The View from the Tower

Brett Graham Tai Moana Tai Tangata Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth 5 December 2020–2 May 2021, curated by Anna-Marie White

Tai Moana Tai Tangata, a sculptural installation by Brett Graham, opened at the Govett-Brewster last December and proved to be something of a local art-world event, the ‘must see’ exhibition of 2020 and 2021. Motivated by social media, word of mouth and early reviews, streams of visitors—curators, gallerists, writers, art lovers of all kinds—made the journey to New Plymouth to see it. Evidently, it touched something.

But what exactly? And why? And why at this moment in time? The show opened the same weekend as the Auckland Art Gallery’s Toi Tū Toi Ora, a survey show of the contemporary Māori art movement from the 1950s to the present. But in contrast to that mammoth exhibition, which seemed to want to close the book on the fractious ‘culture wars’ and misunderstandings of the past by virtue of its own triumphant occupation of the entirety of the Auckland Art Gallery, Tai Moana Tai Tangata opened a wound even older and deeper in the national psyche. Or re-opened it. For it has no doubt always been there; obvious and visceral to some; invisible, unconscious, or merely ‘in the past’ to others.

I did not witness the morning pōwhiri at the Govett-Brewster, but from all accounts