Ritual Renewal

Recently I was lucky enough to be given a guided tour of Emily Karaka’s Matariki-marking Ring of Fire, showing until September at Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery in Titirangi. The artist was present, fresh off her 2021 residency at McCahon House where the bulk of these works were made. The show is massive, spread across two spaces, with 14 works in the larger and three in the smaller.

I remember walking into the first and largest space and taking a breath, if only because the pulsating soundtrack (courtesy of Te Matera Smith of AAA Records) makes you feel like the room itself is breathing. There are 14 massive panels here, each depicting a maunga given back to their iwi and hapū through the Tūpuna Maunga Authority over the last eight years—returning mountains which through Pakeha settlement had their ancestral character stripped in favour of development opportunity, and the ongoing systematicity of dismantling Māori topographies and identities for a