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Newsroom
4 hours ago
- Entertainment
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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
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- NZ Herald
Work Of Art: What Goes Into Bringing Historic Art To Tāmaki Makaurau?
With work from some of the world's most famous painters coming to Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki this June for new exhibition A Century Of Modern Art, co-ordinating curator Dr Sophie Matthiesson talks to Emma Gleason about what makes this show so special. Monet, Degas, van Gogh and Renoir
Newsroom
26-04-2025
- General
- Newsroom
Book of the Week: The Anzac who terrified his family
On a tattered Red Cross map, four nearly-straight pencil lines track north from Capua, near Naples, to Chavari then Ubine. From here, over the border to Breslau in what was then German-occupied Poland, then on to Lübeck, north-east of Hamburg. Above each line a single handwritten word – 'Train', 'Train', 'Train', 'Walk' The map of World War II prisoner of war camps, a pencilled circle marking Stalag VIII-A, is all we have of my father's whereabouts as a POW between 1941 and 1945, an impersonal graphic for a four-year term of incarceration that would shadow the next 35 years of his life with its unforgettable but largely unspoken memories. At war's end, over 8000 former prisoners of war returned to New Zealand. Many came back to fiancées, wives, old jobs, new families – in 1947, a record number of nearly 50,000 births was registered – but many also returned with their blasted memories, nightmares and flashbacks. Inexplicable to families, frightening for children. Mary Kisler begins her memoir Dark Dad with a story as a child, cowering in her bed with her mother. Her father, Jack Arnott, the 'Dark Dad' of the title, looms in the doorway: 'In my mind, he roars like a bull, but my mother knows he will not come closer while her children are there to protect her … Only once does the dark dad cross the threshold, and in an instant we are out the narrow window, leaving the metal hasp dangling.' Dark Dad roars, gets drunk, throws plates, rips the wig off his daughter's new doll. On one occasion, when he pushes a lit cigarette into her mother's eye: 'We climb over the low fence to our neighbours' house, and they tuck us into bed.' Kisler and her siblings know their father had been hurt in battle – he keeps a shard of shrapnel dug out of his leg. But his psychological injuries are more nebulous. While he tells his children about his time in Egypt, 'he said almost nothing about his time in the camps, apart from describing the death of a fellow prisoner who was shot when trying to make a dash for freedom. His body was left to hang on the wire as a salutary lesson to others.' Kisler is an art historian and curator. For years she brought her indefatigable curiosity, her knowledge, her unashamed delight in discovery to her regular slot on Kim Hill's RNZ Saturday morning programme discussing historic art. After co-editing Frances Hodgkins: European Journeys with Catherine Hammond, Kisler, then senior curator at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, tracked Hodgkins' peripatetic travels across England, Wales, France, Spain, Morocco and the Netherlands. She must have been around 70 as she negotiated precipitous French trains, precarious pathways and a dodgy Fiat to find the exact cafe, street or bay that Hodgkins used in her art. The resulting book, Finding Frances Hodgkins, is a dedication not only to Hodgkins but also to the author's unrelenting determination to pursue her subject. Here, she brings again this exhaustive curiosity, this determination to put her feet on the ground, to the story of her father, the man who talked little, who fell into dark moods and drunkenness, who, when he died in Auckland's Mercy Hospice 1987 (the date is also given as 1978), was 'propped upright, like a Baroque painting of the death of Saint Jerome.' Kisler is a thorough guide. She traces her father's family from Scotland to Tasmania before grandfather Bill leaves the Plymouth Brethren fold to go to Dunedin, promptly followed by his 'sweetheart' Frances. When Frances became pregnant, Bill knows it is his brother's child she is carrying. They marry, so avoiding a family scandal, but Bill does not forget or forgive: 'Bill never lost any opportunity to beat my father's bastardy into him; he would sit on his chest and strike him across the face, yelling that he was no child of his.' Kisler follows the family to Milton where, at the age of 13, her father leaves school to become a labourer, building roads in Central Otago then the West Coast before finding work with the new Fulton Hogan company back in Milton. He enlists at the outbreak of war and in 1940, a week before his 26th birthday, arrives at the Papakura Military Camp. It's here that he meets Kisler's mother, Margaret Ethelwyn Gray, or 'Ewie', one of five children born into a 'clever, literary family'; an anxious, anorexic teenager; a 'highly sensitive, warm-hearted woman'. In August that year, the 7th Anti-Tank Regiment, 33rd Battery, 6th Brigade, including Arnott, gather in Wellington to sail for Egypt. Amongst the well-wishers is his mother's brother, who decides now is the time to tell his nephew who his father was: 'The shocking news that his father was George Arnott can only have added to my father's underlying sense of unworthiness.' Over 80 years later, Kisler tracks her father's journey, from Port Tewfik on the Suez Canal to Cairo and Maadi Camp, where the Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force (2NZEF, or 'The Div') is under the command of British-born New Zealander General Bernard Freyberg. Kisler is meticulous in describing the camp layout – bakery, rugby ground, ramshackle cinema – and the egalitarianism insisted by Freyberg within the camp (and the allure of Cairo's red light district outside the camp). But, as she does throughout this book, she also stops to admire the beauty of early-morning light, 'picking out the pleated rock face of the hill behind the camp, and the violet shadows dancing across the dun-coloured dunes at dusk'. There are grainy black and white photos: her father, now a dispatch rider, wearing a full uniform and lemon squeezer hat; her father and an army mate sharing a beer in Cairo, 'A little light refreshment, what', written on the back; a two-pounder gun en portée belonging to the 7th Anti-Tank Regiment. She follows him to Greece where the 6th Infantry Brigade is tasked with defending the coastal portion of the Aliakmon defensive line. The Allies take a pounding. Two hundred and ninety-one men die, 599 are wounded, 1614 are taken prisoner. Arnott's Regiment returns to Egypt where it becomes embroiled in the bloody Battle of Sidi Rezegh during Operation Crusader, part of the Western Desert campaign against the Axis forces in North Africa commanded by Lieutenant-General Rommel. Kisler's father is one of the approximately 2000 men taken prisoner. From here, she uses her father's military record and a rudimentary grasp of Italian to draw her own pencil lines through the Italian camps where her father was held. Campo PG (Prigione de Guerra) 66 in Capua under Lieutenant-Colonel Guglielmo Nicoletti – 'middle-aged, squat, deeply unattractive and a thug'. PG 52 in Chiavari (or Pian di Coreglia), the only Italian camp site Kisler is unable to visit. PG 57 at Gruppignano, a new camp not far from the Austrian border under Commandant Vittorio Calcaterra – a 'short-arsed, fat-gutted little shit'. Then to the Ampezzo work camp, PG 103/6, high in the mountains. Each camp is a variation on lack of running water, food scarcity, overcrowding, disease, punishments for minor offences. Despite the 'gallant slant' adopted by prisoners in their letters home – 'It all seemed jolly hockey sticks, as if they were describing their time at boarding school or holiday camp' – the toll of incarceration is evident. Some prisoners 'crack'. Others play bizarre imaginary games to wish themselves far from the camps. Again, Kisler pauses. She notes the dome of the Church of Santa Maria of the Nuns near Capua, the constant rustling of beech leaves and the burbling rush of the Lumiei river in Ampezzo. In Gruppignano she describes the rust-tinted leaves on the vines, small gardens 'frothy with weeds'. Still, 'I was overwhelmed with grief, for if it is possible for the earth to retain human misery then it does so at Gruppignano.' A telegram to her son from the author's grandmother. The armistice document of September 8, 1943 required all UN prisoners to be turned over to the Allies but only 339 of the approximately 3700 New Zealanders in Italy crossed to the Allied lines. Many more faced the harrowing train journey into Germany. After stopping at an overcrowded transit camp near Hanover, Arnott is sent to Stalag XI-B at Fallingbostel in Lower Saxony. As in other camps, Arnott would have been sent out to nearby work sites. Camp conditions are deteriorating, food supplies dwindling. By October 1944, she writes, many prisoners were on the brink of starvation. From here, Kisler's footsteps falter: 'Almost everything I have gleaned about my father's time in Germany has come from external sources, either official or from other prisoners' recollections. It is as if he simply disappeared, and the man who emerged at liberation was a very different being.' Kisler's father was in Fallingbostel on April 16, 1945 when American forces take the town and the tanks of the 8th King's Royal Irish Hussars roll in. The released prisoners, including 8400 New Zealand POWs, are sent to a transit centre in Brussels before being flown to England for a period of recuperation. The men's physical health improves but many are haunted by their experiences. Emotional problems, the British War Office stated, 'are disproportionately severe in men who have been prisoners for more than eighteen months … Planning the rehabilitation of these men demands particular care — Not soft handling, but different handling.' By the time Arnott returns to New Zealand, 'People had been advised not to ask questions and women were expected to make the best of any difficult situation.' On September 29, 1945, he and Ethelwyn Gray are married. But Arnott is unsettled. While war trained you to suppress your fears in the face of the enemy, writes Kisler, 'it didn't train you to deal with the peace that followed'. Without the comradeship of the war or any public acknowledgement of their experiences (some were accused of cowardice), these estranged, silenced men soldier on, 'sometimes creating havoc in their wake'. With a level gaze, an unemotive lens, Kisler reveals the cost of this 'soldiering on'. It is a memorable, plain-speaking book of dogged research, understanding and acceptance. Acceptance of the deep well of unexpressed horror, of the forbearance of their wives and partners, of the child who lay in bed at night whispering, 'Please, please, Mum, don't argue with him.' The Dark Dad by Mary Kisler (Massey University Press, $37) is available in bookstores nationwide.
