The occult, in the vaguest sense, refers to a power that is not necessarily our own but might be harnessed. Whatever power is present at Occulture, it keeps to its own company; anything prepossessing of influence clings to it tightly. What service can the gallery do magic, beyond canonise it’s aesthetic? “Without access to power’s hidden manifestations, visibility is tantamount to reality, a possible explanation for the authenticity of images,” writes Lynne Tillman, speaking to the difficulty I feel trying to explain how the white walls of the gallery have a tendency to dehistoricise anything they swallow. The light that envelops the works seems pertinent in an exhibition that beckons someplace darker. In Occulture, whiteness is allowed to slip from the norm only to a place with slightly more shadowy corners; which is not to say whiteness per se has ever been defined by anything but what it isn’t. I’m not speaking for the all the works — some, Fiona Pardington’s, Lorene Taurerewa’s, Yin-Ju Chen’s, speak to histories that are not strictly of a Victorian Gothic strain — but rather the vague notion of the occult, defined principally by the more historical works, which is presented as a particularly Pākehā mysticism.

The Tohunga Suppression Act was passed by the New Zealand legislature in 1907. It declared that:

“2. (1.) Every person who gathers Maoris around him by practising on their superstition or credulity, or who misleads or attempts to mislead any Maori by professing or pretending to profess supernatural powers in the treatment of cure of any disease, or in the foretelling of future events, or otherwise, is liable on summary conviction before a Magistrate to a fine not exceeding twenty­five pounds or to imprisonment for a period not exceeding twelve months in the case of a second or any subsequent offence against this Act.”

Mamari Stephens suggests that the Act was passed less out of genuine concern for Māori health and more as a means of asserting certainty and dominance during an anxious and confusing period in our history. The stigmatisation of tohunga it encouraged remains: in 2003 Heather Roy, an ACT Member of Parliament, asked the Minister of Health in the House whether there was “any clinical evidence that such healing is effective; or is this funding just political correctness gone mad?”

Occulture engages more with a mysticism that insists, as Alistair Crowley did, that “To practice black magic you have to violate every principle of science, decency, and intelligence. You must be obsessed with an insane idea of the importance of the petty object of your wretched and selfish desires,” than it does with the holism that is engaged with the history and suppression of “superstition” here and in the wider Pacific. The distinctions between what is “magic”, what is “superstition”, what is “holistic”, what is “occulture”, and so on, are interesting for their malleability — as often tied to slippery legacies of cultural dominance and subordination as any basis of fact.

It’s difficult to distill each artist’s individual body politics into a five minute video, and difficult again to try and account for them within 600 words. The series leaves a lot to be desired, specifically in terms of acting as a “counter-narrative” to an exhibition of around 100 artworks, because it has not been granted the physical presence so many of the videos attest to the need for. Rather, it is the intangible presence of an absence that is being acknowledged by the gallery in commissioning this series. Having said that, the series remains accessible to audiences across Aotearoa and the Pacific despite the exhibition having been packed up and shipped back to the Tate, and so has the chance to long outlive the exhibition proper.  

Often the series seems to ask for more of the gallery than it has been granted. Rosanna Raymond, who features in episode one, speaks of visiting galleries with her mother as a child and being totally unrepresented. The question raised but left unanswered is whether or not a young Samoan girl could have walked into The Body Laid Bare and found a figure she could identify with. Tanu Gago, photographer and co-founder of FAF SWAG, who features in the final episode of the series, said in conversation with Anthony Byrt for Metro in March that “[FAF SWAG] realised that the challenge of inclusion and participation and diversity is actually to come into the centre, and to operate in a way that is still authentic and meaningful to [our] cultural space, but has the visibility to reach a wider audience.” He elaborates on that in Pacific Bodies, speaking to a need for the realities of young, LGBTQ+ Pacific peoples to be brought to the forefront of the public consciousness in order for the general population to understand what they need from us to ensure that their futures thrive. The point the series makes, it seems, is that it itself is not, cannot be, enough.

Pacific Bodies leaves you wanting: wanting for the gallery to allow itself to be truly and physically decentralised by the artists whose voices it has brought to the fore; wanting for a longer conversation; wanting for a chance to experience the works we see so briefly on screen in real life. The series, in making present the absence, marks the need for something more.

Light falls and flows until the shadows, reflections, and various plays of light become to feel prolonged; until we forget these images track instances, not passages, of time. Cole takes photographs that look like memories. The texture of memory, he writes, is “an intense combination of freedom verging on randomness and a specificity that feels oneiric.” The texture of memory is the soft curves of light playing on a mesh curtain in a hotel room in Nuremberg, folding in and out of shadow; or, perhaps it’s cooler to the touch: the harsh facets of a mirrored surface. The texture of memory has never been the smooth, slippery surface of a photographic print.

Could we consider reflection as synonymous to memory? Both look backward — “re”, as prefix (recollection, reflection) is derived from the latin for “behind” — which is not to say they cannot move forward. Think of the Hawaiian term for future: Ka ua mahope, “the time which comes after or behind.” Blind Spot features many photographs of reflection: in glass, in puddles, in the rephotographing of images. Cole writes that these subjects, images already made, are “neither more nor less than the ‘real’ elements by which they were framed […] Which world? See how? We who?”

Cole’s instances of reflection draw our attention back to the photographic lens, reminding us that what we know of the scene is only what the frame allows us: that the photograph is always, at least, a view of a view. Blind Spot asks us to look for the continuity of places in spaces where we might not have thought to: in dreams, in dappled light, in shadows, in reflection; “hearing the silence because we have heard some of the sounds.”¹

1. Greg Denning, “Empowering Imaginations,” The Contemporary Pacific 9(2) (1997): 419-29.

I’m having trouble writing to the theme of intersectionality. It’s a term that has been the focus of discussion within the arts recently, by writers Lana Lopesi, Natasha Matila-Smith, Kari Schmidt — more informed and eloquent on the subject than I am. My concern is that intersectionality can be, at its worst, a way of superficially acknowledging difference without accounting for oppression. It can — it should always — go far beyond that, but the way in which white people position themselves to it — most problematically in instances like writing for Salient which involve unpaid labour — often posits intersectional theory as antithesis to “white feminism” and in doing so manages to make whiteness central to the discussion. A reliance on these dichotomies does little beyond affirming the problems intersectionality seeks to address.

Basically I feel weird because I’ve been asked by you to write to a really complicated theme, with little regard for the fact that some artists and artist practitioners whose work may be defined by an outsider as intersectional in fact prefer to adhere to indigenous modes of thinking: mātauranga Māori, Moananui, manaakitanga, whakawhanaungatanga (this is clearly illustrated in Why Can’t We All Just Get Along? The Curatorial Edition, a conversation between Lana Lopesi, Nigel Borell, Ioana Gordon-Smith, and Ema Tavola published by the Pantograph Punch). Yes, these frameworks are intersectional; no, they are not best conflated under the umbrella of intersectionality.

Calling your feminism intersectional does not necessarily make it so. Without a clearer understanding of how this issue is going to pan out I am wary of contributing to it. The arts sector, this magazine, and my column would be greatly benefited by the careful application of intersectional theory and I think that is something that we should truly strive to achieve, however within the context of this issue I am worried that, as a woman of Māori and Tahitian descent, my voice will be subsumed into a broader narrative of “diversity”. I would not call my voice diverse; I would call it my own.

All the best,

Hanahiva Rose

The Adam Art Gallery has just opened it’s new show, The Tomorrow People. The exhibition “brings together a selection of works from an emerging generation of artists that offer urgent, resourceful, and playful possibilities for navigating troubling times.” It’s a big show (25 artists!) that asks interesting questions about the world we stand to inherit.

A new range of exhibitions has just opened at The Dowse Art Museum, including Fiona Clark: Te Iwi o Te Wāhi Kore, an exhibition of documentary photographs from the ’80s to the present by Fiona Clark which “reflect the activities, concerns and taonga of tangata whenua of Taranaki”; Maureen Lander: Flat-Pack Whakapapa, three installations by Maureen Lander which use raranga as a means of exploring the concept of whakapapa; and He Taonga Te Reo, an exhibition of objects from the Dowse’s collection which consider how language is integral to identity, 30 years after te reo Māori was made an official language.

Pātaka has also just opened three new shows: Máximo Laura — Eternal Vision, work by Peruvian tapestry artist Máximo Laura; TAKU HIKOI, LA’U MALAGA — My footprint, my walk, my journey, artworks by artists who have accessed the Te Korowai Whariki mental health services of Rangipapa, Purehurehu, and Tangaroa, and the Rangitahi/youth service, which showcase how artmaking can aid the journey towards mental wellbeing; and Flock Together, which brings together works across a range of media by Whanganui artists Leonie Sharp, Angela Tier, Tracey Piercy, and Emma Cunningham, exploring their shared interest in birds as inspiration, subject matter, material, and resource.

On Monday, July 24, from 12.15–1.15pm, Charlotte Wood and Emily Perkins will be in conversation at Te Papa as a part of their Writers on Mondays series. Their conversation will focus on what it means to write from this corner of the globe, and ask what fiction can grant us in the contemporary moment. Writers on Mondays is a weekly series that runs until October 2. Visit www.tepapa.govt.nz for more details on who will be speaking and when.

Also on July 24, Jeff Sessions will be talking at City Gallery Wellington from 6.00pm as a part of the Deane Lecture Series. His lecture “The Maungapōhatu Diamond: The Poetics and Truth of Prophecy” will focus on the significance of the Maungapōhatu diamond to Rua Kenana and his movement and its vision of political and economic independence.

Anxious Garden, an exhibition of new work by George Watson, opens at Enjoy Public Art Gallery on July 26 at 5.30pm. A text to accompany the exhibition, written by Anna Rankin, will be released that night.

On July 27 Horizons, an exhibition of camera-less photography by Poppy Lekner, opens at Toi Pōneke from 5.30pm.

Adam Art Gallery: Acting Out

“Works by a selection of New Zealand and international artists who address the physicality of the body.”

> July 9

Bartley and Company Art: Into the Anthropocene

Conor Clarke, Anne Noble, and Deborah Rundle “question and explore the dominant paradigms that have led the world to the position it is in today.”

> June 24

Bowen Galleries: Four Young Artists — Two From Auckland & Two From Wellington.

Works by Nicholas Pound, Tom Tuke, Yvette Velvin, and Rachel Weeber. Opens Monday, June 12, 5.30 pm.

> 1 July

City Gallery Wellington

Has four shows on: Colin McCahon: On Going Out With the Tide; Martino Gamper: 100 Chairs in 100 Days; Petra Cortright: RUNNING NEO—GEO GAMES UNDER MAME; and Shannon Te Ao: Untitled (McCahon House Studies).

The Dowse

Has five shows on: The Mind in the Hand: Drawing from the Dowse Collection; This Time of Useful Consciousness: Political Ecology Now; Richard Stratton: Living History; Emma Fitts: From Pressure to Vibration — the Event of a Thread; and Dark Objects.

Enjoy Public Art Gallery: Indecent Literature

“Robbie Handcock’s paintings explore historic depictions of gay sexuality in order to question contemporary queer existence.”

> June 24

MEANWHILE: No One is Sovereign in Love

Works by Freya Daly Sadgrove, Laura Duffy, Robbie Handcock, Alexandra Hollis, Ruby Joy Eade, and Aliyah Winter — curated by Simon Gennard.

> June 10

Pātaka

Has six shows on: Boundless—printmaking beyond the frame; Kereama Taepa—Whakapī; INFLUX—Tautai Contemporary Pacific Arts Trust Exhibition; Recollections + Wayne Youle; New Zealand Potters—Tableware; and Te Kāhui O Matariki—The Art of Matariki.

Peter McLeavy Gallery: I Object

“A sculpture exhibition of gallery artists: Andrew Barber, Oleg Polounine, Peter Robinson, and Yvonne Todd.”

> June 17

play_station: a trip to the beach

Works by Nicholas Pound, Emma McIntyre, and Anh Tran. “With the nature of a road trip in mind, these three artists are off to the beach.”

> June 17

Precinct 35b: Gone with Makura

Will Bennett’s paintings “trace the steps of NZ criminal and prison escapee Joseph Pawelka.”

> June 15

Toi Pōneke: Pūkana whakarunga! Pūkana whakararo!

“Contemporary artworks by leading and emerging Māori artists are paired with virtual taonga from the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, accessed via visitors’ mobile devices.” Curated by Suzanne Tamaki.

> June 24

to these mysterious islands)

frozen in glossy post-card form

  she is adorned

     with dreams

        ready for you / to

           fantasise

           romanticise

           over gorgeous big brown eyes

              gorging thighs¹

The newspapers locate us. “Struggles of farming and living without water”; “Moana Directors say thank you Samoa”; “Samoa’s $131m project approved”; “Win a Toyota Hilux!” Small, filtered glimpses of a place like our own but different; where ads for holidays in “White Sand Polynesia” still get printed even though we’re already there. Some places exist only in photographs, or, maybe — the sand is always whiter on the other side.

We are in Samoa. Turn around and face the ocean. Look at how blue it is. How the horizon is not a line but a gradient. How the sky and sea never look better than when they become one. Think of the peace that comes with having at once everything and nothing to look at. Behind us, the sand; the bush; the shade. A few empty fale. A dream.

Europeans first placed foot on this soil in 1787. They came ashore on the north coast of Tutuila in what is now American Samoa. 12 members of the landing party and 39 Samoans were killed. What did each see in the Other — light hitting tense arm; a glint in the eye; the arch of a furrowed brow; blood spilt on the sand to be washed away as the tide rises? Does a threat look like what you know, or what you don’t?

Yuki Kihara’s Coconuts That Grew From Concrete, on display at Artspace until July 1, explores how one’s Other can be shaped into another’s Own. The wall, on the left as you enter, is covered with a large poster: paradise. In the centre of the room is a standalone structure, covered in newspaper pages: a land with wants, needs, desires. And hanging — one in a gilded frame, others unframed canvas — around us, are beautiful Frankensteins: women stitched together from early 20th century tableaux photographs of Samoan subjects by Pākehā photographers, destined to be postcards, and painted portraits by European Old Masters.

The Burton Brothers are among the photographers whose images are used. They kept a diary of their time in the Pacific, which was published as The Camera in the Coral Islands. They wrote of a Samoan woman they photographed:

“Here, for instance, is a girl dressed but little according to civilised ideas, very much of her form, her bosom, her shapely limbs being freely revealed. She is just a poem, and no thought of impropriety suggests itself for a moment…”

In Kihara’s Odialisque (After Boucher), a Samoan woman lies on her side, head propped up by one arm, the other covering her breasts. Her hair is tightly curled. Her face is round. Her eyes slant toward the camera. A flax skirt and woven mat reinforce the Otherness that would define how she was read when turned to postcard. Kihara has transposed her, cropping the photograph so that she is cut off at the waist, onto Boucher’s The Odialesque: a woman reclined on a huge bed of pillows and velvets with her naked back to the viewer. The two images fit seamlessly: the figure’s legs extending easily from ‘ie tōga to bedspread.

Where does fantasy end? The paintings are reproductions, their pixels visible if you look up close. The wallpaper has fractures down its seams. Paradise has its fault lines, where tensions heighten to the point of collapse. Its end point is its source. To follow the lines, from pale leg to flax skirt, or brown stomach to white hip, is to look for the connections in difference: to shape someone’s Other into your Own and be made complicit in the act.

looking with new eyes

  nothing is left

     she one the post card

        has Frozen to death.¹

1. Selina Tusitala Marsh. “Statued (stat you?) Traditions.” Wasafiri 25 (1997): 52-54.

A meme stayed projected on the wall for most of the talk, leftover from Mutambu’s presentation. I don’t know where the image originally comes from, but it’s a 21st century mise-en-scène with the Instagram tags visible:

“Artist”, wearing trackpants and a crop top — her face is out of frame — twerks on “Gallerist”, also in trackpants and crop, her pierced belly button exposed, who is bent backwards in a bridge. “Gallerist” is being propped up by “Unpaid Intern”, who is using her entire body to keep the other woman from falling. “Collector”, wearing pink and grey pajamas and a cute pink sleep mask on her forehead, has got her hand on “Artist’s” ass, her mouth agape in what looks like excitement. “Curator” sits away from the action, clad in all black, taking photos on a huge iPhone.

It’s funny, in that meme-y way of being an exaggeration of real life, drawing on associations that aren’t obvious until they are. Really, the most unlikely aspect of the image is that all the characters are black, and all are women. Everything else is possible after a few too many drinks. Mostly, I like the image in the same way I love reality TV: never guiltily, always totally immersively. How much fun! To imagine yourself in each and every role. How would you live if you lived a script? Would you be Kylie or Kim? Paris or Nicole? Surely no one would pick “Unpaid Intern”.

There’s a scene in the 2012 Bravo series Gallery Girls where Maggie Schaffer confronts her employer, the gallerist Eli Klein. It goes something like this:

Maggie: I just can’t keep doing these internships for you…

Eli: I don’t want you to intern forever, and we only ever ask for a 30 day commitment from our interns. Do you think it’s been more than 30 total?

Maggie: [whispering and crying] I’ve done this since college. [She left university three years ago]. That’s all I wanted to say.

Eli: Okay, well I appreciate your hard work and dedication. I will see you on Monday.

The unpaid intern propping up the rest of the ridiculous scene is often praised for hard work and dedication, which is their contribution in a deal with an employer that usually promises to return experience, maybe a reference, and rarely — but ideally — a paying job. In a society like ours, where Pākehā women earn 13% less than the average male, Māori women 13% less than that, and Pasifika women 7% less again, to be able to accept a position which pays only in cultural capital is a luxury. An industry in which some kind of volunteer-work-as-experience is necessary to get a foot in the door leads inevitably to an industry that is lacking in diversity. That’s not to say that unpaid work is the only means of entering the sector, just that it seems one of the most common. It’s also not to say that unpaid work is necessarily exploitative, although it can be, but that it’s often hard to say no to any opportunities — unpaid or paid — for fear of missing out on the experience. The problem is not that the system doesn’t work — it does, whatever its pitfalls — but that by its very nature it excludes people who can’t afford to risk working for nothing in the hopes that it will lead to something more.

Pipilotti Rist’s Pickelporno, on display at the Adam Art Gallery, begins with such an image. Silver heels, strappy, cross an iron grate, turning beam to bridge. It’s a calculated entrance, one loaded with intent; a woman dressed in yellow moves toward a man in blue. They greet one another, he hands her a rose, they fall into bed. If we think of porn, which so often insists sex take place in context — no matter how fanciful — then this is not that; it is also not erotica, which demands much of the same. No, this is sex as association.

What do you see when you see a lemon?

How does a flower fuck?

How do you feel, seeing fingers plunged deep into watermelon flesh?

What is the truth of sex, if not that it feels better than it looks it should?

Laura Mulvey insisted on the idea of the woman as bearer of symbolic meaning, never being herself alone but the carrier of a history defined by what it means to be seen. Woman is not just person, and nor is man — they can be not that but they can’t be nothing more — because unless the viewer allows for sex to be something that erases the individual, then they must be read as agents in these actions; players in a game. How can they allow that, if we assume they never have before? What I’m saying is the body is more than the means, less than the message. This is a game of signs.

In Pickelporno sensations have blurred outlines. Tactile emotions are translated into the  visual, which melts into memory — the ever unreliable — and suddenly sex looks a lot like a pile of rocks, or two birds flying overhead. This overlay of images works to create a film that extends outwards, rather than inwards: a film that is impossible to penetrate. This is what Laura Marks would call a haptic mode of looking, tending not to “distinguish form so much as discern texture.” Love, which might be defined as believing the lies you tell your lover, is coarse in texture. Like sandpaper, it smoothes rough edges. Sex has more tactile potential: the goosebumps of a lemon; a flow of lava; an orange wedged in the crease of your knee; limbs turned to liquid under a firm hand.

Poise in another sense, courtesy of the Oxford English Dictionary: a pause between two periods of motion. In the film, at the point just prior to climax, things speed up. Images flash — nature, flowers, plants, bodies — then they stop. And for a moment, we pause in the shadows of a blank screen.