Irirangi: The recurring calls of toi Māori

This piece is an excerpt from They covered the house in stories: 50 years of exhibiting contemporary art, a richly-illustrated 384 page hardcover book exploring Te Tuhi’s 50 year history and highlighting its enduring contribution to contemporary art.

When researching Te Tuhi’s archive for this essay I came across a 1986 exhibition called Karanga Karanga that immediately piqued my curiosity. As well as highlighting an approach and a moment I was unaware of, it also raised questions for me about Māori exhibition-making and representation in the context of our cultural institutions here in Aotearoa New Zealand, and how this may have lent itself to Te Tuhi’s own histories. 

The karanga is often described as a call and response, which in many ways is a misnomer. It is the call by the kaikaranga on behalf of mana whenua to visitors to their marae, followed by a response from the kaikaranga on behalf of the manuhiri — but this is an over-simplification of what is a much more deeply significant exchange. The practice of karanga is undertaken by women whose mana in these situations is paramount. With the first words of a karanga, the ātea becomes tapu, requiring all participants to acknowledge the sacredness of the space they are entering and the actions they are undertaking.¹ Historically, this was also the moment at which mana whenua and manuhiri would understand whether they were facing whānau, friend or foe; discerning the intentions of the visitors (and their potential reception) and calling on the atua and tūpuna for their wisdom, guidance and protection. In this way it is fitting to use Karanga Karanga as a sort of origin marker in Te Tuhi’s engagement with Māori artists and exhibition making, setting the scene for a chronology that has profiled wāhine Māori from early on while also consistently investing in notions of intention and exchange over subsequent decades.

Karanga Karanga, initiated by Haeata Māori Women’s Art Collective, was shown concurrently at three different venues — Wellington City Art Gallery, Fisher Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, and Tairāwhiti Museum, Tūranga-nui-a-Kiwa Gisborne — as a single exhibition featuring over seventy wāhine Māori artists from across the country. As an example of exhibition making, it presented an innovative approach to Māori collectivism, championed by a proactive group of women who were reacting to a proliferation of exhibitions showcasing male artists² and a “need for Maori women to gather together to support each other’s endeavours.”³

This was not a unique example of Māori or female activism. It came off the back of decades of change, as curator Athol McCredie confirms: “Feminism, the environment and Maori rights were the political issues of 1970s New Zealand.”⁴ These major social shifts across the country coincided with significant impacts for Māori communities. In 1974 the Māori language was given official recognition through the Māori Affairs Amendment Act, and the following year the Waitangi Tribunal was created, with the Treaty of Waitangi Act being passed in the same week Whina Cooper led the Māori Land March onto the grounds of Parliament in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. Coincidentally, 1975 was also the year the Pakuranga Arts Centre opened on the site that is now Te Tuhi.

Paul Meredith notes: “By 1986, just under 80 percent [of Māori] were in urban centres.”⁵ As a result, many whānau were becoming increasingly disconnected from their whenua, language and ahi kā. Art centres and galleries, particularly those in urban settings, became spaces where Māori artists could present works that reflected their experiences to a wider audience. In the same year as Karanga Karanga was shown, Te Maori, having received overwhelmingly positive reviews and record crowds from showings in New York, St Louis, San Francisco and Chicago, began its national tour showcasing the histories and artforms that for a general Aotearoa audience were still partially, or completely, unknown. One of the intriguing differences between these two exhibitions was that wāhine Māori and associated artforms were excluded from Te Maori. Gender politics aside, these and other exhibitions seemed to represent a modality of Māori agency and determination that had been heavily influenced by the events and progress made in the previous decade. 

The exhibition programme of the Fisher Gallery, newly built in 1984, interestingly profiled Māori women’s practice over their male counterparts through much of the 1980s and 90s. Of significance during this period were multiple solo presentations by artists who would go on to become some of our most prominent in the decades that followed. Maureen Lander (who also participated in Karanga Karanga) presented solo installations that not only drew from a whakapapa of raranga but also spoke to concerns about a lack of Māori ownership, historically, in the way they were perceived and represented. Her exhibition Grass Skirts (1996) utilised a set of display cases on loan from Auckland Museum. Funded by the Carnegie Foundation, established by American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, the cases were commissioned in 1929 to show artefacts from Auckland Museum’s ethnographic department. At Te Tuhi, these vitrines were utilised by multiple artists from 1996–98 as part of an invitational programme. As well as Lander, Areta Wilkinson, whose practice at this time frequently offered a critique of museological and taxonomic systems in relation to te ao Māori, presented a project simply titled Carnegie Storage (1996), which displayed catalogue cards, each representing the artist’s own works as an absent collection.

The 1990s was a time peppered with major moments for Māori in their relationship with the Crown. Ngāi Tahu and Waikato-Tainui both settled substantial claims in this decade, and the highly controversial pan-tribal Sealord settlement, covering commercial and customary fishing rights, was signed.⁶ The Fisher Gallery presented important exhibitions that responded to some of these themes, including Emily Karaka’s Waharoa o Ngai Tai (1997), which featured some of the artist’s most passionate and provocative works, created in response to the Treaty of Waitangi, including Te Ure O Te Ao(1995) and Local Government Tea Party (1997). As Witi Ihimaera writes in the catalogue, “the Fisher Gallery exhibition shows us that the spirit of indomitable Earth Goddess remains as passionate as ever.”⁷ This fervour was also visible in an earlier exhibition, Works from Mana Tiriti: Māori and Pakeha Artists respond to the Treaty of Waitangi (1990), in which Karaka strongly advocated for Ngāi Tai to have greater representation in the exhibition, as mana whenua. Originally conceived for Wellington City Art Gallery as a response to the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, the Fisher Gallery iteration shifted the focus from an overarching national response to a more local context that included a major new work by Karaka called Waitangi Wailing Wall (1990).

There were exceptions, of course, to the concentration of wāhine Māori exhibitions. Para Matchitt’s seminal installation Papa Kāinga (1987) was described by commentator Hamish Keith at the time as “one of the most important exhibitions held in the gallery.”⁸ Its bold architectural forms, layout and symbolism positioned the work within a contemporary Māori context while also speaking to what was happening in the art scene nationally and internationally. Similarly, Bob Jahnke’s exhibition Alpha Omega (2001) was engaging with broader trends, but his installation also spoke to the impacts of economic shifts nationally on Māori communities and livelihoods, such as the closing in the 1990s of a number of freezing works that had become the lifeblood of small towns across the country. This exhibition coincided with the opening event to celebrate the unification of the Pakuranga Community and Cultural Centre and the Fisher Gallery in a single building, becoming ‘te tuhi — the mark’. Gifted by Ngāi Tai to acknowledge tupuna Manawatere, “a great explorer who signalled his arrival in Aotearoa New Zealand by making his tuhi, or mark, on a pōhutukawa tree using karamea, a red ochre”,⁹ the new name signalled a critical shift in how the gallery was positioned within a national conversation about contemporary art practice moving into the new millennium.

Featured in the opening exhibitions was Reuben Paterson’s The Wharenui that Dad Built (2001), displayed as part of the Cameo Project series, newly conceived by gallery curator Rhoda Fowler (who had incidentally also been responsible for the Carnegie Case programme), to assist in growing the careers of emerging artists. Over the following decade, the number of exhibitions across the gallery increased, but the number of projects including Māori remained relatively static. Interestingly, the 2000s were a time of significant growth for Māori nationally, with a number of Māori visual arts courses being offered, major exhibitions being presented around Aotearoa and internationally, large publications being launched, and more Māori entering dedicated positions in cultural institutions. However, even though the number of Māori exhibitions and projects that were presented at te tuhi — the mark was comparatively low, they did make an impact. One of the most significant was the commissioning of Atarangi II (2006) by Michael Parekōwhai, which at the time of its unveiling was one of his largest public artworks to date. Positioned outside the main building near the street, it has become a landmark for those navigating their way to and from the gallery. An iteration of Atarangi (1990), held in Te Papa’s collection, this work references Te Ataarangi, an immersive visual and verbal teaching method developed by Dame Kāterina Te Heikōkō Mataira and Te Kumeroa Ngoingoi Pēwhairangi. It was modelled on Egyptian educator Caleb Gattegno’s Silent Way, developed in the early 1960s, that among other tools utilised the coloured batons called Cuisenaire rods that could be employed to create visual cues by teachers and learners. Its title translating broadly to ‘a considered new beginning’, Atarangi II’s relationship to language and education seemed fitting for this moment in Aotearoa’s and the gallery’s histories.

The following year, Brett Graham and Rachael Rakena presented U.F.O.B. (2007), fresh from the Sydney Biennale. The interactive installation invited gallery visitors to lie down and consider the video works suspended above them that explored ideas of Indigenous identity within a global context — a strand of research that was becoming increasingly important for Māori artists as international networks expanded and greater opportunities to present on the global stage became possible. This was also becoming apparent in some of the conceptual curatorial approaches being employed across te tuhi — the mark’s programme. Land Wars (2008), a two-part exhibition curated by Emma Bugden across various platforms, investigated a variety of perspectives on land, its commodification and politicisation. This exhibition was presented only a few months after the small rural community of Rūātoki was raided by armed police claiming local Māori were involved in a terrorist training camp in the nearby Urewera ranges.¹⁰ The exhibition included a work by senior artist Shona Rapira Davies. Like her earlier solo installation at the gallery, The Cicada Tree (1994) — of which reviewer T. J. McNamara said, “Its materials have a strong Maori context but it speaks to all races about the mythic power of regeneration”¹¹ — this installation drew its materials and kaupapa directly from a lived te ao Māori experience of the whenua and a history of forced dislocation.

Te Tuhi, across its many incarnations, has had a history of supporting developing practice. The beginning of the next decade suggests a leaning into this intention in relation to Māori artists being offered repeated opportunities to exhibit at different stages of their careers, and who have an ongoing relationship with the gallery in a variety of other ways. In 2009 Jeremy Leatinu‘u received the Iris Fisher Scholarship, an initiative established by the Lou and Iris Fisher Charitable Trust to support students in their final year of study through a one-off financial gift. The following year he was invited to have a solo exhibition. His work at the time — which combined performance and moving image as a way of representing the challenges of Māori and other minority groups coming to grips with defining an identity informed and challenged by decades of urbanisation and cultural dislocation — was also to become a consistent feature of the types of practices highlighted in the programme moving forward. A later project, Jeremy Leatinu‘u: Earthpushers (2017), commissioned by the gallery for the 2017 Headland Sculpture on the Gulf, also profiled a strand of the programme that was about expanding the reach of the artists and their works beyond the physical site of Te Tuhi in Pakuranga through a variety of offsite initiatives. This work, which included a large-scale performative action co-opting commuters to transport 500 small hessian bags of dirt from the city across the Waitematā Harbour to Waiheke Island, was connected back to Te Tuhi through the screening of a video work at the gallery that located the cumulative project, from start to finish, within an art and documentary context.

Like Leatinu‘u, Martin Awa Clarke Langdon was first included in Te Tuhi’s programme as a student. The initiative Mura o te ahi (In the heat of the fire) (2011), developed in partnership with Manukau Institute of Technology School of Visual Arts (which had an ongoing relationship with the gallery dating back to the 1990s), gave four students an opportunity to present a short-term solo exhibition. A few years later, Langdon was included in the expansive multi-platform project Unstuck in Time (2014), curated by Bruce E. Phillips. His work, My Grandad Mostly Played the Black Keys (2014), described in a New Zealand Herald review of the exhibition as the “only work that comes near convention”,¹² was nevertheless challenging from a Māori perspective in its use of conceptual connections that drew on Māori and European art-historical references while also talking to Langdon’s own experience of being Māori. A third example of this conscious nurturing of practice is Shannon Te Ao, who first exhibited at Te Tuhi with the moving-image work A torch and a light (cover) (2015), also commissioned for Unstuck in Time. Coincidentally, like Leatinu‘u, who had worked as Te Tuhi’s educator, Te Ao had also been employed by Te Tuhi, as Exhibitions Manager and Curatorial Assistant from 2011 to 2012. Over the following years, he would have his work featured multiple times, including the presentation of the co-commissioned moving-image work With the sun aglow, I have my pensive moods (2017) at the Edinburgh Art Festival, Scotland. This recurrence of moments in which to encounter an artist’s work at different times, across an array of platforms and within diverse contexts could be viewed as favouritism, but when experienced over the course of the gallery’s history with numerous directors and curators, it forms a methodology that speaks to the invitation set out by Karanga Karanga back in 1986.

In the mid-2010s there was a series of appointments of Māori into gallery directorial positions. Included among these was Hiraani Himona, who became the first Māori director of Te Tuhi in 2015. Having returned to Aotearoa from a successful period working at the South London Gallery, she brought with her an expansive understanding and experience of the international art world that appeared to align with the aspirations of former directors and curators, while also wanting to engage more directly with Māori and Moana Oceania in the programme and the ethos of the gallery. At the same time there was the continuation of an intentional shift to offsite projects that sat alongside the Pakuranga programme, growing the profile of the gallery and providing more opportunities for artists to have their works accessed by a greater audience. Although a low-key addition to this external programme, Te Tuhi Billboards, which faced the gallery entrance on the opposite side of Reeves Road in Pakuranga, gave artists a direct interface with a non-gallery audience. Initiated in 2006 (and expanded to include Te Tuhi’s Parnell Train Station venue in 2020), the billboards hosted projects by a number of Māori artists, including then Berlin-based Conor Clarke, whose subtly manipulated landscape images, Scenic Potential(2016), touched on the ongoing pervasive theme of the detrimental impacts of humankind on the environment, which were being felt on both a local and international level. Similarly, Silo 6, a series of repurposed concrete silos in central Tāmaki Makaurau, had been employed by Te Tuhi as an offsite location for a number of projects. Acts of Passage (2018), curated by Gabriela Salgado, Te Tuhi’s first international artistic director, built on earlier exhibitions at this site, to provide occasions for new audiences to engage with art in an unconventional setting. Included in this exhibition were works by Arapeta Ashton that included a karakia as a performance to cleanse the space at the opening function. The following year, Ashton presented an installation of contemporary kākahu at Te Tuhi called Māwhitiwhiti (2019), which included a documentary about his practice and a series of weaving workshops — continuing Te Tuhi’s commitment to ongoing support of an artist’s practice.

The 2020s began with the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, which saw the unparalleled shut-down of services around the globe and the closure of Aotearoa’s borders from 26 March for the next two years. In the weeks prior to this, the Sydney Biennale hosted its opening events, led for the first time by an Indigenous curator and attended by the largest-ever contingent of Indigenous delegates. Over the course of the pandemic, movements such as Black Lives Matter took on greater significance following the wrongful death in the United States of George Floyd at the hands of police in May 2020. In December that same year, the expansive exhibition Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art opened at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. One of the largest exhibitions in the 134-year history of the gallery and featuring over 200 works by Māori artists, its impact was further accentuated by the exhibition’s Māori curator Nigel Borell publicly resigning, with a number of the institution’s Māori staff reportedly calling out the institution’s lack of cultural safety.¹³

Within this complex set of circumstances, Te Tuhi had to find alternative modes of delivering its ambitious programme while also responding in some way to the significant transformation of the international and local cultural landscape. In 2020 James Tapsell-Kururangi became the inaugural Curatorial Intern at Te Tuhi’s Parnell Project Space. His programme over the following year, called Papatūnga, embodied Māori principles of place and time, but also invested in developing enduring relationships between artists, curators and practices that in many ways reflected Te Tuhi’s own approach over the decades. Having initiated both these new offsite strands of Te Tuhi’s programme to expand reach and include support for emerging curatorial practice, the organisation was also faced with a shift in the core role of artistic director/curator. Among a series of one-off guest curatorial projects piloted over the following two years was A Very Different World(2021), an exhibition by Ngahiraka Mason that endeavoured to “bring to light the changed realities and unprecedented difficulties of the Covid-19 pandemic.”¹⁴ As the gallery was coming to terms with new ways of working and thinking about engaging the world, many artists and curators were also grappling with similar issues. Hiria Anderson’s works in the exhibition were presented on both the billboards, with Reka Deals (2021) as a series of hand-painted roadside signs advertising Māori delicacies, and in the gallery, with small painted scenes from the marae and home. These works combined summed up the experience for many Māori coming to terms with a changed reality, where community and kai took on unprecedented importance in the face of shortages, increased costs and growing inequality.

While the exhibition programme hosted guest curators and maintained a consistent presence in Pakuranga, the early 2020s were marked largely by alternative approaches to exhibition making, and the development and presentation of artists and their practices. Projects such as Tia Barrett’s Tūhononga (Cluster and Connection) (2023–24), which documented the experience of gathering pūrākau through wānanga and physical experience, and the two-part digital and static imagery of Chevron Hassett’s Hello Mr Kāwana (2022), reflect the pivot in approach that many had to make to move away from the more conventional gallery-exhibition format favoured pre-Covid. This also coincided with the upturn in appetite for Indigenous perspectives in art, locally and internationally. Te Tuhi’s collaborations with national and offshore partners in the presentation of toi Māori escalated in 2024. Early in the year, the Malta Biennale invited Te Tuhi to participate in their inaugural exhibition programme with a screening of twenty moving-image works by eleven Māori artists, called Takiwā Hou: Imagining New Spaces, which was later re-exhibited at the gallery in Pakuranga. As an extension of this project, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne chose a selection of three artists from Takiwā Hou: Imagining New Spaces to have their works included in Vidéo Club, screened in Reims, France, with a reciprocal programme of works shown in Aotearoa by three French artists. Then in August, Te Tuhi, in collaboration with the Busan Biennale Organizing Committee, commissioned a series of works including Layne Waerea’s Free Promises (2024) and Aroha Abigail Jensen’s Inside my papahou: puoro tuatini. Her site, Désirée — ā whakamātao owha (2024), both exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan as part of the Biennale’s opening programme. Also, in August that same year Te Tuhi partnered with The Dowse Art Museum and the Office for Contemporary Art Aotearoa to present Shannon Te Ao’s Ia rā, ia rā (rere runga, rere raro) — Everyday (I fly high, I fly low) (2021) as the New Zealand Pavilion at the 15th Gwangju Biennale.

This intense period of programming and network building overlapped with initiatives intended to support Māori artists and practices in an Aotearoa context. Two projects, the World Weather Network and Paerangi: Waipawa, encouraged the creation of works in response to engaging with sites, communities and issues that had gained increased prominence following the hyper localism generated by the pandemic. Riki Pirihi’s Ka Tangi te Kārearea a te Rangi Uaheke (The Falcon Screams on a Rainy Day) (2024), composition and film recorded in a disused concrete bunker at the summit of Moe-i-te-rā Brooklyn Hill in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, is a visceral and emotive reflection of the challenges facing the climate and the environment, captured as part of the World Weather Network’s multiple responses. Paerangi: Waipawa, on the other hand, was a strand of the Papatūnga Artist Development Programme conceived “around a series of wānanga for artists and their wider communities, providing opportunities to share knowledge, develop projects and connect with other people and spaces.”¹⁵ Paerangi: Waipawa brought together a group of seven Māori artists to wānanga, collaborate and exhibit in a two-day pop-up in the Central Hawkes Bay town of Waipawa.

This ongoing commitment to artist development has become a defining feature of Te Tuhi’s programme. While not always presented through exhibitions, support for Māori artists and their practice has been the mode by which the gallery has built on the challenge so poignantly articulated through Karanga Karanga back in 1986. Having traversed fifty years of some of the most dynamic times in post-colonial human history, marked by a blend of remarkable advancements and significant challenges, Te Tuhi has surprisingly remained both responsive and singular in its vision. The space created by Haeata and many others is one of frequent engagement with toi Māori and the things that impact and are of importance for Māori communities. While not necessarily a call and response, it is most certainly an investment in ‘notions of intention and exchange’.

1. Rawinia Higgins rāua ko Paul Meredith, “Te Mana o te Wāhine — Māori Women — Waiata, Karanga and Whaikōrero,” Te Ara — The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, accessed 12 April 2025, http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/te-mana-o-te-wahine-maori-women/page-4.
2. In the introduction of the catalogue for the Tūranga-nui-a-Kiwa Gisborne iteration, it is noted that one of the key catalysts for the development of Karanga Karanga was an exhibition at The Dowse Art Museum called Pakohe, featuring the work of “Maori and Pakeha master craftsmen” working in stone. Haeata Māori Women’s Art Collective, “Karanga,” in Karanga Karanga (Gisborne Museum and Art Centre, 1986), 1–2.
3. Ibid, 1. 
4. Athol McCredie, “Going Public: New Zealand Art Museums in the 1970s” (master’s thesis, Massey University, 1999), 82, http://hdl.handle.net/10179/250.
5. Paul Meredith, “Urban Māori,” Te Ara — The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, accessed 1 October 2023, http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/urban-maori.
6. Richard S. Hill, “Ngā Whakataunga Tiriti — Treaty of Waitangi Settlement Process — The Waitangi Tribunal and Negotiated Settlements,” Te Ara — The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, accessed 20 April 2025, http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/nga-whakataunga-tiriti-treaty-of-waitangi-settlement-process/page-3.
7. Witi Ihimaera, Earth Goddess: He Tohu o Taku Aroha ki a Emare Karaka (Fisher Gallery, 1997).
8. “Launching a New Canoe: The Art of Para Matchitt,” Accent, September 1987, 30.
9. “History: Te Hītori o Te Tuhi,” Te Tuhi, accessed 12 April 2025, https://tetuhi.art/about/history/.
10. APNZ, “Police Acted ‘Unlawfully’ During Urewera Raids,” The New Zealand Herald, 22 May 2013, https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/police-acted-unlawfully-during-urewera-raids/Y5U7R2O5MMKAR4RS4UQONDA7QQ/.
11. T. J. McNamara, “From Earth to Heaven,” The New Zealand Herald, 17 November 1994, 4.
12. “First, the Fish Was Killed,” The New Zealand Herald, 16 August 2014, https://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/first-the-fish-was-killed/OCIU47WFC72GR5KWAD5GA5PUF4/#google_vignette.
13. Leonie Hayden, “‘Unsafe Space for Māori’: Auckland Art Gallery in Turmoil as Staff Question Leadership,” The Spinoff, 27 March 2021, https://thespinoff.co.nz/atea/27-03-2021/auckland-art-gallery-in-turmoil-as-staff-allege-unsafe-space-for-maori.
14. “A Very Different World,” Te Tuhi, accessed 12 April 2025, https://tetuhi.art/exhibition/a-very-different-world/.
15. “Papatūnga Artist Development Programme,” Te Tuhi, accessed 15 April 2025, https://tetuhi.art/opportunities/papatunga/.

Reproduced with permission from They covered the house in stories: 50 years of exhibiting contemporary art.