Two Worlds
HERE: Kupe to Cook
Pataka Art + Museum, 11 August–23 November curated by Reuben Friend & Mark Hutchins-Pond
Some days/I’ve been/on dry land/for too long my ache/for ocean/so great/my eyes weep/waves1
Thus does Tongan poet Karlo Mila express a profound connection with the ocean shared by many inhabitants of what writer Epeli Hau‘ofa famously termed ‘our sea of islands’. Interpenetration of the ocean with Pacific life pervades HERE: Kupe to Cook, even as it juggles two strands of artistic exploration. One strand I identify with the ‘Kupe’ facet of the title―a celebration of ancient and ongoing Polynesian seafaring. The other focuses more on the ‘Cook’ facet ―delving into European incursion and its colonial aftermath. The best works in this show entwine these strands, which otherwise seem to strain apart.
A plaque near the entrance underlines this doubleness explaining how the title HERE plays on the English and te reo words for ‘this present place’ and ‘to fasten with cords’, respectively.
The ‘Kupe’ component greets the visitor with a local, weighty statement of Polynesia’s prior claim to Aotearoa: the carved anchor stone known as ‘Maungaroa’. It lived for centuries on a Porirua beach; legend holds it was brought by Kupe from Hawaiki.
Nearby, Israel Tangaroa Birch (Nga Puhi, Ngai Tawake, Ngati Kahungunu, Ngati Rakaipaaka) plunges further into an ocean of word-play with his lacquer-on-etched-steel work (2017). When Colin McCahon inscribed that portentous phrase ‘I AM’ into Aotearoa’s art history, it spoke as the Christian god. Birch’s pun reflects (literally) that, in te reo, ‘wai’ can mean both ‘water’ and ‘who’. This shimmering minuet between water and being suggests a more
