Waitohu 2020

Waitohu (meaning to mark, signify, indicate) is a substantial exhibition featuring thirteen significant contemporary Māori artists. While diverse in media and each with well-established individual styles and visual languages, there are numerous conversations and links uniting their concerns and senses of being.

Waitohu commences at the entranceway with the chevron-shaped explicit connection to the architecture of the wharenui in Robert Jahnke’s spatially transformative poupou Tomokanga o te Ua (The Portal of Rain) (2019). Using mass and void and light, Jahnke engages directly with Māori cosmology and environmental narratives. Hone Tuwhare’s poem “Rain” printed on the slab flanks of the entrance portal begins the conversation about earth and sky, Ranginui and Papatūānuku. Jahnke’s characteristic use of (Tuwhare’s) words - incanted silently by the viewer, building the lilt of prayer, the tonal laments of karakia - establishes a sense of reverence (further augmented by the sensations, metaphors and cultural symbolisms of light) while beginning dialogues of time passed, time present, time future. Offering the infinity of reflected illusion as reality, utilising darkness and light, and Māori conceptual space, Jahnke positions fluorescent tubes of light by stacking them vertically. Using this language of void and substance and limitless space, Jahnke is also explicitly referencing tukutuku lattice work with stitches that fall vertically.

See exhibition website for full essay.