On truth and telling stories
Responses to the 60th Venice Biennale
Hana Pera Aoake
04.10.2024
While on residency at Delfina Foundation, London, in early 2024, Aotearoa artist Hana Pera Aoake (Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Hinerangi, Waikato/Tainui) attended the Venice Biennale. In this essay, they reflect on their experience being mired in the spectacle and politics of the event and, particularly, on the questions posed by the Biennale’s central exhibition, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, which gathers works by majority Indigenous, queer and migrant artists under the rubric of the “stranger”. Encountering Venice for the first time, Aoake unearths its fraught political contexts to ask who the Biennale is really for, and who the groups are that are made strange by it; and how the presenting Aotearoa artists are represented within the aims of its curatorial frame. Despite the complexities of the event, what Aoake finds is a potential for connection across cultures that exceeds the curatorial and political structures of the Biennale, and which offers pathways to solidarity, resilience and resistance.
In the late American writer Audre Lorde’s essay, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, she writes that, “without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pretence that these differences do not exist.”[01] 01. Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (Penguin: United Kingdom, 2017), 18. Reading this essay again after many years helped me to think through the issues I found at the 60th Venice Biennale, particularly in its main exhibition, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, which was curated by Adriano Pedrosa, Artistic Director of the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP). Stranieri Ovunque focused heavily on the inclusion of queer, Indigenous, migrant and other historically underrepresented artists, which felt in some ways celebratory and was moving to witness. However, for me the exhibition also raised more urgent questions around what it means to do this, in this context. Who is the Biennale for, when the communities the works originate from are so far away from Venice? Does showing so many works outside of their context flatten the nuances of place? Given the realities for most people in the community I live in (Kawerau) and for those who work (and attempt to) live in Venice, I understand that I am lucky to have been able to even afford to go to the Biennale. Considering who this event was for was pertinent to how I was approaching coming to the Biennale for the first time.
Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere takes its name from a 2006 series of neon signs by the Paris-born, Palermo-based collective Claire Fontaine. Claire Fontaine took the name of that series from Turin-based anarchist and anti-racist collective Stranieri Ovunque, whose work fought xenophobia and racism in the 2000s. Their name is a literal translation of “strangers everywhere”. Claire Fontaine’s series of neon sculptures are reconfigured at the Arsenale’s Gaggiandre in almost 50 languages, including some that have gone extinct. The languages include Te Reo Māori, but unfortunately the phrase is misspelt and reads “Kei nga wāhi katoaa tauiwi”, where a correct translation might be “Kei ngā wahi katoa tauiwi”. Seeing our language, our reo, welcoming all people of different nations was both exciting and special. However, the error begs the question of whether a Māori language expert was consulted about the appropriate spelling in order for it to be tika.
Claire Fontaine, Foreigners Everywhere (Self-portrait), Stranieri Ovunque (Autoritratto), 2024, 60th La Biennale di Venezia, 20 April–24 November 2024. Photo: Contemporary HUM.
Claire Fontaine, Foreigners Everywhere (Southern Māori), 2015. Precarious Balance installation view, Christchurch Centre of Contemporary Art (CoCA), 14 February—08 May 2016. Courtesy CoCA.
Walking on the ancient cobbled streets of Venice, I was very aware of my own strangeness to this place, alongside the thousands of other strangers who visit Venice every year.[02] 02. According to online statistics, the average wage for most workers in Italy from 2019 was only 17.20 Euros, and if tickets to the Biennale are 30 Euros for even a standard entry ticket, who is the Biennale for if locals cannot afford it? Venice has become too expensive for most locals to stay as the population has decreased from 120,000 people (1985) to only 55,000 (2015), with demographers predicting that by 2030 there will be no more full-time residents. Given the pressure on local residents, naming an exhibition “Foreigners Everywhere” holds an undertone of something more nefarious and serious in considering the ongoing effects of overtourism. Given also that Italy has long been a site for “illegal” migration, which is a key point of attention for Italy’s right-wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, one has to contend with the abhorrent conditions for the many migrants who attempt (and often die trying) to cross the Mediterranean.[03] 03. Filippo Furri, “Venice’s long history as a sanctuary city for migrants is under threat”, The Conversation, February 10, 2017, www.theconversation.com/venices-long-history-as-a-sanctuary-city-for-migrants-is-under-threat-70359. Weekly there are reports of migrants drowning in the Mediterranean and of the poor living conditions of many who do manage to survive, which reiterates the privilege of being able to hold a New Zealand passport and the tension of being a foreigner in a city like Venice.
In the lush parkland of the Giardini, one of the two permanent sites of the Biennale, next to the Arsenale, these tensions between locality, nationhood and foreignness are abundantly clear, particularly in the closed Israeli pavilion, which stands appropriately near to the US pavilion, whose sponsoring nation has greatly enabled the continuing Israeli genocide of Palestinians. On the Venice Biennale preview opening day, the Israeli artist Ruth Patir and the pavilion’s curators announced that they would not open the fertility-themed exhibition,[04] 04. The announcement came after the decision to maintain an Israeli pavilion in this edition of the Biennale was largely criticised and an open letter drafted by the organisation Art Not Genocide Alliance in February 2024 was signed by more than 23,000 artists and cultural workers calling for the deplatforming of the Israel pavilion. The letter cited the ban that once prevented apartheid South Africa from participating. uncomfortably titled (M)otherland, until “a ceasefire and hostage release agreement is reached”.[05] 05. Charlotte Higgins, “Artists refuse to open Israel pavilion at Venice Biennale until ceasefire is reached”, The Guardian, April 16, 2024, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/apr/16/artists-refuse-open-israel-pavilion-venice-biennale-ceasefire-gaza. This comes too, as the Russian artists and curatorial team have withdrawn from participating at Venice since the Russian invasion of the Ukraine in 2022.[06] 06. It is an interesting lesson in soft power to see that Russia lent Bolivia the use of their pavilion for this year’s edition. This decision coincided with Bolivia, which is home to some of the world's biggest lithium reserves, signing a $450 million deal with Russian state firm Uranium One Group to produce electric vehicle components such as batteries. The fact that Bolivia is being hosted by the Russian pavilion in this context demonstrates the implication of the art world within broader spheres of geopolitical tensions. See Tobias Käufer, “Russia, China ahead in race for Bolivia’s lithium”, DW (Deutsche Welle), 29 December, 2023, www.dw.com/en/russia-china-ahead-in-race-for-bolivias-lithium/a-67843534.
The machinations behind the national pavilion presentations at Venice make it impossible not to consider the broader political implications of soft power so deeply embedded within the contemporary art market. This is particularly pertinent when thinking through the representation of Indigenous artists within the national pavilions. The insider-outsider basis of nationhood is inherently exclusionary, particularly when you consider the imperial drive to conquer and embed already occupied areas into the broader empire. Indigenous people are not yet full beneficiaries of nationhood, as evidenced by statistics around housing, health and the lack of access to spiritually and culturally significant areas in their lands. Furthermore, the political ideologies of Indigenous people reject domination and subjugation as the foundation of a political order, as in the idea of the “nation”.[07] 07. Dominic O’Sullivan, Needs, rights, nationhood, and the politics of indigeneity. MAI Review 1 (2006): 2, www.researchoutput.csu.edu.au/ws/portalfiles/portal/9675172/PID11288.pdf.
The tension between Indigeneity and nationhood culminated for me in seeing the sombre, painful and beautiful work of Archie Moore (Kamilaroi, Bigambul), titled kith and kin, in the Australian pavilion, which won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation, one of the Biennale’s top awards. In kith and kin, Moore charts his First Nations Australian connections spanning more than 2,400 generations and 65,000 years in a vast hand-drawn genealogical chart. In the centre of the room is a white plinth, surrounded by a moat of water, and on it are 500 stacks of redacted official documents, each of different heights, which have been drawn up by the Australian state. The papers mainly comprise reports on Indigenous deaths in custody, but also include a number of documents from Moore’s own family archive. The work acts as a memorial to the atrocious and ongoing legacies of Australia’s colonial history and as a demonstration of the way familial connections are severed through the over-incarceration of Indigenous bodies. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders continue to die in custody at an alarming rate, with 562 Indigenous Australians having died in custody since 1991. Indigenous Australians, furthermore, make up 33% of Australia's prisoners, though they are just 3.8% of the national population.[08] 08. Hannah Ritchie, “Indigenous deaths in custody haunt Australia”, BBC, April 7, 2024, www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-68634074.
Archie Moore, kith and kin, 2024. Australia Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2024. Photographer: Andrea Rossetti © the artist. Image courtesy of the artist and The Commercial.
Archie Moore, kith and kin, 2024. Australia Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2024. Photographer: Andrea Rossetti © the artist. Image courtesy of the artist and The Commercial.
Archie Moore, kith and kin (detail), 2024, the Australian pavilion of the 60th Venice Biennale, 20 April–24 November 2024. Photo: Hana Pera Aoake.
Archie Moore, kith and kin, 2024. Australia Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2024. Photographer: Andrea Rossetti © the artist. Image courtesy of the artist and The Commercial.
The Australian pavilion of the 60th Venice Biennale, 20 April–24 November 2024. Photo: Contemporary HUM.
Although kith and kin was not a part of Stranieri Ovunque, this year's central exhibition, which is curated by a different, invited curator for each edition, it connected to its concepts around foreigners, citizenship and the nation state. I couldn’t help but consider the fact that most people in Australia voted “No” in the 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice referendum that would have allowed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders the right of recognition and representation in Australian parliament. Kith and kin was also recently purchased by the Australian government for the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art and the Tate, London. When this was announced, however, there was no mention by the Australian government nor the gallery directors of how deaths in custody are an integral part of the work. The Australian minister for arts and culture Tony Burke simply stated: “kith and kin is a great Australian story first exhibited in Venice, but now comes home.”[09] 09. Creative Australia, “Archie Moore’s Golden Lion-winning kith and kin acquired by Australian Government and donated to world-leading art museums,” media release, August 19, 2024, www.creative.gov.au/news/media-releases/archie-moores-golden-lion-winning-kith-and-kin-acquired-by-australian-government-and-donated-to-world-leading-art-museums/. Without diminishing the significance of Moore’s achievement for himself, his family and his wider community, I cannot help but feel the tension of how the telling of these stories is obfuscated by the blatant racism embedded into Australia, especially after they voted “No” to allow First Nations people in Australia to have sovereignty and recognition on their own land.
The US pavilion offered a pathway to a different understanding of this tension at the Biennale. It featured the bold, playful and celebratory work of Choctaw/Cherokee painter and sculptor Jeffery Gibson. Gibson’s presentation marks the first time an Indigenous artist has been chosen to represent the US, with the last time a Native American artist was included in the Biennale at all being 1932.[10] 10. Colleen Barry, “Choctaw artist Jeffrey Gibson confronts history at US pavilion as its first solo Indigenous artist”, APS news, April 20, 2024, https://apnews.com/article/venice-biennale-us-pavilion-native-american-indigenous-aa13ab97f5c0449171a46ddaf9713547#. Gibson’s the space in which to place me utilises text from US constitutional documents, music and sermons in exquisite beadwork and paintings, which spoke not just to the broken promises of these documents, but the trauma and resilience of Indigenous nations. In one beaded work, a badge on the throat of a bust reads, “IF WE SETTLE FOR WHAT THEY’RE GIVING US… WE DESERVE WHAT WE GET!”, while another, an intricately beaded hanging boxing bag, features the words: “WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT”, a phrase from the opening passage of the Declaration of Independence (1776).[11] 11. National Archives of the United States of America, “Declaration of Independence: A Transcription,” accessed September 20, 2024, www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript.
Despite the complicated origin of these words, they carried me across the multiple contradictions of being an Indigenous person encountering works by Indigenous artists at the Venice Biennale. They supported me to think through the contexts of where these works were made, and how we think about our own, local political contexts. Gibson’s work acted as a wero and reminded me that although the context of the Biennale might be fucked up and complicated, art remains an important way in which Indigenous artists communicate their truth; and this truth is never linear and is always dependant upon whose truth is told, where and why. In order to understand shared histories, we must have difficult conversations, and we need to be attuned to the nuances of these histories, beyond the neatly packaged false narratives of those who have attempted to obstruct Indigenous ways of life.
Of the 87 national pavilions that made up the Biennale, New Zealand was not among them this year for only the second time since we began participating in 2001. Many people within the arts community in Aotearoa that I have spoken to were upset by this, but, in this specific edition, where an exceptional number of artists from Aotearoa have been included, it also means the presentations of these artists are less encumbered by the mantle and interests of the nation state. When we think about the ways in which these pavilions are framed as an exercise in marketing and as a means of providing “exposure”, it becomes less about art and more about what political stakeholders see as a worthy national “investment”. Although I immensely respect and admire previous representatives of our pavilion, especially Yuki Kihara (Sāmoa) (2022) and Lisa Reihana (Ngā Puhi) (2020), I did find the idea of them as representatives of our “nation” problematic. For instance, the New Zealand government occupied Western Sāmoa between 1920 to 1961 and is responsible for several atrocities and injustices there, including a devastating outbreak of influenza in 1918 and the removal of citizenship rights of a group of New Zealand citizens from Sāmoa in 1982.[12] 12. The 1918 Influenza pandemic killed 22% of the population in Sāmoa. The New Zealand government was also responsible for Black Saturday, when in 1929 a crackdown by the New Zealand Administration on a peaceful demonstration led to the murder of 11 people. Currently, Green Party MP Teanau Tuiono is attempting to push forward the Restoring Citizenship Removed by Citizenship (Western Sāmoa) Act 1982 Bill, which would provide entitlement to New Zealand citizenship for a group of people born in what was Western Sāmoa and whose citizenship was removed by law in 1982. Although the bill has passed its first reading, the law remains intact and prevents those born in Western Sāmoa from having equal rights of citizenship within Aotearoa. See NZ History (Manatū Taonga — Ministry for Culture and Heritage), “The 1918 Influenza pandemic”, last modified April 22, 2020, www.nzhistory.govt.nz/culture/1918-influenza-pandemic/samoa; NZ History (Manatū Taonga — Ministry for Culture and Heritage), “NZ in Samoa”, last modified July 31, 2024, www.nzhistory.govt.nz/politics/samoa. Through the New Zealand government’s protectorate a number of laws were passed that continue to have ongoing effects upon the ways in which gender and sexuality is able to be expressed in Sāmoa, and which Kihara explored in her Biennale presentation Paradise Camp (2022). In considering Reihana’s work, one only needs to look at the shocking inequities around health, housing, incarceration and education in order to understand that Māori are not afforded the same rights and dignities as Pākehā. Kihara and Reihana’s work is extremely important for unsettling the “peaceful’” histories of settlement in Aotearoa and the wider Pacific, but having them framed as “representatives” of the nation is unnerving when Māori and our Moana cousins continue to experience the ongoing legacies of colonialism.
As part of the 60th Venice Biennale, four important Māori artists and a collective are showing work in the curated section, alongside over 300 Indigenous and other artists from the so-called “Global South”. This delegation of New Zealand artists is the largest to ever participate in the curated section of the Biennale.[13] 13. The delegation of artists from Aotearoa New Zealand at the 60th Venice Biennale features Brett Graham (Ngāti Koroki Kahukura, Tainui), Fred Graham (Ngāti Koroki Kahukura, Tainui), Mataaho Collective (Te Atiawa ki Whakarongotai, Ngāti Toa Rangātira; Ngāti Awa, Ngāi Tūhoe; Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi; Rangitāne ki Wairarapa), Selwyn Te Ngareatau Wilson (Ngāti Manu, Ngāti Hine) and Sandy Adsett (Ngāti Pahauwera). Other Aotearoa artists are Areez Katki, Caitlin Devoy, Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta (Ngātiwai, Ngāpuhi, Waikato Tainui, Sāmoan, Tokelauan) and Robert Jahnke (Ngāi Taharora, Te Whānau a Iritekura, Te Whānau a Rakairo o Ngāti Porou), who are featured in events in Venice held parallel to the Biennale. The inclusion of so many Māori artists follows from the seminal exhibition Toi Tū Toi Ora (Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2020–2021), curated by Nigel Borell (Pirirākau, Ngāi Te Rangi, Ngāti Ranginui, Te Whakatōhea), who was instrumental in facilitating the exhibition of the work of Māori artists in both the Venice Biennale and in Indigenous Histories at the Museum of Art in São Paulo and Kode, Bergen Art Museum, in Norway (2023–2024), also curated by Pedrosa.
Within the complicated space of the Biennale and its wider global political context, encountering Māori artists in the central exhibition was a reprieve in some ways. The tensions of recognising the state of Māori language, culture and access to housing, education and overrepresentation in the criminal justice system always sit beneath the surface, alongside the right-wing coalition government’s attack on initiatives seeking to improve these inequities and the government’s attempt to diminish the importance of our country’s founding document through the Treaty Principles Act currently before parliament. It was relieving to see these artists not only being included and recognised for their importance, but to see them representing themselves, their whānau and their communities, rather than “New Zealand”. Although, it still raises the question around whether their inclusion within a curatorial frame that groups art by Indigenous and historically marginalised groups under the rubric of “foreignness” flattens the particularities of our context within Aotearoa.
The Arsenale, the pre-Industrial site of the Venetian state’s naval power, is around a 15-minute walk away from the Giardini, where the permanent national pavilions sit.[14] 14. Many countries host their pavilion presentations in temporary sites around Venice, as Aotearoa New Zealand has done in previous years, bar Reihana’s and Kihara’s presentations, which were held in the Arsenale. The first work you encounter is Yinka Shonibare’s Refugee Astronaut VIII (2024), before you stumble into Mataaho Collective’s luminous Takapau (2022), a downsized, site-specific version of a work originally shown in Te Puni Aroaro at Te Papa Tongarewa between 2022 and 2024. But even downsized, Takapau remains transportative, as though you are entering a physical manifestation of the place of te whare tangata, or the house of humanity. Immediately homesick for my child and my whenua, I cried as I looked up and felt shards of light rippling through the gaps in the work’s polyester hi-vis tie-downs that criss-cross between the large columns of the Arsenale’s historic Corderie. The reflective straps of Takapau were reversed from its initial installation in Te Papa, which is interesting to consider in the context of showing this work in the northern hemisphere. “Takapau” refers to the finely woven mats Māori use for ceremonies, including childbirth, and the work represents the moment of birth: a moment between light and dark, or Te Ao Marama, the realm of light, and Te Ao Atua, the realm of the gods.
Mataaho Collective, Takapau, 2022, installation with polyester hi-vis tie-downs, stainless steel buckels and j-hooks. Site specific reconfiguration. Courtesy Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa. Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia installation view, 20 April–24 November 2024. Photo: Ben Stewart. Courtesy of Creative New Zealand.
Entrance to the Arsenale featuring Yinka Shonibare's Refugee Astronaut VIII, 2024, and Claire Fontaine's Foreigners Everywhere (Self-portrait), Stranieri Ovunque (Autoritratto), 2024, 60th La Biennale di Venezia, 20 April–24 November 2024. Photo: Contemporary HUM.
Mataaho Collective, Takapau, 2022, and (in background) Yinka Shonibare, Refugee Astronaut VIII, 2024. Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia installation view, 20 April–24 November 2024. Photo: Contemporary HUM.
Mataaho Collective, Takapau, 2022, installation with polyester hi-vis tie-downs, stainless steel buckels and j-hooks. Site specific reconfiguration. Courtesy Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa. Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, 20 April–24 November 2024. Photo: Ben Stewart. Courtesy of Creative New Zealand.
Takapau was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Participant in the International Exhibition. If art were sport, Mataaho Collective’s achievement is the equivalent of the All Blacks winning the Rugby World Cup, yet the collective’s Golden Lion was barely reported locally in Aotearoa. In an ideal world, a Māori art collective securing the top prize at the world’s top art event would reinforce the value of art to New Zealand society. Only a month after Mataaho Collective’s historic win, though, the government slashed $42 million NZD from the budget for the Ministry for Culture and Heritage.[15] 15. André Chumko, “Budget 2024: Funding to arts slashed,” The Post, May 30, 2024, www.thepost.co.nz/nz-news/350296499/budget-2024-funding-arts-slashed. This reveals the sad truth that, despite the unprecedented level of representation of New Zealand artists in Venice, as a country we do not value arts and culture as much as we should, something that feeds into the disappointment many felt at the lack of New Zealand having a pavilion. A national pavilion does guarantee visibility, but having so many Aotearoa artists presenting in the curated section of the Biennale in this exceptional year also freed them from a specific kind of obligation to “represent” the nation.
Walking through the Arsenale, ultimately I was overwhelmed by the amount of work, but also by the emotion I felt. Near Yolŋu artist Naminapu Maymuru-White’s suite of works, Fred Graham’s work hung on the wall, while his son Brett Graham’s work sat on the floor. The works in dialogue with each other were to me a representation of the intergenerational transmission of knowledge so woven into Māori communities. Given that, like the Grahams, I have genealogical ties to the Tainui people, seeing these two artists together was another moment where I felt my strangeness in Venice alleviate and my longing for home re-emerge. Fred Graham’s presentation consisted of four works that draw from various pūrākau, indicated by titles such as Māui Steals the Sun (1971) and Ngā Tamariki a Tangaroa (1971). From the walls, Fred Graham’s series of works look upon Brett Graham’s Wastelands (2024), a large sculpture of a carved pātaka on wheels. Wastelands comes out of a previous exhibition, Tai Moana Tai Tangata, which was curated by Anna-Marie White (Te Ātiawa) at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Ngāmotu New Plymouth. While that particular exhibition considered the history of the relationship between Tainui and Taranaki, Wastelands relates particularly to the Waste Lands Act (1858), an act of aggression by the Crown that allowed the confiscation of land deemed as being “wasted” and “unproductive”, a concept deeply alien to Māori, because no part of the whenua would ever be viewed in this way. The work’s placement of a pātaka on wheels signifies both what was gained through exchanges with Pākehā and the determination to continue despite the landlessness that followed for many Māori communities after the New Zealand Wars.[16] 16. These were a series of battles instigated by the British crown, the New Zealand government and some Māori allies against a number of Māori tribes in the mid-19th century. These battles resulted in the appropriation of large tracts of Māori land and led to the disenfranchisement, alienation and impoverishment of many Māori communities, including those who had remained neutral and who fought alongside the British crown and New Zealand government. While Māori adapted to new Pākehā technologies, it’s easy to forget that our tūpuna never needed wheels, because we had waka.[17] 17. Noelle McCarthy, “Portrait (part 2): Noelle McCarthy interviews Talia Marshall”, Newsroom, August 7, 2024, www.newsroom.co.nz/2024/08/07/portrait-part-2-noelle-mccarthy-interviews-talia-marshall/. The building of a pātaka was (and is) in many ways a sign of ahi kā, a sign of occupation and of belonging to a place.
But what does it mean to put artists from such disparate places as Lebanon, Columbia, Aotearoa and India together?
In the Central Pavilion, where Stranieri Ovunque continued with two sections dedicated to global modernisms and abstraction, it was emotional to see Sandy Adsett’s Waipuna (1978) alongside work such as Iranian artist Mohammad Ehsaei’s Untitled (1974) and to think of the way that kōwhaiwhai and naqqashi-khat (calligraphic painting) are fundamentally about the communication and preservation of history and whakapapa. Heartening too was seeing Selwyn Wilson’s Study of a Head (1948), which is said to depict Wilson’s nephew Ponga Pomare Kingi Cherrington at their homestead in Taumarere. Seeing the work of Adsett, who is 85 years old (and also the work of Fred Graham, who is 96) in Venice feels especially important, because not only are these artists important elders, but their work still has relevance through the power to articulate a Māori worldview. Seeing Adsett, Graham and Wilson exhibit alongside global peers felt momentous as a celebration and acknowledgement of their importance, not just in the context of the art history of Aotearoa, but within a more expansive global history. The joy I feel towards the celebration of these senior Māori artists is not without some apprehension around the curatorial intention of removing them from their context of Aotearoa and placing them in Venice alongside all of these artists from so many other parts of the world. Maybe, instead of flattening these works, this curatorial approach offers them an independence, where they can be untethered from preconceived ideas or set assumptions. These tensions don’t need a tidy resolution. The depth and uniqueness of these works and their context is perhaps not meant to be apparent, and the inclusion of artists like Adsett simply offers a footnote into a broader understanding of artistic production outside of what is typically shown in a space like the Venice Biennale.
I don’t know that the nuances of the places these Māori artists come from are completely evident, or that they haven’t been somewhat subsumed into the hype beast of the international spectacle that is the Venice Biennale. But I do know that our difference cannot simply be shed, because as Māori each of those artists carry the unique sensitivities of their whakapapa. These differences carry very specific histories, but the uniqueness of having Māori whakapapa enables these artists to make connections to global stories, not just of colonisation, but a celebration of Indigenous and non-Western narratives around the potential of art to tell more complicated stories. Despite our differences, Audre Lorde’s assessment that “without community there is no liberation…” could not have been more correct. All of our struggles towards sovereignty are interconnected, and we must build alliances not just within our own hapori, but within the context of a global community. No matter what context we come from, the complicated legacy of racial capitalism and its Trojan horse of colonialism continues to dictate how and when we come together, even in terms of contemporary art. What Pedrosa has attempted to do is bring these painful histories together in order to think through moments of repair, resilience and celebration. As Jeffrey Gibson’s work so eloquently indicated, the truth of these histories is evident when we connect them to a bigger web of histories that meet each other on swampy shores of Venice. Venice is not the centre of contemporary art, but it is a place where we can meet each other, share stories and find strength in our differences.
Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta, The Body of Wainuiātea, 2024. Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania installation view, Ocean Space, Venice, 23 March—13 October 2024. Co-commissioned by TBA21–Academy and Artspace, and produced in partnership with OGR Torino. Photo: Contemporary HUM.
Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta, The Body of Wainuiātea (detail), 2024. Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania installation view, Ocean Space, Venice, 23 March—13 October 2024. Co-commissioned by TBA21–Academy and Artspace, and produced in partnership with OGR Torino. Photo: Contemporary HUM.
Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta, The Body of Wainuiātea (detail), 2024. Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania installation view, Ocean Space, Venice, 23 March—13 October 2024. Co-commissioned by TBA21–Academy and Artspace, and produced in partnership with OGR Torino. Photo: Contemporary HUM.
On my final day in Venice, I visited Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta’s The Body of Wainuiātea, which is featured in Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania, at Ocean Space. Ocean Space is an exhibition and research centre with an annual programme that coincides with the Biennale, located in the Church of San Lorenzo. Heta is an architect and also recently became a mother, her work speaking to the pūrākau of the atua Wainuiātea, whose body is the birthing waters that Papatūānuku was submerged in before rising from the ocean. Wainuiātea is amniotic fluid, or the fluid in which we exist before we are born; a space called Te Whare Wānanga, or the house of learning, in which we learn and grow the most, inside of the mother's womb. Heta utilises the word “ātea” in Wainuiātea to refer to the open area in front of a wharenui, and in this way it acts as a portal to atua. When I sat on the seats positioned on Heta’s ātea, I listened to a karakia, which is played twice daily to open and to close the space, its acoustics ricocheting gently through the old church. Here, I finally felt less of my foreignness, and something shifted. I reflected back upon the importance of how pūrākau anchors us to the whakapapa grounding us to this world, even when we walk across cobblestones in Europe. The Body of Wainuiātea, not unlike Takapau, Māui Steals the Sun, and Wastelands, provide Māori ways of connecting to whakapapa through physically rendering them into artworks, which enable our context to be visible, while aligning us to the many other cultures around the world whose worlds were shattered by colonialism, but who still hold and share these stories as a reminder of our resilience.
This publication is produced with the support of Creative New Zealand Toi Aotearoa as part of Contemporary HUM’s wider coverage of the 60th Venice Biennale and its parallel events.
Click here for Crossing Currents: Aotearoa New Zealand Artists in Venice, an eight-part podcast series featuring interviews with the exhibiting artists from Aotearoa.
Click here for HUM's live coverage from the opening week of Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, The 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.