spinofflive
Inflatable mokomoko and wheke at the Kura Moana installation. (Images: Mark Tantrum with additional design by Tina Tiller)
Inflatable mokomoko and wheke at the Kura Moana installation. (Images: Mark Tantrum with additional design by Tina Tiller)

SocietyMarch 2, 2022

In Wellington, Lisa Reihana’s public art tells stories of the moana that connect us all

Inflatable mokomoko and wheke at the Kura Moana installation. (Images: Mark Tantrum with additional design by Tina Tiller)
Inflatable mokomoko and wheke at the Kura Moana installation. (Images: Mark Tantrum with additional design by Tina Tiller)

This year’s Festival of the Arts artist in focus has created a programme of free waterfront works focused on stories of the Pacific ocean. She tells Charlotte Muru-Lanning why she’s interested in moana as a connector of peoples.

The legendary Polynesian explorer Kupe is considered to be the first person to discover Aotearoa. Iwi around the country have differing accounts of Kupe and his travels, but it’s said that it was his furious pursuit of a great and wayward octopus named Te Wheke a Muturangi that led him to Aotearoa.

During Kupe’s voyages around Aotearoa, he visited and named places up and down both islands. Those pūrākau are specific to iwi, as well as connectors between. Our shared whakapapa with Kupe also connects Māori with our Pacific cousins.

One of the places Kupe is credited with discovering and naming as he made his way around the country is Te Whanganui-a-Tara, the harbour on which Wellington is now situated. 

A new installation by visual artist Lisa Reihana (Ngāpuhi-Ngāti Hine, Ngāi Tū-Te Auru), created as part of the Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts, of which she is the artist in focus, honours that story and expands on it through six outdoor works. The walkable waterfront installation, Kura Moana, features playful bespoke inflatable sculptures, music, video projections and augmented pieces, all created specifically for the festival. 

Kura Moana is an expression of the whakapapa that we as New Zealanders have with the whole of Te Moana Nui a Kiwa, explains festival director Mere Boynton (Te Aitanga a Mahaki, Ngāti Oneone, Ngāi Tūhoe). “For Māori, we whakapapa very closely with the people of the Pacific, they’re our ancestors,” she says. 

The centerpiece of Kura Moana, an enormous blow-up wheke, rests – or perhaps more accurately, bides its time – in Whairepo Lagoon on the waterfront. As the tide goes in and out, and Wellington’s ever-reliable winds gust through, the 15-metre wide sculpture, decorated with patterns created in conjunction with a Whāngarei signwriter, naturally becomes animated. 

About a 15 minute stroll away, in Waitangi Park, Reihana has created six wacky-waving mokomoko, or geckos, which flap in the wind like the attention-grabbing tubular figures that inhabit the front of car yards.

Lisa Reihana in front of her mokomoko in Waitangi Park, Wellington. (Photo: Mark Tantrum)

Though Reihana has worked across a wide array of mediums in the past, this is the first time she’s worked with inflatables. “I’m always kind of trying to push the boundaries of what I do and what I know,” she says. “Being the artist in focus for this festival has really given me a lovely opportunity to make something for a very different community.”

Floral lei and ei katu, made in collaboration with local Pacific Island artists, adorn the bronze statue of Kupe Raiatea, his wife and tohunga Pekahourangi at the moment of their sighting of Aotearoa from their canoe. Unveiled in 1940, the sculpture spent 40 years at the Wellington Railway Station before, in 2000, being given a permanent home on the waterfront. “As Pacific Islanders and Māori, those artworks really embody our tūpuna,” says Boynton. The lei and ei katu are a way of honouring the sculpture as tūpuna, while honouring our connections to the Pacific as well.

Near the sculpture, a new ambient track by Reihana’s partner James Pinker will play, along with ‘Aotearoa’, a song written by Ngatai Huata in the 1990s about Kupe’s wife Hine-te-aparangi. Reihana is hoping that the song “amplifies the female aspect” of the story of Kupe, bringing an entirely new energy to the heavy bronze statue. 

“I’ve got some things that I’ve carried around with me for years, like pictures I have on the wall,” Reihana says. “Sometimes you just take them down or move them to another place, and you see them fresh, or you see them with a different kind of fresh set of eyes.” That’s the feeling she’s trying to achieve for people who walk past the Kupe statue every day.

At night, projections of new video works will accompany the installation. One piece projected onto Te Papa reimagines the process behind the statue of Kupe through the eyes of sculptor William Trethewey, with life models for the statue striking poses. “I’m always interested in where the artist is in work,” says Reihana, ” and what it takes to create these objects.” 

Each artwork in Kura Moana behaves like a clue to a story or moment in history. Part of the fun for viewers is following up with other resources to learn more or add more colour to stories we think we already know. We may know the story of Kupe, but what about his wife? We might walk past a sculpture everyday, but what went into its creation?

Beyond the waterfront installations, pieces from 15 years of Reihana’s catalogue will be dotted across galleries in Pōneke. Pataka Gallery in Porirua is showing a mini-survey of her career, including the video work Nomads of the Sea which tells the story of Charlotte Badger, the first European woman who lived in Aotearoa. It’s the first time the piece has been shown in New Zealand. 

Lisa Reihana’s video work In Pursuit of Venus.

Reihana has frequently explored how identity and history intersect with place and community in her artistic practice. The concepts for Kura Moana were developed from Reihana’s seminal 2015 video work In Pursuit of Venus, currently on display at Te Papa. The video, shown at the 2017 Venice Biennale, brings to life a historic French scenic wallpaper portraying encounters between Europeans and Tahitians – two peoples, brought together by the sea.

“Like In Pursuit of Venus, [in Kura Moana] there’s these interactions between people because of travellers who’ve hopped across the waterways and travelled to far flung places,” says Reihana.

In some ways, the Pacific Ocean has been a gateway to Aotearoa for all New Zealanders. “That’s what we want to focus on,” says Boynton, “that Te Moana Nui a Kiwa is a connector of all of us, it connects us to the Pacific, it connects us to the rest of the world”. 

The 2022 Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts is on now and runs until March 20. 

The festival has relaunched a revised programme to focus on outdoor art, visuals arts and digital sessions showcasing chamber music and conversations with local and international writers. For more information visit festival.nz.

Keep going!
A protester at Cranmer Square in Christchurch (Photo: Adam Bradley/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images; additional design Archi Banal)
A protester at Cranmer Square in Christchurch (Photo: Adam Bradley/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images; additional design Archi Banal)

SocietyMarch 2, 2022

As police target parliament grounds, clone protests spring up around New Zealand

A protester at Cranmer Square in Christchurch (Photo: Adam Bradley/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images; additional design Archi Banal)
A protester at Cranmer Square in Christchurch (Photo: Adam Bradley/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images; additional design Archi Banal)

Many unable to make their way to Wellington have been seeking ways to join the movement closer to home – but with all eyes on parliament, they’ve been relegated to the sidelines. 

As the parliament protest enters its fourth week, with the peak of support seemingly passed and police mounting a massive operation to bring the action to an end, the question for many watching, supporting and participating in the once-convoy-now-occupation seems to be: what next?

The relative success of the convoy and the subsequent occupation seems to have been something of a surprise to everyone. It was clear that police underestimated the event, and while many of us in the media saw it coming, few could honestly say they expected it would still be going days later, let alone weeks.

While some supporters of the protest have suggested at various times that they represent “the majority” of the population, and that “hundreds of thousands” would show up outside parliament, it seems that even they were perhaps unprepared for it to actually take off the way it did. They’d made similar predictions in the past about protest efforts, none of which came even remotely close to being correct.

So it’s natural that some have been determined to catch that lightning in a bottle again, and expand the protest nationwide – they want to create Convoy 2.0 with outposts all over the motu. But so far things haven’t quite taken off the way some may have hoped.

One of the larger NZ Convoy channels on Telegram, originally part of the planning for the initial protest, renamed itself “Freedom Camp NZ” and began to promote the expansion plans in mid-February, then spawned a second Telegram group to facilitate planning for each city.

The Telegram appeal to connect people for nationwide protest outposts

A conversation thread was created for each major New Zealand city and town, with locals encouraged to coordinate directly with one another to bring the “Freedom Camp” movement to the nation. New Zealand’s most populous city, Auckland, managed fewer than a hundred comments. 

But the effort to create satellite occupations has one advantage: some have been there almost since the start. At the beginning of February, as the North Island and South Island convoys reached their destinations, most of those in the South Island identified their big challenge: Cook Strait. With the majority of the convoyers unvaccinated, and many unwilling to be tested, getting a ferry ticket was impossible. Picton was the end of the line for the bulk of the southern convoy, and many went home. But some remained, and Picton has also played host to an occupation. 

Protesters’ signs at Cranmer Square in Christchurch (Photo: Adam Bradley/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Then, as the success of the Wellington occupation became evident, some of those in Christchurch, who had been unable to reach the capital, decided to start their own offshoot. They set up camp in Cranmer Square a few days after the speaker, Trevor Mallard, unleashed sprinklers and 80s pop on the parliament occupation.

And so, for almost as long as the Wellington occupation has raged on, there have been sibling protests in Christchurch and Picton, and yet you’ve probably heard very little about them. And you’ve definitely not been watching live streams from either of them on the nation’s leading news websites. 

The protest at Nelson Square Reserve in Picton (Nate McKinnon/RNZ)

The same has been true for ideologically aligned Facebook and Telegram users. In the many and varied groups that make up the online community of Covid denial in New Zealand, the parliament protest has been the story. It’s the main storyline in every single group and channel. Details of the goings-on each day are posted and shared with no context or explanation required. A post saying “police have stormed the site” is understood by everyone to mean the occupation camp in downtown Wellington. 

Mention of the other protest camps is sadly lacking, even there. Occasionally, if extraordinary news breaks, updates will filter out and thoughts turn briefly to other camped-out protesters. But for the most part it’s out of sight, out of mind

A group hoping to establish a protest beachhead in Auckland piggybacked off the Freedom and Rights Coalition’s Harbour Bridge march on Saturday to establish the Tāmaki Makaurau Freedom Camp. But rather than set up tents in Victoria Park, where the march’s thousands of participants ended up, they moved across town to the Auckland Domain where they were largely unnoticed by most of the city. Police blocked roads into the Domain to prevent more people joining, and the council issued bylaw breach notices to demand the campers leave.

Trump flags flying at the Auckland domain protest on Saturday (Photo: RNZ)

By Tuesday afternoon the camp’s Telegram channel reported “there’s only 12 including kids on site”.

And, due to the fragmented nature of the protest movement, a different group of protest supporters led by a QAnon-promoting Telegram influencer were discussing their own separate Auckland-based protest days after the Domain protesters had first pitched their tents. 

Another Telegram conspiracy influencer, Karen Brewer, has been frustrated that her appeals to shift the protest to the governor general’s official residences in Auckland and Wellington have been drowned out by the parliament occupation. Brewer has been appealing to believers to gather outside the official homes of Dame Cindy Kiro in order to demand she dissolve parliament and issue a writ for a new election. A small number of her supporters have been meeting outside government house in Auckland to take turns stepping up to the gate in order to shout their demands at the presumably empty house.

A protester shouts a demand for the government to be dissolved at a seemingly empty house; Karen Brewer’s promotional poster intended to see a small crowd oust the government.

The success of the Wellington protest that inspired copycat events has also, ironically, consigned them to the sidelines. With all eyes on parliament’s long-deceased lawn, there’s been little attention paid to the smaller actions around the country for those trying to join in closer to their own homes. The media aren’t that interested, and even supporters have only so much love to give, and it’s all headed for the capital. But with police making it clear they’ve run out of patience in Wellington, the outposts may soon find themselves the centre of attention.

But wait there's more!