te ahua, te wa, te atea

Russ Flatt

The Dowse Art Museum
45 Laings Road, Lower Hutt

18 May - 03 November 2024

Artist talk: Saturday 18 May 11am. RSVP appreciated

For this exhibition Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland-based photographer Russ Flatt (Ngāti Kahungunu) presents video and still images exploring wāhi tapu (sacred sites) in Heretaunga Hastings. Featuring state of the art point cloud technology this installation takes you on a moving journey through the landscapes and complex histories that have come as a result of colonisation. The imagery shifts from real time contemporary portraits of places and people to ethereal renderings suggesting an otherworldly realm.

The video installation te ahua, te wa, te atea (2022), gives us a hawk’s eye view of the significant sites Otatara Pā, Te Awarua o Porirua, Pākowhai, Roto a Tara and Ōmārunui. Each of these locations is significant as a wāhi tapu that was acquired in the 1800s through dubious means by colonial settler Thomas Tanner and his business partners. Using drone footage Flatt provides a unique perspective of these landforms – flying over, through and sometimes within the whenua. At times the terrestrial veil is suspended allowing us to see through to the other side and the first dawn light - te wheao. Bridges, cars, and toppled monuments seem to flick from past to present or present to future and back again echoing Māori concepts of time and space.

Alongside te ahua, te wa, te atea is a series of six photographic portraits of wāhine who whakapapa to the sites and narratives in the moving image work. There ghostly forms hover indistinctly yet definitely, their images captured at significant locations. These works are from a series called Tekau Mā Rua a reference to the group of 12 settlers, including Tanner, referred to as the twelve apostles, who were responsible for acquiring significant tracks of Māori land through questionable means.

Russ Flatt makes carefully staged photographs utilising a range of modes and points of view in order to recover and reconstruct memories and past events. His work addresses notions of identity and looks towards a re-imagined past in order to recognise the present. Flatt graduated with a Master of Visual Arts from Massey University in 2023 and a Post Graduate Diploma in 2013 from Auckland University’s Elam School of Fine Arts. His work is held in collections including Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Wallace Arts Trust, Auckland Council and the University of Auckland.