Art
Gifts from home
by Philip Matthews
For Lisa Reihana, art is about support and knowledge.
When the call went out for Maori and Pacific artists to work with museum objects in Pasifika Styles, Lisa Reihana put her hand up for something from the Far North, where her father is from. The north was also an early seat of government and a site of early settlement; it was “where a lot of material was leaching out of the country” in the 19th century. Taonga, carvings, entire meeting-houses.
Reihana refers to her carved object as “he”, never “it”. He probably left New Zealand on a ship in the 1830s. Was he stolen, bought, traded? No one knows. Who made him? What was he called? “He’s lost his name,” Reihana says.
Her work’s name is he tautoko, meaning to support someone, initially in reference to the carving’s original position at the front of a meeting-house, but there’s another meaning, to do with supporting those who came before you and those who come after you. Support and know-ledge passing across generations.
He was in a little pine coffin. Reihana brought video footage of skies she had filmed in New Zealand. She put the skies on screens around him. She went deeper into the Cambridge Museum’s collection, filmed it, digitalised and scrambled it, forming tukutuku-like patterns from it, “giving a female principle to a male carving”. She put some headphones on him. Overall, she was giving this nameless man a gift from home.
That was one of four works Reihana has in the show. She worked hard in Cambridge. Then she was back in the UK in December, speaking about her work at the Tate Modern with one artist from Australia and one from Malaysia. As far as she can tell, the Tate is keen to expand its knowledge of the Asia-Pacific region.
For a while, she was involved with British curator Nicholas Thomas’s plans to mount a Pacific show at the Hayward Gallery; that fell over, but Thomas’s interest has continued. He co-authored a book on Niuean tapa with John Pule and was recently made director of the Cambridge Museum, commissioning New Zealand photographer Mark Adams to document its collection. “There are interesting networks developing. They don’t come out of nowhere; they come out of years and years of association.”
Being an artist is about knowing as much as it is about making – certainly you get that sense talking to Reihana. That brings us back to support and knowledge: just as Reihana has benefited, so she will lend a hand. Next month, the Moving Image Centre’s new K Rd venue opens with Restless, a show she has curated. “I used to run the Moving Image Dept at the Manukau Institute of Technology. I was seeing that students from South Auckland needed to be seen in central Auckland in order to get some kind of transition and recognition. A bigger picture.”
This explains the inclusion of a video work by two of her former Manukau students, Junior Ikutele and Dean Kirkwood. “It’s quite full on.” They’re wearing KKK-style hoods and flicking the image into negative and back out again, making the hoods black then white.
Other Restless artists are more established. Brett Graham was an Elam contemporary of Reihana; his video work is about phosphate mining on Banaba.
Lonnie Hutchinson looks at “blackbirding”, the Australian slave trade in Pacific women and workers. Parekowhai Whakamoe has a video work based on her Tuhoe background. Then there’s John Miller, a former influence or guiding figure. When at Elam in the early 80s, Reihana saw his Land of the Wrong White Crowd, a record of the Springbok tour. Miller’s photos of the tour clicked over on 35mm slides while a cassette tape played “sounds from the media about what was happening, what people were saying on talkback radio”.
It made a big impression on Reihana; curating Restless gave her the chance to re-stage it and to help Miller digitalise the fraying audio tapes.
“All of the works have strong messages,” Reihana says. “I didn’t want anything fluffy.” But the provocations of Ikutele (Niuean) and Kirkwood (Maori) aren’t simply about bringing a report from the tougher side of town into polite art circles; it’s about Reihana’s duty as a teacher. The students aren’t rich, they’re running up big debts and “art is such a tenuous, nebulous area to expect someone to get a job in”, she says. “What can you offer in return?”
RESTLESS, Moving Image Centre, Auckland, March 10-April 21
RESTLESS, Moving Image Centre, Auckland, March 10-April 21
