festival, and straight away knowing if there were any Cook Island women in the crowd. You can spot them a mile away in bright, patterned dresses, but also the way they carry their energy is very captivating. This is the kind of energy that Tuaratini carries with her when she performs, and each time I have heard her share stories I am left changed.

In 2019, during a storytelling session at the Pacifica Arts Centre, which happened to be held around Halloween, orators shared scary myths and legends from their communities. Tuaratini was there and shared a legend of a lady who lost her love, and the sadness turned her into a witch who would prey on small children – scary, right? Hunched over her daughter, pretending like she was the witch, Tuaratini sang “Kati kati a e moe e moe ra.” These luring words scared me in a way that I could imagine someone actually singing them. Just the other day my son was singing the words and my spine straightened and my imagination got the best of me – yet again, that is just an effect of a gifted storyteller.

What is it that makes me feel shifted each time I hear a new story from Tuaratini? In my curatorial and art practice I am often inspired by moments and events that allow me to learn and think more deeply about my position as a Niuean, Māori woman. Taking time to reflect on how my hiapo practice may affect others, I am often taken back to parts of Tuaratini’s storytelling that have arrested my mind and heart. I want a practice that does that.

Since 2017 I have seen her in many positions, serving within the Pacific community as MC, as administrator, as mother, as educator. Working closely with groups to encourage the revitalisation of storytelling styles from all over the Pacific, her work with this art form goes deeper than just her own practice. Tuaratini, as part of the Turou Takitua collective, has travelled globally, continually sharing and developing; however, what I love is that she always comes home and grows her best work in the Pacific. If you get a chance I recommend seeking out an opportunity to hear one of her fantastic legends. In this text I haven't attempted to explain a lot about her stories because it would not do them justice, but I hope you get to experience Pacific storytelling from one of the best.

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Gemma Banks

Anointing, 2020

In mid 2019 I went to see Headcase by Julia Morison.

A strange comfort presented itself as I walked the room filled with haunted music and severed porcelain heads. Was I walking into a mausoleum? A graveyard of 100 generations? And then it happened, my grandmother called out to me.

Heaving her last, she made a truncated sucking sound. I felt a hand lightly press on my shoulder. Then the room filled with a chill, her body was still.

It was quiet, but my heart was racing, what do I do now? I felt afraid and swallowed a big lump of air. I knocked on my aunt’s door. She was half asleep and confused, but she finally began to understand.

We moved at an alternating pace. A hurrying scuttle, and a frozen stare. The remaining brothers and sisters were called and we gathered in the lounge. They ask me what happened.

A pierced sky and a hand on my shoulder. I shut my eyes and say goodbye.

Anointing is my gesture to Julia Morison’s Headcase.

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Huriana Kopeke-Te Aho

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Andrea Gardner

The sense of quiet during the lockdown was unexpectedly soothing. Our small city lost its motorised hum. The air seemed tranquil; the days were open-ended and very few people were rushing about. No appointments, no dinner dates. More time fiddling in the kitchen and the garden. Studio time also seemed to stretch out generously, encouraging deeper diving into self-reflective states. It was an odd mixture of calmness mixed with nervous anxiety and sadness over the calamitous events in the global distance. With my art practice of staged photography (all within the confines of the studio) I decided to work in an improvisational and intuitive way, responding to the shapes and colours I could make with domestically sourced props, cardboard, paint and my own body. I said to myself, “Don’t worry about content.” And it was fun.

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Natalie Tozer

My work documents exposed urban stratigraphy. I look for layers that aren’t meant to be seen. Curbside ruins. Crumbled footpaths. Potholes. These layers are visible histories of life/nonlife entangled within the ground. I interpret these small moments in our urban landscape as interruptions to capitalist strategies. Mythically and metaphorically rich, the ground provides us with clues, knowledge, refuge as well as the sunken networks of extraction, exploitation and disposal. The ground is active, generous and vulnerable. We lace it with tar-seal, concrete and gravel; stone blasted and rendered for our urban environments.

I see my practice as a way to read and understand the ground as the surface to a complex underland. By collecting, documenting and deciphering the findings, I hope to gather enough data to learn something. I like to reach out in the dark, to gaze into a possible future and let the practice reveal the rest.

This year, I have made casts of broken footpaths near and around Karangahape Road, Tāmaki Makaurau. The markings from tools and previous layers of broken grout lie exposed for interpretation like messages from the underland lurching upwards eager to be seen.

The recent Covid-19 rāhui brought repair and construction of the footpath to a halt. During this lull in productivity and progress I made some casts that now act as a fossil record. I want to show through the work that I deeply admire the well-used areas we travel through. I want to acknowledge and contemplate the beauty of its worn complexity and explore the idea that meaningful production should be a subset of ‘care.’ This approach is about revealing the alternative strategies against capitalist modes of production, where we focus on tending and caring for what we have, instead of perpetuating in an ever-expanding frenzy.

The rāhui gave me and my nine-year-old daughter Penelope time to walk around our neighborhood, where she carefully acted as a pathfinder and navigational keeper of our mutual discovery. Together we found and surveyed small poetic moments of urban decay, some of which will never be fixed, remaining arrested in time just the way they are. These places are entanglements where the underground reaches through the ever-expanding mask of concrete, the mark of empire building since the Roman times.

For me, these walks enact soft lines of experience and memory, weaving relational becomings in common worlds. They are perspectives on life and nonlife, and the offer of coexistence. Through exploring and striving to understand, I try to invite the possibility of symbiotic and improbable cohabitations and collaborations into my practice and relationships.

Perhaps in years to come, this geontological learning and speculation will emerge into the next generation through Penelope. I smile when she unearths small findings from the curb, lichen-encrusted tar-seal crumbles. As if discovering a perfect shell on a storm-swept beach, she collects and clutches her find all the way home to show me. A small offering from the messy entangled ground.

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Nikau Hindin

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Yukari Kaihori

Once Upon a Time in a garden

The Covid-19 lockdown in New Zealand made it a necessity for me to work within a limited physical space and use found materials from around the house. It is an unprecedented event in my lifetime. I did not know what was coming next. In this era, we usually know how the year goes and can plan things in advance. I thought about my late nana – the emergency circumstance in my life has become a time for me to attempt to understand and relate to her. Maybe this is (not remotely close, but) what it was like when she was young and the war broke out. There must’ve been tremendous uncertainty and stress for everyone. Maybe panic buying is much like the way people reacted back then. She told me about (again, not even remotely comparable, but) not being able to obtain things like food, materials – everything slowly disappeared from the market and you had to recycle everything.

Toshiko Kimura was the youngest sibling and her mother died during childbirth. She was adopted out at three years old to a wealthy childless couple from Numa Shima a small island in Seto Inlet, Osaka. They adopted her with one expectation, that she would grow up and take a husband through an arranged marriage, to better the family name.Later she graduated from Osaka Meijo High School.

She was not an artist in the way that we define it today. But she paid attention to the details in everyday forms more than anyone: such as the way she made Japanese tea in a ritualistic manner, how she put out a candle by waving her hand in front of it, how she made notes for poems (haiku) on a flyer, or how she folded every piece of used wrapping paper, every handkerchief or piece of plastic wrap going to the bin into a neat, perfectly folded square. There was a perfection in her mannerisms – precise, calm and articulate – and she did it all without ever expecting anyone to witness or appreciate it. She was no one – an ordinary woman, a housewife, a mother, a grandmother – like so many other nameless women who worked hard to create our foundations. In my first years of life, she looked after me every day in the garden, pointed out to me the subtle colour change in plants, and the smell of different flowers in different seasons, the way the sun looks different daily and the way the moon looks different depending on how you are feeling. She found pleasure in small discoveries in our ordinary surroundings.

Lockdown in Aotearoa made me more aware of the limited space we inhibit and made me pay closer attention to ordinary things. Mostly, though, I became more aware of how fortunate I am to have family and friends, my positionality, place, time and freedoms that perhaps my grandmother didn’t have in her time. I have been in touch with my artist and non-artist friends and my family daily. We chat, supporting each other whether we are in Aotearoa, Germany, the USA, Canada or Japan. I had my grandmother’s garden in my thoughts the whole time.

Untitled, 2020, cotton fabric, 2400 × 2650mm. Towards the end of the first Covid-19 lockdown, I made the work out of my one summer bedsheet (100 percent cotton) as that was the most accessible canvas I had around. I buried it in the dirt to weather and dye it, and then installed it in the backyard.

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Vicktoria Johnson

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Hana Pera Aoake

Rachael Rakena's Haka Peep Show and the vitality of culture

In this country rugby is a religion. One of my earliest memories is of the Rugby World Cup in 1995. I vividly recall seeing the All Blacks perform Ka Mate, and seeing Jonah Lomu right in front. I remember the commentator saying, “the cultural challenge of the haka,” and “Jonah Lomu is absolutely living the haka.” In hindsight I can’t help but think about the contradictions of players like Jonah Lomu, who on the one hand represented so much for a generation of young Polynesian people, particularly from his hometown of South Auckland. On the other hand, I thought about his vocal support of John Key and his brand of conservative neoliberal social welfare reforms, which further disinvested and exacerbated the problems that already existed in the community from which Lomu came. Lomu the symbol and Lomu the person were often difficult men to reconcile.¹

Through the eyes of a young Maaori child living in diaspora in Australia, to see haka performed was always a source of immense pride in both being from New Zealand and being Maaori. It gave me a sense of belonging and yet it felt alienating to see these men slap their thighs in defiance of their opponents – a rugby team. It felt important to see representation of Maaori and have it be shared and on the world stage, indicating the potentiality for biculturalism. Yet it always felt empty somehow. Is sport just entertainment? It can’t be. To distance sport from politics is of course ridiculous, especially given the legacy of events such as the All Black’s tour of South Africa in 1960 and the Springbok Tour in 1981. The lesser-known tour in 1960 saw the New Zealand Rugby Football Union (NZRFU) refuse to select Maaori players, leading to the ‘No Maoris, No Tour’ campaign. It wasn’t until 1970 that Maaori were selected to play in South Africa as ‘honorary whites,’ after significant pressure from a petition headed by Anglican Bishop Wiremu Netana Panapa.² This title of ‘honorary whites’ was described by the Maaori Women’s Welfare League as an ‘insult to the Maaori race’ and in so doing, Maaori women let the world know their opposition to the policy of apartheid.³

One of the most painful conversations I had while overseas was centred around rugby. It was painful because in explaining who I was and where I came from, a white European I didn’t know very well began to perform their first association with New Zealand. Having some guy from Belgium perform a pisstake of a haka made me think about the oversimplification of Maaori and how we are regarded as a homogeneous group. Indeed, earlier this year, when Kim and Kourtney Kardashian’s children performed the #HakaChallenge, and nurses in Devon performed a pisstake of a haka to build ‘morale’ and champion themselves as ‘warriors’ fighting Covid-19, I felt just as shocked, hurt and uncomfortable.

The story of the composition of Ka Mate is known extensively within Ngaati Toa and Ngaati Tuuwharetoa oral histories. It follows a moment of tribulation for the arguably genocidal Ngaati Toa chief Te Rauparaha on his journey from Kawhia to seek alliances with other tribal groups, one of those being Tuuwharetoa, who lived in the Lake Taupoo region. After following the advice of Te Heuheu, the paramount chief of Tuuwharetoa, Te Rauparaha sought protection from Te Heuheu’s relative, Te Wharerangi. A war party sought utu against Te Rauparaha for crimes against Ngaati Te Aho. Te Wharerangi instructed Te Rauparaha to climb into a kumara pit and for Te Wharerangi’s wife, Te Rangikoaea, to sit on top. By combining the spiritual qualities of a woman (noa) and of food, Te Wharerangi was able to weaken the power of the tohunga from the war party. When his enemies arrived, Te Rauparaha could feel the power of the tohunga’s incantations and is said to have muttered “Ka mate! ka mate!” under his breath (“Will I die!”) and “Ka ora! Ka ora!” (“Will I live!”), as the power of noa reduced the effect of the tohunga’s incantation. These lines were repeated many times, and eventually Ngaati Te Aho were convinced that Te Rauparaha had escaped towards Taranaki. This haka was written as a celebration of life over death.⁴

How do we disentangle the tension of acknowledgement and celebration of Maaori and our own complicity in our commodification?

Ka Mate belongs to Ngaati Toa, not to the All Blacks and certainly not to New Zealand. For eight years Ngaati Toa attempted to trademark Ka Mate to prevent its use without their permission, particularly by commercial organisations. In 2006, the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand declined their claim on the grounds that Ka Mate had significance to all New Zealanders and represented New Zealand abroad. To me this is indicative of the imperial notions of nationhood, and of a legacy of attempted cultural genocide and plunder of our lands and resources, and the distortion of Indigenous cultural practices as entertainment. To appropriate this haka and deprive it of its context and meaning is just another way in which we can see the imperial enterprise of appropriating peoples’ art objects and artefacts, and the simultaneous dissociation of these peoples from their material and immaterial culture.⁵ In 2011, in the lead-up to New Zealand hosting the Rugby World Cup, New Zealand Rugby came to a quiet agreement with Ngaati Toa.

In September 2011, the Kaai Tahu and Ngaa Puhi artist Rachael Rakena produced Haka Peep Show, in the middle of the Octagon in Dunedin. Haka Peep Show was commissioned for the Rugby World Cup and consisted of a large, towering black pou that was shaped like a Rexona deodorant can (a brand endorsed by the All Blacks) and contained four viewing booths and coin slots for koha. Each booth presented a 3D video artwork of a different haka, viewed through a peephole. The four haka were performed by different Maaori leaders, such as Ngaati Porou rangatira Selwyn Parata and Tuuhoe artist and activist Tame Iti, Maaori men for whom haka is a part of their everyday lives. This work was made collaboratively – recentring the notion of the singular genius artist and instead placing value on collectivity and the fluidity of te ao Maaori – in that it demonstrated a capacity to reinscribe autonomy, our tino rangatiratanga or mana motuhake in a public space.

Haka Peep Show became part of a debate around what is and isn’t an artwork, with Dunedin City Councillor Lee Vandervis “resigning in disgust” from the council's Art in Public Places subcommittee in September 2011, the same month the pou was unveiled. Vandervis railed against the funding in the Otago Daily Times, asking the media, “Why are we spending $50,000 on an embarrassing penis? A 5m-high penis, in the Octagon.”⁶ Vandervis fuelled a rhetoric focusing solely upon how much the work cost and who owned it. Dave Cull, Dunedin Mayor at that time, claimed Cr Vandervis had resigned "because he found participating in the decisions of the committee too challenging."⁷

The debacle around who owned the work was tiresome, particularly because when we think about the idea of ownership in a Maaori ontology, it simply isn’t the same. A Maaori worldview sits in opposition to colonial ideas of ownership, for instance the differences between the division of land within English common law versus kaitiakiship, or the difference between kawanatanga and tino rangatiratanga. It’s as Ani Mikaere observes in her essay “Three (Million) Strikes and Still Not Out,” “While it would be inconsistent with a Māori worldview to declare that we ‘owned’ the land, iwi and hapū enjoyed an intimate relationship with each and every corner of Te Ika-a-Māui and Te Waipounamu.”⁸ For Maaori, you cannot ‘own’ land as an individual, a company or some other setup. You can only exercise responsibilities and rights in respect of it (land and Papatuuaanuku).⁹ The ideas and gentle criticism layered within Haka Peep Show were undermined by an obsession with the ‘taxpayer.’ I still feel that this work offered a thoughtful challenge to the dominant white monoculture that revealed how deeply entrenched colonial notions of ownership and who has the right to public space are, within a city built on wetlands to replicate Edinburgh. When asked about who owned this artwork, Otakou runanga chairman Edward Ellison replied, "It is the artist's work. I imagine she owns it."¹⁰

Rachael Rakena is a Maaori artist, and a Senior Lecturer at Massey University. She uses the term ‘toi rerehiko’ to describe her practice, literally meaning electronic brain, which is a play on rohohiko, which is the Maaori word for computer. By substituting the ‘roho’ with ‘rere,’ meaning to flow, fly, be carried by the wind, rise or escape, Rakena imparts a digitality within our own bodies. Many of her works explore whakapapa, water and Maaori cultural practices and histories, through “electricity, movement and light,” using digital and electronic technologies from a Maaori perspective.¹¹ In an interview with Dr Huhana Smith in 2003, Rakena says, “In my work I explore the interstices between different cultural places – the space between them and the experiences that happen in that space.”¹² She adds that her work plays with “notions of traditional and contemporaneity with interdisciplinary and collaborative digital practice.”¹³ Rakena likes to work collaboratively, and another work I am often drawn to is Pacific Washup (2003–04), a performance and collaboration between Rakena, Fez Fa‘anana and Brian Fuata. Rakena has also collaborated with many other people, including her whaanau, Maaori artist Brett Graham and Maaori dancer Louise Pootiki. Rakena has exhibited internationally, including at the Sydney, Venice and Busan Biennales.

When I think about Rakena’s oeuvre I can’t help but think about flying over water and weaving through the zeros and ones of cyberspace. It makes me think of the story of Taane putting Te Whaanau Marama – the children of light, the sun, the moon and the stars – in the sky and along their path. This action culminated in the day–night cycle that is fundamental to the rhythmic cycles of nature and influences our human sleeping patterns, when our mauri goes on a hiikoi with our tuupuna. Rakena’s work has a vitality and urgency that renders the liveliness, adaptability and resistance of Maaori as sacred and fluid. Her work is like a hongi, it is an exchange of the hau between an expansive kaupapa Maaori methodology and a Maaori way of being.

As a young Maaori living and working in the Octagon at the time, seeing Haka Peep Show was one of the first times I understood the power of public space and the debasement and homogenisation of culture. Haka is more than just a group of men in rugby shorts performing Ka Mate. Haka is a diverse cultural expression that can mark different modalities, geographies and histories. For instance, Tame Iti performed a protest haka for Haka Peep Show shrouded in Hinepukohurangi, acknowledging Iti’s whakapapa to Te Urewera. The koha slots meant that not only could everyone experience the mana of haka, but that all koha collected could be gifted back to the kaitiaki of each haka. This acted as a subversion and critique of these processes of cultural debasement, rather than being an act of complicity in the commodification of culture.

Haka Peep Show coincided with both the Rugby World Cup and the release of the Waitangi Tribunal’s Wai 262 report in July 2011. Launched in 1991 by six iwi, Wai 262 was a Waitangi Tribunal claim about the recognition of rights around, and control of, traditional Maaori knowledge, customs and relationships with the natural environment. This report asserted that the Crown had failed to adequately protect Maaori interests in relation to a wide range of cultural knowledge and cultural practices, as well as in their relationships with Indigenous flora and fauna. Rakena reflected that “Haka in mainstream New Zealand, and internationally, has thrived in large part due to the haka branding of the All Blacks and the huge uptake of sponsorship and advertising in the media that exploits and promotes Maaori culture.”¹⁴

While in Rotterdam in 2018 I saw Paul McCarthy’s Santa Claus (2001), affectionately known as the ‘butt-plug gnome,’ and thought a lot about the erection of phallic architecture all across Europe, as an enshrinement of imperial power. So many people who saw Haka Peep Show could not see past its phallic shape. While it’s easy to draw a parallel to the shape of the pou and its title with the work of an artist like McCarthy, that would be oversimplifying and dismissing the specificity of the context of this work within Aotearoa. Rakena’s pou referenced Tane, but a pou could refer to a pillar or a goal post, or to a kaiako or expert or symbol of support. It obviously referenced the form of a men’s aerosol deodorant can, a product that sponsors the All Blacks. Haka Peep Show spoke to the much broader context of the sexualisation and commodification of Maaori sportsmen and the toxic representation of both their masculinity and culture within the media.

In the two years I was at Massey doing my MFA, unfortunately I only encountered Rakena twice, once during a critique, where she gave me some of the most useful feedback I had had the entire time I was there. I felt star struck and shy around her. I hope in writing this I can reinscribe this work as being a brilliant satire and devastating critique of the commodification of haka that is imbued with generosity, respect and the fluidity and potentiality of bodies and the stories they hold. The enduring potency of Haka Peep Show is the way these dialogues that Rakena sought to engage in and with, and through the bodies of the performers, provoked deeper tensions around not only who has the right to public space and what is and isn’t art, but how we understand and continue to live with and move through the consequences of colonialism. Haka Peep Show helped prove that te ao Maaori is not a static, flattened culture, but its vitality and nuance are embedded into our everyday. It challenged the historical amnesia of Paakehaa New Zealand under a government in which our Prime Minister, John Key, in 2014 asserted that “New Zealand was settled peacefully.” If you claim you can’t understand the importance of artworks like Haka Peep Show, perhaps it’s that you simply missed the point.

The author has used Waikato-Tainui te reo Maaori spelling, as a reflection of her whakapapa.

1. “Jonah Lomu Proved a Polynesian Man Could Still Win When the Deck was Stacked,” Morgan Godfery, Maaui Street (Wellington: BWB, 2018), 138.
2. Aroha Harris, Hīkoi: Forty Years of Māori Protest (Wellington: Huia, 2004), 32.
3. Ibid, 35.
4. Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, “Haka Ka Mate Attribution Act 2014 Guidelines,” https://www.mbie.govt.nz/assets/4066ff743b/haka-ka-mate-guidelines.pdf, 4.
5. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso: London, 2019), 94.
6. Anna Burns Francis, “Dunedin ‘Penis’ Art Causes Controversy,” Newshub, September 13, 2011, https://www.newshub.co.nz/nznews/dunedin-penis-art-causes-controversy-2011091317
7. Alison Rudd, “Cr Resigns ‘in Disgust’ over ‘Rented’ Art,” Otago Daily Times, September 13, 2011, https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/cr-resigns-disgust-over-rented-art
8. Ani Mikaere, “Three (Million) Strikes and Still Not Out,” Colonising Myths – Māori Realities: He Rukuruku Whakaaro (Wellington: Huia Publishers and Te Tākupu, Te Wānanga o Raukawa, 2011), 154.
9. Moana Jackson, “Land Loss and the Treaty of Waitangi,” in Te Ao Marama: Regaining Aotearoa: Māori writers speak out (Vol. 2), ed. Witi Ihimaera (Singapore: Reed Books, 1993), 72.
10. Alison Rudd, “Cr Resigns ‘in Disgust’ over ‘Rented’ Art.”
11. Huhana Smith, “Rachael Rakena: In Conversation with Huhana Smith,” in Taiāwhio II: Contemporary Māori Artists, 18 New Conversations (Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2007), 195.
12. Ibid, 200.
13. Ibid, 196.
14. Stacey Kirk, “Sex, Rugby and Haka,” Manawatū Standard, September 9, 2011, http://www.stuff.co.nz/manawatu-standard/news/5586411/Sex-rugby-and-haka-part-of-peepshow

Femisphere 4

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Femisphere 4

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