Time's arrow finds its mark
For Adams these pinpoint dates are the tip of the arrow, the key to entering this time-space continuum. Take 08.04.2002. At Hikiau Heiau. View to Ka'awaloa. Kealakekura Bay. Hawai'I as an example. The opening date represents the moment of image capture, when Adams stood on the foreshore with his cumbersome plate camera and tripod (more steampunk tech).
Mark Adams, 08.04.2002. At Hikiau Heiau. View to Kaʻawaloa. Kealakekua Bay. Hawaiʻi, 2002, colour inkjet prints, courtesy of the artist and Two Rooms, Auckland.
But the activating date we are being asked to witness is equally precise: February 4, 1779, when Captain Cook was killed on the shore of this picturesque bay 246 ago. The slaying of Cook was in retribution for the attempted kidnapping of an important ali'I nui (reigning chief) named Kalani'ōpu'u.
Call it what you like … cause and effect, two sides to every story, lost in translation or the inevitable chaos that arrives with the coloniser, in Adams' hands these images act as prompts for a searching enquiry into fractured pasts. And we find them boiling with myths and alternative facts yet ultimately and thankfully some home truths; no matter how galling or confronting these might be.
The exhibition opens with a supreme example of Adams' eye for the past still rattling away like the proverbial squeaky wheel. 1988. Hori Korei. George Grey monument. Albert Park. Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland depicts the monument to Sir George Grey, twice Governor of Aotearoa New Zealand between 1845 and 1868 and Premier in the late 1870s, sans his stony head, in the immediate aftermath of its lopping during a Waitangi Day protest. 'Good Governor Grey' (the sculpture) has copped a bit of treatment over the years, most recently in 2020, when he was smeared with red paint as part of Black Lives Matter protests.
Mark Adams, 1988. Hori Korei. George Grey monument. Albert Park. Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, 1988, silver bromide print, courtesy of the artist.
These moments of ruptured pasts and presents are at their most elegiac in Adams' colour-saturated images of carved wharenui 'ki tāwahi' far away from the shores of Aotearoa and their original whenua and iwi. The whare Rauru (today in Hamburg) and Hinemihi (most recently standing on the Surrey estate of the former Earl of Onslow, another Governor of Aotearoa in the 1890s) were, in the 19th century, what contemporary Ngāti Pikaio carver Lyonel Grant describes as sitting between a whare tūpuna (ancestral house) and a whare tapere (place of entertainment)..
These ornately carved houses were on the front line of Aotearoa's nascent tourism industry in Rotorua, welcoming guests from all over the world to the thermal wonderlands of the Pink and White Terraces and Whakarewarewa. Te Arawa leaders such Āporo Te Wharekānewha of Tūhourangi were amongst Aotearoa's founding tourism entrepreneurs building hotels and welcoming guests to the sulphurous attractions of 'Hotwaterland'. Adams photographs capture the legacies, at home and abroad, of the boom in whakairo carving that this first wave of tourism was a catalyst for. Hinemihi and Rauru were the creations of some of Aotearoa's great carvers in the period 1870 to 1930 – Wero Tāroi, Tene Waitere, Anaha Te Rāhui and Neke Kapua. In Aotearoa terms, a dream team of talent that can be compared to 1500s Rome when Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were painting up a storm.
Mark Adams: A Survey | He Kohinga Whakaahua, installation view, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2025 including works depicting Samoan Tatau. Photo: Joanna Wright
Examples of their mahi toi still adorn many wharenui in the Te Arawa region or in museum collections, but today at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki we can see Hinemihi and Rauru, and their majestic carvings, in all their glory in Adams large format photographs. In their assiduous documentation, Adams images speak for themselves, but they also perform the vital act of adding to the mana of their creators, ensuring that their names are as canonical here as Michelangelo in Italy.
In 2025 we can also marvel not just at the skill and artistry of the carved works but ponder on the quirks of circumstance, the global trade in whakairo in the early 20th century: a strange brew of Pākehā patronage and commercial opportunism that provided the licence financially and conceptually for the carvers of the past to create these legacy masterpieces. The role of these whare in the world is significant to iwi Māori today. Contemporary carver Grant has described them as, 'a piece of Te Arawa history. It's really, really important that (referring to Rauru) it's representing Māori people in a land where Māori people are valued and admired, as they are by the Germans … the best ambassador we could ever have.'
Back home in Onehunga or Mangere, Adams' methodology results in photographs that capture what I think of as 'timeliness'. They are not timeless because his images are so forensic in their detail, no woozy soft-focus here folks, or contain so many markers of specific time such as fashion hints, sideburns or a strategically placed box of Dominion Bitter.
Adams' visual essays on Samoan Tatau from the 1970s to the present, here in Aotearoa and further afield in Europe, are intimate tableau of skin, blood and ink set in suburban living rooms. For five decades Adams has followed the Samoan Tufuga Tatatau (tattoo master) Su'a Sulu'ape Paolo II from Tāmaki to apartments in Eindhoven and Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Recipients including many young Samoan men, and none other than the painter Tony Fomison, proudly display the during and after of the gruelling tatau ritual, surrounded by a support crew of whānau and friends. Via Adams' lens we join them as they follow their forbears in taking the Pe'a on 10.05.1980 at Grotto Road, Onehunga or 30.06.1986. Chalfont Crescent. Māngere.
Mark Adams: A Survey | He Kohinga Whakaahua, installation view, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2025 depicting the 11 panel panoramic work 27.06.2014 to 01.07.2014. Nine Fathoms Passage. After William Hodges Waterfall in Dusky Bay with a Māori Canoe, 1776. Tamatea Dusky Sound. Te Waipounamu South Island. Photo: Joanna Wright
Adams' patient process is determined in large measure by his choice of equipment, a large format-plate camera which requires much wrangling and set-up for that one shot. In this regard his work over five decades stands as the most potent antidote to the brutalising avalanche of doctored, tweaked AI slop ricocheting about in the poor old Cloud. An Adams photograph is anchored within its chosen cultural context facilitating a contemporary resonance today and a clear pathway into the future, in striking contrast to the digital mayfly trolleries that rogue algorithms fling at us unbidden 24/7.
Perhaps the best example of time's arrow finding its mark with a shuddering thud is the largest work in the exhibition, the 11-panel panorama dating to 2014 entitled Nine Fathoms Passage. X really does mark the spot here, in terms of both time and place. The time being late March 1773 when Captain Cook arrived in Dusky Sound on his second voyage to Aotearoa aboard the Resolution. This moment was memorialised by the official artist on the voyage William Hodges.
Adams elegantly plays on points of view, his 360-degree panorama imagining the complete aspect to and of mana whenua, complete with snow-capped peaks, arcing rainbow and a plunging waterfall … 100 percent pure New Zealand. History painting and photography collide in this great frieze to thrilling effect. There is a touch of theatre here, Adams captures iconic Dusky Sound as time's arrow lands in the moment before the Resolution rounds the headland. The rest, as they say, is history.
Across the 65 images that make up the exhibition, the selections made by the curatorial team of the late Ron Brownson, who died in 2023, and Dr Sarah Farrar, head of curatorial and learning, we experience the great historical narratives of Aotearoa and wider Polynesia and see anew them ever evolving on a trajectory into the future.
Brownson, who was responsible for the first institutional acquisitions of Adams' work in 1995, also framed a written lens to articulate why so many find his images, ostensibly documentary photography, so stirring and culturally nourishing. In Brownson's view Adams is not so much a documentary photographer but a 'conceptual photographer' his images being 'a visual artefact of evidence'.
Adams' 'proof' is precise and profound. And, like time's arrow, invariably finds its target.
Mark Adams: A Survey | He Kohinga Whakaahua, until August 17 at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.
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Newsroom
a day ago
- Newsroom
Time's arrow finds its mark
Comment: Across the numerous large-format, multi-panel photographs, some clocking in at over ten metres, that make up Adams career retrospective A Survey/He Kohinga Whakaahua at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki (until August 17) 'arrows' of whenua and event land with resonant twangs … from Dusky Sound to suburban Onehunga, from leafy Surrey to the blasted landscape of Mount Tarawera. History is re-animated, as centuries of dusty neglect collapse before our very eyes. The exhibition could be subtitled Revelations 1776 to 2025. For Adams these pinpoint dates are the tip of the arrow, the key to entering this time-space continuum. Take 08.04.2002. At Hikiau Heiau. View to Ka'awaloa. Kealakekura Bay. Hawai'I as an example. The opening date represents the moment of image capture, when Adams stood on the foreshore with his cumbersome plate camera and tripod (more steampunk tech). Mark Adams, 08.04.2002. At Hikiau Heiau. View to Kaʻawaloa. Kealakekua Bay. Hawaiʻi, 2002, colour inkjet prints, courtesy of the artist and Two Rooms, Auckland. But the activating date we are being asked to witness is equally precise: February 4, 1779, when Captain Cook was killed on the shore of this picturesque bay 246 ago. The slaying of Cook was in retribution for the attempted kidnapping of an important ali'I nui (reigning chief) named Kalani'ōpu'u. Call it what you like … cause and effect, two sides to every story, lost in translation or the inevitable chaos that arrives with the coloniser, in Adams' hands these images act as prompts for a searching enquiry into fractured pasts. And we find them boiling with myths and alternative facts yet ultimately and thankfully some home truths; no matter how galling or confronting these might be. The exhibition opens with a supreme example of Adams' eye for the past still rattling away like the proverbial squeaky wheel. 1988. Hori Korei. George Grey monument. Albert Park. Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland depicts the monument to Sir George Grey, twice Governor of Aotearoa New Zealand between 1845 and 1868 and Premier in the late 1870s, sans his stony head, in the immediate aftermath of its lopping during a Waitangi Day protest. 'Good Governor Grey' (the sculpture) has copped a bit of treatment over the years, most recently in 2020, when he was smeared with red paint as part of Black Lives Matter protests. Mark Adams, 1988. Hori Korei. George Grey monument. Albert Park. Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, 1988, silver bromide print, courtesy of the artist. These moments of ruptured pasts and presents are at their most elegiac in Adams' colour-saturated images of carved wharenui 'ki tāwahi' far away from the shores of Aotearoa and their original whenua and iwi. The whare Rauru (today in Hamburg) and Hinemihi (most recently standing on the Surrey estate of the former Earl of Onslow, another Governor of Aotearoa in the 1890s) were, in the 19th century, what contemporary Ngāti Pikaio carver Lyonel Grant describes as sitting between a whare tūpuna (ancestral house) and a whare tapere (place of entertainment).. These ornately carved houses were on the front line of Aotearoa's nascent tourism industry in Rotorua, welcoming guests from all over the world to the thermal wonderlands of the Pink and White Terraces and Whakarewarewa. Te Arawa leaders such Āporo Te Wharekānewha of Tūhourangi were amongst Aotearoa's founding tourism entrepreneurs building hotels and welcoming guests to the sulphurous attractions of 'Hotwaterland'. Adams photographs capture the legacies, at home and abroad, of the boom in whakairo carving that this first wave of tourism was a catalyst for. Hinemihi and Rauru were the creations of some of Aotearoa's great carvers in the period 1870 to 1930 – Wero Tāroi, Tene Waitere, Anaha Te Rāhui and Neke Kapua. In Aotearoa terms, a dream team of talent that can be compared to 1500s Rome when Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were painting up a storm. Mark Adams: A Survey | He Kohinga Whakaahua, installation view, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2025 including works depicting Samoan Tatau. Photo: Joanna Wright Examples of their mahi toi still adorn many wharenui in the Te Arawa region or in museum collections, but today at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki we can see Hinemihi and Rauru, and their majestic carvings, in all their glory in Adams large format photographs. In their assiduous documentation, Adams images speak for themselves, but they also perform the vital act of adding to the mana of their creators, ensuring that their names are as canonical here as Michelangelo in Italy. In 2025 we can also marvel not just at the skill and artistry of the carved works but ponder on the quirks of circumstance, the global trade in whakairo in the early 20th century: a strange brew of Pākehā patronage and commercial opportunism that provided the licence financially and conceptually for the carvers of the past to create these legacy masterpieces. The role of these whare in the world is significant to iwi Māori today. Contemporary carver Grant has described them as, 'a piece of Te Arawa history. It's really, really important that (referring to Rauru) it's representing Māori people in a land where Māori people are valued and admired, as they are by the Germans … the best ambassador we could ever have.' Back home in Onehunga or Mangere, Adams' methodology results in photographs that capture what I think of as 'timeliness'. They are not timeless because his images are so forensic in their detail, no woozy soft-focus here folks, or contain so many markers of specific time such as fashion hints, sideburns or a strategically placed box of Dominion Bitter. Adams' visual essays on Samoan Tatau from the 1970s to the present, here in Aotearoa and further afield in Europe, are intimate tableau of skin, blood and ink set in suburban living rooms. For five decades Adams has followed the Samoan Tufuga Tatatau (tattoo master) Su'a Sulu'ape Paolo II from Tāmaki to apartments in Eindhoven and Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Recipients including many young Samoan men, and none other than the painter Tony Fomison, proudly display the during and after of the gruelling tatau ritual, surrounded by a support crew of whānau and friends. Via Adams' lens we join them as they follow their forbears in taking the Pe'a on 10.05.1980 at Grotto Road, Onehunga or 30.06.1986. Chalfont Crescent. Māngere. Mark Adams: A Survey | He Kohinga Whakaahua, installation view, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2025 depicting the 11 panel panoramic work 27.06.2014 to 01.07.2014. Nine Fathoms Passage. After William Hodges Waterfall in Dusky Bay with a Māori Canoe, 1776. Tamatea Dusky Sound. Te Waipounamu South Island. Photo: Joanna Wright Adams' patient process is determined in large measure by his choice of equipment, a large format-plate camera which requires much wrangling and set-up for that one shot. In this regard his work over five decades stands as the most potent antidote to the brutalising avalanche of doctored, tweaked AI slop ricocheting about in the poor old Cloud. An Adams photograph is anchored within its chosen cultural context facilitating a contemporary resonance today and a clear pathway into the future, in striking contrast to the digital mayfly trolleries that rogue algorithms fling at us unbidden 24/7. Perhaps the best example of time's arrow finding its mark with a shuddering thud is the largest work in the exhibition, the 11-panel panorama dating to 2014 entitled Nine Fathoms Passage. X really does mark the spot here, in terms of both time and place. The time being late March 1773 when Captain Cook arrived in Dusky Sound on his second voyage to Aotearoa aboard the Resolution. This moment was memorialised by the official artist on the voyage William Hodges. Adams elegantly plays on points of view, his 360-degree panorama imagining the complete aspect to and of mana whenua, complete with snow-capped peaks, arcing rainbow and a plunging waterfall … 100 percent pure New Zealand. History painting and photography collide in this great frieze to thrilling effect. There is a touch of theatre here, Adams captures iconic Dusky Sound as time's arrow lands in the moment before the Resolution rounds the headland. The rest, as they say, is history. Across the 65 images that make up the exhibition, the selections made by the curatorial team of the late Ron Brownson, who died in 2023, and Dr Sarah Farrar, head of curatorial and learning, we experience the great historical narratives of Aotearoa and wider Polynesia and see anew them ever evolving on a trajectory into the future. Brownson, who was responsible for the first institutional acquisitions of Adams' work in 1995, also framed a written lens to articulate why so many find his images, ostensibly documentary photography, so stirring and culturally nourishing. In Brownson's view Adams is not so much a documentary photographer but a 'conceptual photographer' his images being 'a visual artefact of evidence'. Adams' 'proof' is precise and profound. And, like time's arrow, invariably finds its target. Mark Adams: A Survey | He Kohinga Whakaahua, until August 17 at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.
NZ Herald
6 days ago
- NZ Herald
How to see the discovery of lost Frances Hodgkins landscape and place she painted it
NZ art curator and Frances Hodgkins' expert Mary Kisler has helped authenticate a lost painting by the acclaimed NZ artist. Photo / Jason Oxenham Reminder, this is a Premium article and requires a subscription to read. Listening to articles is free for open-access content—explore other articles or learn more about text-to-speech. How to see the discovery of lost Frances Hodgkins landscape and place she painted it NZ art curator and Frances Hodgkins' expert Mary Kisler has helped authenticate a lost painting by the acclaimed NZ artist. Photo / Jason Oxenham A lost painting by New Zealand art great Frances Hodgkins has been authenticated by BBC show Fake or Fortune, with the help of former Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki curator and Hodgkins expert Mary Kisler. The painting was bought by Robjn Cantus for £35 (c$79) in a Hertfordshire County Council auction of its mid-20th Century art collection in 2019. It has now been valued at £50,000 (c$112,500). Robjn Cantus blogged about the painting. Art blogger Robjn Cantus purchased the Frances Hodgkins painting for £35 at an auction in 2019. Soon after his online purchase, art blogger Cantus posted about the painting, which the auctioneers had attributed to English artist Vera Cuningham. He was messaged saying it might be a Hodgkins. Much of the episode is dedicated to retracing Hodgkins' life in Britain, where she spent much of her career until her death in 1947. It also goes looking for the possible site of the abstract landscape – a mine entrance – among the Roman gold mines of rural south Wales, and the local inn where she stayed, as recorded in her letters. Kisler appears on the show via video link from Auckland to verify that the painting is a Hodgkins. 'I emphatically think it is by Frances Hodgkins,' she tells Cantus and the show's presenters, Fiona Bruce and Philip Mould. 'You can read Robjn's painting as fitting into a really large number of Hodgkins' works. When you lay those works side by side, you can see absolutely that Robjn's work fits among them.' Kisler says she wonders if the painting is October Landscape, a piece exhibited at the Lefevre Gallery in London in 1943 alongside works by Pablo Picasso. 'It's a damn good one,' Kisler says of the painting. 'I'd love to have it myself.' How to see The episode can be seen on unofficial video platforms here or here. Sky Television which screens the series in New Zealand on its Sky Arts channel and is currently showing last year's season of Fake or Fortune? says it is investigating with the BBC whether the broadcast of the latest season can be brought forward. Sky also has available the 2024 documentary Frances Hodgkins, Anything but a Still Life, by New Zealand-based filmmaker Blandine Massiet du Biest available to Sky Arts subscribers on its SkyGo platform.
Otago Daily Times
06-08-2025
- Otago Daily Times
Film offers look ‘behind the scenes'
This year's International Film Festival gives New Zealanders the rare opportunity to see behind the scenes at a gallery as it curates a ground-breaking exhibition, in this case Auckland Art Gallery's "Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art". Rebecca Fox talks to TOITŪ: Visual Sovereignty 's director, Oscar nominated producer, award-winning film-maker and art lover Chelsea Winstanley. More than 100 artists, 300 art works, 10 installations — it sounds huge. For art lover and movie producer Chelsea Wistanley, the concept of Auckland Art Gallery's "Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art", to create the largest Māori art exhibition in New Zealand's history, authored by Māori voices, sounded fascinating. "I like to find stories about people that are doing all the good things behind the scenes." Living in Los Angeles at the time the exhibition was being developed by gallery's curator, Māori Art, Nigel Borell (Pirirākau, Ngāi Te Rangi, Ngāti Ranginui, Te Whakatōhea), Wistanley's marriage to Taika Waititi had broken down, Covid had hit America, Black Lives Matter was going on. "LA was kind of crazy. And it was almost like a great catalyst, actually. So I was like, I'm coming home. I'm going to sink my teeth into this." Personally she needed to come back to New Zealand, but it also seemed like the perfect opportunity for her to go back to her love for writing and directing. While she is known for producing — as a producer on Waititi's Academy nominated feature Jojo Rabbit , Wistanley became the first indigenous female Oscar nominee for Best Picture and her critically-acclaimed documentary feature, Merata: How Mum Decolonised the Screen played at the 2019 Sundance and Berlin film festivals — it is not something she ever wanted to do. "I just fell into that role and you just keep doing one thing after another and someone tells you, you're pretty good at it or they keep offering you work in that space." Along the way Wistanley (Ngāti Ranginui and Ngāi Te Rangi, Pākehā) forgot about her youthful self's wish to be a director. She had started out directing a television art show where she met artists such as Fred Graham, Tama Iti and met Waititi for the first time. "I really believe in timing. And it was the perfect time for me to come home, sink myself into something that was really right. You know, on the kaupapa that I love, art." Working alongside Borell and the gallery's team, Wistanley threw herself into the project deciding to self-fund the documentary to avoid any unnecessary restrictions. "So what little resource I had, me and my producer, we were just like, right, we're going to do this. We'll scrimp and scrape. We'll pull favours. And, you know, half the time I'm getting the camera out myself and I'm not a camera operator. But there's just times you're like, oh, my God, I've got to capture that." She had been told the exhibition was going to be the equivalent to the landmark 1980s "Te Māori" exhibition that toured the United States and then New Zealand's main centres, including Dunedin. "It's got this really neat synergy, I suppose, because "Te Māori" really awakened Māori people to what their culture and a traditional culture that they had. And then when it finished its amazing world conclusion, it actually finished at the Auckland Art Gallery. "And that was another thing that I thought, from an international perspective, was really interesting, too. Like it had all these parallels. So I was like, that's going to be fantastic." But things took a different direction as tensions emerged between Borell and the gallery's director about the imbalance of power in curating. Borrell's vision was that Māori artists should be seen on their own terms, free from colonial frameworks and he pushed to centre Māori voices and stories. He eventually decided to resign just before the show opened. "Alliedship, support and advocacy for indigenous and for Māori in this space is awesome but at the same time it often gets mixed up in authoring the ideas and wanting to have space in that and it is not up for grabs, it is ours to lead and to own. If it is not I don't want to be part of that conversation," Borrell says in the film. "If we can't shape it with this exhibition project which we have waited 20 years to do, when can we?" Like any film-maker, Wistanley had to adapt and follow the story although this was not easy at times. "I'm merely just to be there to capture and respond as an artist myself, as a storyteller. Because people talk about a story being made three times, from the paper, then while you're shooting, and then again in the edit suite. When you get to that third part, you've got to now pull all the pieces together. And whatever you thought might have been the actual story is not any more." She did not want that dispute to overshadow the film though. "I think the overall outcome of the film is, what I really want anyway is, there's nothing to be afraid of, of sharing power. Even if power is the right word. It's just living in harmony together and in true partnership. "Everyone in the gallery, Māori, Pākehā, it doesn't matter who they were, everyone was so invested in the success of that show. Because they're all working there because they love art. So they just want the best thing for the show and for the public to experience." So she also concentrated on was showing the work that went on behind the scenes. Wistanley, whose home's walls are covered in art, got to meet and watch work some of the country's top contemporary Māori artists. "I've always loved art and photography. And it's always kind of been my, I suppose, passion. But this time around, being able to spend time with and see the likes of Shane Cotton or Emily Karaka and their spaces of work. That was the great thing I wanted to show." Selecting those to follow on their journey for the documentary was difficult but working closely with Borrell and the team, she selected a variety of artists doing different projects who also had strong stories. "The artists were so generous." Getting to see the work of the Mataaho Collective (Erena Baker, Sarah Hudson, Bridget Reweti and Terri Te Tau) as it was being made in collaboration with Maureen Lander was special, especially as afterwards the collective went on to win the Golden Lion Award at the Vience Biennale, one of art's highest accolades . The documentary follows their journey at Venice. "My gosh, that was just, like, ultimate, you know. But they're amazing. They're just wonderful." These experiences gave her a new appreciation for artists. "Artists are just the most incredible people. They truly are." Being able to watch and film Ngahina Hohia installing her Paopao Ki tua o Rangi (2009) mixed-media installation using poi, light and sound, drawing on her own whakapapa and the story of Parihaka, over a few days was "mind blowing". It is a piece that has been shown around the world. "It's so beautiful. Again as a viewer you go in and you don't know how many days she spent putting it all together." Then she got to be in Australia when Reuben Paterson saw the glass waka he had designed in real life for the first time. Due to Covid he had supervised its construction via the internet. "It was great to capture him there. I would have been freaking out if that was my piece and it's so incredible when you see it going." But it also gave her a new appreciation for what galleries and their staff do to make exhibitions come to life for the public from driving across the country to pick up valuable and fragile works to conserving pieces so they can can continue to be seen for years to come. "I didn't realise how many people even worked at the gallery, or what all their roles were. Everyone from the registration team, were just such lovely people who take such incredible care, meticulous care. There is just so much that goes on behind the scenes." Sad that the show came down in 2021 six months after opening and that it did not go on to travel internationally, Wistanley took time to decide whether or not to finish the documentary. "I really just didn't want to put out a piece that, oh, the show opened. And yet again, it smashed all the records for visitors and things like that. It did all those things. But it didn't do some other really fundamental things, which sat with me for some time." Two years ago she began working on the piece again, trawling through the hundreds of hours of material to piece together the final story. "I think for them, it's a great archive. I just really wanted to kind of celebrate really what goes on. And it probably turned into something slightly different in the end." TO SEE TOITŪ: Visual Sovereignty , Rialto Cinema, Dunedin, August 24, 3.45pm. Q and A by director Chelsea Winstanley.
