30 November 2024

Meditations, the latest exhibition from City Gallery Te Whare Toi, at its temporary home in National Library of New Zealand, Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa, is an exploration of time and the creation of personal archives.

Four artists: Moorina Bonini (Yorta Yorta/Woiwurrung), Lily Dowd, Te Ara Minhinnick (Ngaati Te Ata) and Dr Areta Wilkinson (Kai Tahu) are represented in the group show, curated by Israel Randell.

“I took a Te Ao Māori approach to the curation process, bringing the artists together much earlier than usual. This collaborative method created a spiralled way of thinking that reflects the themes of the exhibition: an active archive, and a collapsing, resisting, and slowing of time through embodied practices,” says Randell.

Moorina Bonini is a Melbourne-based artist exhibiting for the first time in Aotearoa. Her practice attempts to disrupt and critique the eurocentric foundations of indigenous categorisation within western institutions. In Meditations her works use charcoal, from Country (ancestral land), and text to form a counterpoint to a gallery’s traditional white walls.

The pou artist of the exhibition, Dr Areta Wilkinson is showing Ka Taka Te Wā, a delicate and beautiful work created over the pandemic. Taking silver to the awa, Wilkinson used river rocks to shape and imprint pendants; embedding the whakapapa within the rocks into the ancient materials. Here past, present and future occupy the same space in reference to the non-linear concept of time in te Ao Māori.

Lily Dowd is a contemporary photography-based artist who has created new works for Meditations. Her tonal, dreamy compilations of time and light capture memories of daily life in a meditative, performance-based installation. One of her works uses exposed untreated lumen prints in works that slowly degrade and disappear; a living piece that will be replaced during the course of the exhibition.

Te Ara Minhinnick works with whenua; an act of re-representation where whakapapa begins in the land and extends to the artist and her whanau in a statement of tino rangatiratanga. In a new work created for the exhibition, this whenua is a site of evidence, a source to remember and retain knowledge; a place of obligation to all.

“These are experimental practices and hold a plurality of ideas,” says Randell. “I am excited to see the audience’s response to these works and their themes,”

Meditations is open from 30 November – 1 March at National Library of New Zealand, Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa, Wellington.

Karioitahi, Te Ara Minhinnick