Points of Connection

Opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and finishing at the Field Museum, Te Maori’s international success was a timely support for the continued Māori struggle for legal cultural recognition back home in Aotearoa. Te Maori, with the added title of Te Hokinga Mai: The Return Home, toured throughout Aotearoa in 1987, the same year te reo Māori would finally, after decades of petitions and protest, become an official language of New Zealand.

Māori art is very rarely made, shown, written about or collected in a vacuum. It offers points of connection to a multiplicity of people and places. It moves across disciplines and through time, resisting essentialist definitions for the right to make into the future while being informed by our past. There is a well-known photograph from 1987 of Auckland Art Gallery staff sitting on the floor, waiting for Te Māori: Hokinga Mai to open. On 4 December 2020 Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art, an exhibition of over 100 Māori artists, opened in the same gallery. It is the largest exhibition in the gallery’s history, with the curator of Māori art, Nigel Borell (Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi) steering the helm of the waka. The works within the exhibition include weaving, carving, painting, installation, sculpture, adornment, photography and moving image, and can be defined as contemporary because we make them today. They are a result of our everyday lived experience of being Māori. As diverse as that experience is, so are the modes of expression.

This is only one of several exhibitions by Māori artists around the same time. On 5 December, a significant solo exhibition by Dr Brett Graham (Ngāti Kōroki Kahukura, Tainui) Tai Moana Tai Tangata opened at the Govett- Brewster Gallery in New Plymouth, curated by Anna-Marie White (Te Ātiawa). The exhibition of monumental structures and short films traces events and locations in Tainui and Taranaki Māori histories. His large sculptural works track the colonial process by highlighting histories and current-day effects on landscapes. Accompanying the exhibition is a long-awaited publication on the artist’s practice.

I spent late November at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki installing the commissioned artwork Atapō with Dr Maureen Lander (Ngāpuhi, Te Hikutu) and Mata Aho Collective (Ngāti Awa, Ngāti Kahungunu ki Wairarapa, Ngāti Ranginui, Rangitāne, Ngāi Te Rangi, Ngāti Toa Rangatira, Ngāi Tūhoe, Te Ātiawa ki Whakarongotai), of which I am one member of four. We were privileged to collaborate on a new work with our mentor, Maureen, a practising artist for over 40 years and the first Māori to get a PhD in fine arts — but definitely not the last. This collaborative piece was one of two Maureen worked on in this year of change; she also completed a large-scale commission for the Waitohi Johnsonville Library and Community Hub, Whetūrangi with local Wellington weavers Te Roopu Raranga o Manaia. The title of our piece, Atapō, can be translated to mean “before dawn”. It makes poetic reference to the transition of Hine-tītama, the personification of dawn, to that of Hine-nui-te-pō, the custodian of souls. Using insect mesh, wool, and muka, the work echoes the voices of Māori women authors, artists and academics who have recalled the empowering significance of this narrative from the perspective of wāhine Māori. In October, Maureen became a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to Māori art.

What became quite apparent when wandering through Toi Tū, Toi Ora exhibition before it opened is the broad sweep of exhibiting artists and, in particular, the work they do beyond making art. We teach, we write, we curate, we are on boards, we win awards, we exhibit in biennials, triennials and quinquennials, we (used to) travel overseas, hold residencies and speak at symposia. We are busy. We work hard. And we are good at what we do. We create ecologies of support that involves both turning up to sing a waiata tautoko, and, where needed, having a cup of tea when offering a face-to-face critique. There is a lot more at stake than our individual egos, which have a way of being fanned into flames by a wider art world if you’re not careful. When we make art among our most loyal supporters and harshest critics — our whānau — we know we won’t fall into the ego trap. They will always have our backs, but there’s no way you can get too big for your boots with them around.

Bridget Reweti (Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi) is the 2020–21 Frances Hodgkins Fellow at University of Otago and co-editor of ATE Journal of Māori Art. She has a new exhibition Pōkai Whenua, Pōkai Moana which opens at Dunedin’s Te Uare Taoka o Hākena, Hocken Collections on 16 August.