Pouwātū: Active Presence:

John Miller and Elisapeta Heta

Objectspace

9 March – 30 May 2021

Reviewed by Arihia Latham for PhotoForum, 17 June 2021

Wharenui are traditionally carved with detailed whakairo and the walls adorned with the careful criss-cross of stories through tukutuku. For many of us though, post the missionary influence, our wharenui are barren of these art forms and the people that can create them. The placeholder, the connector for those of us that go home to wharenui resembling simpler stuctures, the aspect that holds our stories are the walls holding photographs of our tīpuna. This is the case with a lot of marae in Te Tai Tokerau where both photographer John Miller (Ngāpuhi) and architect Elisapeta Heta (Ngātiwai ki Whangaruru, Waikato Tainui) whakapapa to. This simplicity of space, and focus on the images of our history is what is breathing in the room they created with warm wood and clay hues at Objectspace and it immediately feels calming.

Heta speaks of her design to house Miller's photographs as being influenced by this concept of a whare.

“The wharenui is incredibly sophisticated. Structure, aesthetic, history, all in one building.” she says in an interview on NUKU. “I love the challenge of flipping over the stones and deciding that (western) stereotypes and designs are not for us. Our traditional designs have relevance today and can evolve.

“We as Māori know this, when we tap into the vein beneath the earth, pulsing,” she says.

Pulsing, warm and awake/ brought to life by the lens, were the tangata captured in this room. Strength, empowerment and beauty, anger, injustice and defiance reflected back at us from these photographs spanning decades. This room was a celebration of tino rangatiratanga, it was documentation of the wero, the difficulty and pain that has occurred through standing firmly in what we believe and what is ours. Stepping into this room was like stepping through a portal where time swirls around you like a cloak. I could have spent hours here. Maybe I did. I still feel like I need more time with each image.

As I removed my shoes and stepped into the room, above my head were two images of water flowing in a rockpool from a stream on Rangipoua maunga, taken the year I was born. This is the whakatau and the pure, the settling and the cleansing each person receives as they step inside and as they leave again. On this day it felt like it was for me alone. These two nature shots alongside four images of native forest on the back wall stood in contrast to the rest of the images which were mostly of people. They served as pou in themselves, connecting us to that vein of water and earth calling to one another.. Holding the balance for our humanity.

On the right and left of the room were pou set out from the walls with seats built into their adjoining curves. On each was a series of photographs grouping Miller’s extensive collections into themes. Sovereignty was first with the Māori Land March and the matriarch Whina Cooper at eye height. I whispered a quiet mihi to her as my eyes moved down to the foreshore and seabed, Bastion Point and finally a window of a house bus full of woven putiputi with the word rangatira summing it all up.

The next pou was of wāhine Māori and featured photos of the Māori Women's Welfare League National Conference in 1975 where the president of the league Dame Mira Szászy welcomed the Hon. Whetu Tirikatene- Sullivan, the first Māori female cabinet minister in the Labour Government. What I loved was the way Miller captured people in movement, in a moment of deep expression. Manaaki, mana and pride shine from these images.

Artists and Writers at the inaugural conference in 1973 at Te Kaha made me smile. This year, Toi Māori are planning a return to Te Kaha because of this exact formative conference. Seeing the young Witi Ihimaera and Ngahuia Te Awekotuku with their notepads deep in thought was enough to make me stop in front of this wall for longer, again appreciating Miller’s choice of composition, with kete almost spilling out of one image, and a group of artists bent over a screen print in action. I loved that artists as activists are here.

Three large works sat on the back wall of the whare where those that honour the dead usually would sit.
Particularly the image of Whina Cooper on the pae at Te Rewarewa marae in Rūātoki pulled you in because although she is there, the image asks us to follow an arc of mens’ backs, of faces turned in line with the long maihi of the whare where a flag flies centrally against the sky, dipping itself directly down to her gently defiant stance.

The pou with Rātana images were spellbinding. One tiny tamaiti, eyes like deep wells, looking out at us while their bigger peers are looking ahead to something that is making them laugh and grimace in equal measure and one can’t help but want to see what they can. It almost perfectly mirrors a portrait of black clad Te reo Hura, Tahupotiki Wiremu Ratana’s daughter and church leader, looking toward us surrounded by white robed priests looking away. Both are striking. Another favourite was members of the Rātana band in a pūhanga of guitars, blanket huddled bodies and great hair.

Miller's coverage of Ngā Tamatoa and the Polynesian Panthers was both amazing and depressing as they could be taken today. Protest and occupation, Māori control of Māori things on a banner strung across the museum, challenging Te Tiriti o Waitangi commemorations. In the time of the dawn raids, the Polynesian Panthers were consistent and visionary. These pictures show big feelings. In the year that a formal apology was made by our government, these pictures conjure big feelings.

The last pou shows manaaki in action through kai tables at marae. The beauty of this as the hākari, the feast to whakanoa and bringing together the strands of images before them, is perfect.

On a huge table at the centre of the room we were asked to wānanga, invited to swipe through hundreds more images on ipads and it is this sheer volume of Miller’s documentation of struggle, of faith, of strength that it is in fact timely to be sitting for. My friend started a conversation about how she felt she didn’t get this education at school and so we wānanga the white washing of our school history and the upcoming changes to that in our education system. The placement of this table I realised was for exactly this purpose. The space to sit with the enormity of this body of work and reflect on all the ways these images pinprick our skin and drag rubble through our puku and flush our cheeks with shades of Hineahuone’s clay. These images are taonga of our resilience and our reclamation as much as they are a call for a continued need to keep fighting. The careful construction of this exhibition is placing the wero down in front of us, begging us to pick it up.

Arihia Latham is a Kāi Tahu Māori writer, traditional rongoā Māori health practitioner, facilitator and Māmā in Wellington, Aotearoa (New Zealand). Her work has been published by Huia, Landfall, Oranui, Foodcourt, Te Whē, Awa Wāhine, The Spinoff and Pantograph Punch. She has presented at Verb festival, NZ Festival of the Arts and Te Hā.

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