From the Margins to the Centre

E ngā iwi, e ngā reo, e ngā karangatanga maha o ngā hau e whā, tēnei te mihi atu kia koutou katoa¹

The title of Toi Tu Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art both announces and establishes the conceptual premise of the exhibition curated by Nigel Borell, the ex-curator of Māori art at Toi o Tāmaki Auckland Art Gallery. The word toi is largely understood as art and knowledge but it can also be interpreted another way, to mean peak or summit, so can be perceived as something that is elevated, that has reached a certain stature or metaphorical height. Perhaps more explicitly, toi can also be translated as native or indigenous, which Māori are as tangata and mana whenua of Aotearoa.

Māori art by inference then, can be defined as, of and from this place, and contemporary Māori art, art that is culturally located and that has a critical edge. The tu of the title solidifies the show’s intention and takes a clear position: it means to stand, to take place, to establish or additionally, maybe even more poignantly, (and perhaps ironically in light of Borell’s recent resignation and departure),² it translates as to remain. Ora is active and speaks of an art and culture that regenerates, that is living and dynamic and continually evolving.

Māori art in the context of Toi Tu Toi Ora:

, with the Māori creation narrative chosen by Borell operating as the overall structure that binds the artists and the selected Panoho’s deft classification emphasises that Māori art has metamorphosed and changed over time. It determines that contemporary Māori art is an art that bears traces of something earlier that existed inside a Māori paradigm, conceptually, visually, in idea or form. His definition also underlines that Māori art was never static, that it changed and evolved in pre-European times before the colonial project took hold, and it proposes that contemporary Māori art, although now too diverse to be easily defined, gained strength and gravitas over time and developed, in part, out of the cultural rupture of colonisation. What would contemporary Māori art look like if the colonial project had not ensued, caused loss and breakdown to the way we understood, operated within and visualised the world? Would it be a Te Puia, or Toimairangi version of Māori art, or look like Eugene Kara’s contemporary whakairo, Maureen Lander’s ephemeral installations or Michael Parekowhai’s , or would it be something else? Equally, how would contemporary Māori art look if it did not take a Treaty position and be able to reference, appropriate, challenge, critique or reimagine European and American modern and contemporary art that continues to be centred within the art world? A further question, as Panoho posited in his essay for the catalogue of the 1992 exhibition , held at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, is how would it be if Māori art moved ‘from the margins to the centre’? In , contemporary Māori art kind of does.