Themes & Generations
These three exhibitions are part of the plethora of women-centred events around the country commemorating the 125th anniversary of women’s suffrage.
The seed for Christina Barton’s show at the Adam Art Gallery was her encounter with an exhibition catalogue on the short films of Cuban-born American artist Ana Mendieta (1948–1985). Mendieta’s feminist land-art of the 1970s and early ’80s explored her experience as an indigenous woman traumatically exiled at puberty from her family and native land. Fascinated, Barton saw possibilities for fruitful resonances between Mendieta and a younger generation of Maori women artists—Nova Paul, Ngahuia Harrison, Ana Iti, Raukura Turei—who continue to explore their relationships with whanau and whenua in twenty-first-century Aotearoa.
As it happened, Barton was unable to secure permission from the estate of Ana Mendieta to screen her work as part of the Adam exhibition; but eight shorts of her muddy, melancholic ‘earthbody’ sculptures were able to be shown in a one-off screening at the Embassy Theatre. Mendieta haunts Barton’s show as an absent presence. But although her exile to the Embassy certainly frustrated Barton, perhaps it was for the best. While it is true that all five artists (six if we include Robyn Kahukiwa, whose 1986 stands guard in the window) share an acute awareness
