Bledisloe Wharf — Ports of Auckland
13 DEC
25 JAN
2022
For SINŌ, the identity emerging from this archetypal encounter on the shore is ‘Kiwi’. Whakakiwi can be interpreted as ‘how to become a New Zealander’ or, ‘the making of the New Zealander’.
The usage of ‘Kiwi’ to name a person who lives in newzooland signals a belonging to a specific ideological new zmiddlearthland — one that has overcome its colonial beginnings of forceful nation building and control over indigenous life.
Breeded and birthed in Tāmaki Makaurau, this practice falls along the failures of a necropolitical factory of transgenderist-homoheterosexualising-monstrous-dissident-taniwha-of-the-western-binary-of-sexual-difference-and-an-enemy-of-the-country-colony-and-crown.
Kupesi Sisi Huelo ‘oe Taulanga Waitematā moe Funga Tāmaki Makaurau (2021)
(Download) Press release*
Emitting its light onto the water and into the environment, Kupesi Sisi Huelo ‘oe Taulanga Waitemata moe Funga Tāmaki Makaurau adorns The Lightship, harbour, and city. A sisi (garland) of light beams (huelo), this patterned adornment was created from and for the spaces of the port and its surroundings.
Extracted audio wave spectrum from sounds recorded at the Ports of Auckland, the Waitematā Harbour and Auckland CBD provided the artist with high, medium and low frequencies. Generating visual patterns from this raw sonic material, the artist reimagines these spaces through the sense of listening.
Sione Faletau is a multidisciplinary artist born in Auckland with Tongan heritage. Utilizing art as a vehicle to explore his heritage has led him to undertake Doctoral research on Tongan masculinity from an Indigenous perspective. As of late, his interest has been in creating kupesi (patterns) from extracted audio waveforms from songs, audio recordings and field recordings of environments.
The audio waveforms give him a material that can be manipulated into kupesi. This innovative way of creating has opened a new language and a different way of seeing kupesi in the contemporary realm.
Composing together numerous languages of the Waitematā and its shoreline, Onepanea looks at the communication of and in a place as a force that can both define it in meaning and physically shape it.
Assembling languages that are human, nonhuman, those in everyday use and those less in currency, Onepanea works through a linguistic strata of the Lightship’s place.
Natalie Tozer is an artist and experimental filmmaker based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Working closely with behaviours of ‘the underground’, her process often involves burying and unearthing objects and information. Recent shows include Emerging Artists Show at Sanderson Gallery, Salted Earth at Sosage Gallery and Goofer Dust at Elam Project Space.
In 2021, her work was selected for Femisphere 4 and was a National Contemporary Award Finalist. Natalie holds a PGDipFA with distinction and is a MFA candidate at Elam School of Fine Arts.
Sam Tozer (Kāti Māmoe, Pākehā) is a co-director of LOT23 – a film studio, gallery and live music events centre. He is also a long time collaborator of Lisa Reihana, being her DOP / Technical director / VFX / compositor for Ihi installed at the Aotea Centre in 2020, Nomads of the Sea 2019 and In Pursuit of Venus {infected} which represented New Zealand at La Biennale di Venezia 2017.
With over 20 years experience, directing, editing, creating visual effects and shooting for music videos, drama, advertising and fine art projects he is pleased to collaborate for the first time with another creative force in his life; his co-director at LOT23, wife, mother of children, and writer of bio's Natalie Tozer.
With special thanks to Te Reo consultant Kiriana O’Connell (Ngāti Tukorehe, Pākehā)
Photography: Brett Phibbs
Lucy, Kathleen, Katherine, Karen, Hinemoa, Maata, Marina, Lily, Carlotta, Miringa, Agnes, Loretta, Abigail, Elizabeth, Hori, Sonny, Tataingaoterangi, Andrew, Georgina
Pūtahitanga kura opens with this list of names. They are whānau, ancestors, and literary figures; a constellation of identities whose names have graced, confined, or augmented self-hood. Names that arrive to us presently having gathered the events, losses, and meanings of those who bore them.
Based in Tāmaki Makaurau, artist Abigail Aroha Jensen recently graduated with honours from Toihoukura School of Māori Visual Art and Design in Turanganui-a-kiwa.
Recent work includes Ngā Haki o te Tangata; Whiri Whiri Muka Tangata (2020), Occupied Territories at RM Gallery with Avigail Allan and Naomi Allan (2021).
Based in Turanganui-a-kiwa, Georgina Watson is an artist and writer, graduating with a Masters in Fine Arts from Elam School of Fine Arts, and a Bachelor of Media Arts Majoring in Painting and Sculpture at Wintec.
Recent work includes the group show They Covered the House in Stories, curated by Amy Weng for Te Tuhi (2021), Eternal Girlhood of the Settler State, presented by May Fair Art Fair in collaboration with Tyson Campbell (2020).
With special thanks to Design Technician, Jim Haung.
Photography: Brett Phibbs
Cinema was Monū’s teacher. They are “made up of movies”. Narratives and images from elsewhere spoke to feelings and experiences not reflected in Monū’s immediate environment. Spanish melodrama and Japanese animation gave permission to the queer part of the artist’s identity. Now, as the artist actively reimagines characters from global cinema as Tongan, they seek a Pacific cinematic language; to view and make movies that reflect the wide, vastly different, personal and intricate diasporic experiences of Pacific peoples in a global society.
Sione Tuívailala Monū is an artist of the Tongan diaspora. They live between Canberra Australia and Auckland, and works across the mediums of photography, moving-image, fashion and adornment, performance and drawing exploring identity, family and pasifika queer experience in the diaspora.
Recent exhibitions include: Spheres: An Online Video Project, 2020; Christchurch Art Gallery, Kahoa Kakala, Fresh Gallery Otara and Objectspace, 2017; Statuesque Anarchy, Enjoy Public Art Gallery, Wellington, 2017; Pouliuli, Westspace, Melbourne, 2017; Making Space, Centre of Contemporary Art Toi Moroki, Christchurch, 2017; GG Talk That Talk, Fresh Gallery Ōtara, 2016.
Photography: Brett Phibbs
Tyson Campbell presents a lyrical and biographic tale. Set to the poetic and political device of rap music, the city boy biography narrates the complexity of navigating citylife as “white-palatable Māori”. Like a series of thoughts noted-to-phone on the bus ride-home, Skylined memoirs the feelings and tones of living in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.
Tyson Campbell (Te Rarawa/ Ngāti Maniapoto) is an Auckland-based multi-disciplinary artist whose work is engaged with the relationships between the indigenous and the settler-state imaginaries. Campbell’s research focuses on Indigenising ways of knowing through relationality and the agency of Whenua.
Tyson is part of the Wominjeka Djeembana Research Lab at Monash University and is also Assistant Curator at Artspace Aotearoa.
Photography: Brett Phibbs
Sorawit Songsataya: “Come up for air studies the ecology of the water and its edge. Reducing these large and intricate habitats to patterns and movement, the artist maps processes of coordination in the harbour’s natural life and the port’s industry. Borrowing synchronicity from these two differing rhythms, Come up for air looks at the idea of sustenance through contrasting scales of mass economic systems and day-to-day gathering of food.”
Sorawit Songsataya’s practice explores the many tangents that connect and redefine our understandings of subjectivity and ecology. Songsataya often employs moving image and sculpture within installation environments, incorporating both digital and tactile media to engage with world-making in imaginative and tangible ways. Recent exhibitions include Rumours (Mermaid), Govett-Brewster Art Gallery (2020) and The Interior, Auckland Art Gallery (2019).
Photography: Brett Phibbs
Janet Lilo: “Created for a future defined by the current global pandemic, BLM, social and political upheavals, and great loss, ISLOVE refocuses Auckland’s harbour as a place of connection and light.”
Janet Lilo (b.1982, Te Rarawa, Samoa, Niue) lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Her work has been exhibited in Asia, Europe, America and Moana Pacific - with extensive shows throughout New Zealand - from Auckland Art Gallery, Te Papa Museum and Christchurch Art Gallery. www.janetlilo.com.
Photography: Simon Devitt