Setting the Agenda

‘Let’s not forget there were women on the waka too, whānau’, warns one of the eponymous aunties of Jessicoco Hansell’s 2022 Aunti FM: To be of secret service (Physic Frequency Unknown), airing at the beginning of Auckland Art Gallery’s Declaration: A Pacific Feminist Agenda, curated by Ane Tonga. It is one of many reminders the exhibition makes: giving a determined focus to histories of matrilineal knowledge-making, holding and sharing that stretch across the temporal and physical space of the Pacific. Bringing together new commissions, loans and collection items, the artworks in the exhibition span the last quarter-century, while asserting the place of older, inherited, embodied and adopted genealogies in contemporary art practice.

‘WHITE WOMEN’S CONVENTION?’ asks a banner stretching above the strident Donna Awatere and Ramona Papali’i, printed larger-than-life in Marti Friedlander’s photograph at ’s entrance. On the banner’s edge sits a reproduction of Robin White’s 1978 , a print originally commissioned for the convention. is reframed by Awatere and Papali’i as a challenge to the exclusion of Māori and Pacific speakers at the 1979 convention held at Waikato University in Hamilton, drawing into the complicated legacies that surround the feminist movement, and its various intersections with Māori and Pacific histories, in Aotearoa. Taking Friedlander’s photograph as a point of departure, considers how Māori and Pacific feminisms have aligned with, diverted and been excluded from political and cultural movements of the wider Pacific—insisting that new ways of moving through our fractured and violent present can be found in the persistence, power and hope these histories embody.