29 February 2024

Five contemporary artists explore how knowledge can be shared across time and culture in Memory Lines, a new exhibition opening at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi.  

The show brings together the work of Fiona Clark, Kirtika Kain, Rozana Lee, Sriwhana Spong and Hōhua Thompson (Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti, Ngāti Kahu, Ngāti Awa, Ngāti Rangiwewehi). These artists work across photography, film, sculptural installation, textiles and painting to consider the relationship between memory, knowledge and artmaking.  

 Curator Dr Kirsty Baker says the artists explore the power and potential that art holds to preserve, transmit and interrogate our ways of knowing.  

 “Each of the artworks in Memory Lines acts as a prompt, inviting us to consider how we have come to our own understandings of the world around us. How do we know the things that we know? How is knowledge passed down to us through generations and cultures?”  

 In the early 1980s Fiona Clark took a series of photographs in support of the Motunui-Waitara Waitangi Tribunal claim, filed by Te Atiawa. During this process Clark produced a calendar, Ngā Whaea O Te Moana, centering kuia as knowledge holders. The exhibition presents the entire suite of photographs from this calendar, displaying them alongside images of the calendar itself, for the first time.  

Memory Lines presents the work of New Delhi-born, Sydney-based painter Kirtika Kain for the first time in Aotearoa. Kain’s sensorial painting practice draws upon a rich range of materials and vibrantly coloured religious pigments. Her distinctive visual language often reflects on collective memories held across the Dalit diaspora.  

Rozana Lee’s textiles are elaborately patterned in hand-drawn wax and incorporate a variety of  culturally specific patterns influenced by her Indonesian-Chinese heritage and her experiences of migration. Her films expand these concerns through the depiction of two journeys ‘home’ from Aotearoa, one to Indonesia and one to China.   

Sriwhana Spong is represented in Memory Lines by both film and sculpture. In these works she uses spoken word, sound, sculpture and visual imagery to navigate the complexity of our relationship to language, considering the ways that it shapes our understanding of both ourselves, and our relationship to the world around us. 

Memory Lines features a major new installation by Hōhua Thompson, commissioned for the exhibition. The installation incorporates sculpture and sound and is based on a pakiwaitara, or story, about the taniwha Pekehāua passed down to Thompson from his tūpuna. This significant new work reflects on generational knowledge transmission, storytelling and kaitiakitanga.   

”These artists share an interest in the communicative power of artistic expression, inviting us to consider the power of art to shape memory.”  

Memory Lines runs from 9 March – 30 June 2024.    

About the artists:  

Hōhua Thompson’s (Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti, Ngāti Kahu, Ngāti Awa, Ngāti Rangiwewehi) large-scale installation practice frequently draws on pūrākau handed down to him through his whakapapa.  

Fiona Clark is one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s leading photographers, whose work as an artist is intrinsically linked with her work as an activist. Clark’s photographs, made across a career spanning more than five decades, serve as a visual record of the knowledge embedded in the places, people and communities she pictures.  

Rozana Lee’s practice often considers the power of pattern, material and form to hold cultural memory and reveal overlooked or omitted history. Her batik works fuse together a range of symbolic imagery to question notions of originality, belonging and home through the frame of migrant experience.  

Sriwhana Spong’s recent practice has been shaped by her research into medieval women mystics, including Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179). Through spoken word, sound, sculpture and visual imagery, Spong’s work navigates the complexity of women’s relationships to power as it has been codified by society.   

Kirtika Kain is a Sydney-based painter whose work often reflects upon collective memories held across the Dalit diaspora. Her sensorial painting practice incorporates materials including sindoor pigment, beeswax, tar and gold to build a visual language that is richly evocative and densely symbolic.