Ten Years and Counting – Two Exhibitions Present Outstanding Photography in Auckland

Auckland Festival of Photography Annual Commission 2020

Auckland Festival of Photography Annual Commission 2011 – 2019 Collection

Wallace Arts Trust – Pah Homestead

9 June – 26 July 2020

Reviewed for PhotoForum by Virginia Were, 16 July 2020

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Perhaps it is no coincidence, given recent catastrophic world events, that the three artists chosen for the 2020 Auckland Photography Festival Trust’s Annual Commission seem more outward looking and overtly politicised in their choice of subjects than their predecessors.

The annual Auckland Festival of Photography was established in 2004 by stalwart champion of the medium, Julia Durkin, to promote contemporary photography through a series of lectures, exhibitions and events throughout the Auckland region. In 2011 Durkin inaugurated the Festival’s Annual Commission (which funds an outstanding Auckland-based practitioner to make new work), and two exhibitions at the Pah Homestead present works by the 2020 commissioned artists and celebrate ten years of the Annual Commission.

This year the modus operandi changed – not one but three artists were selected to make new work, which is exhibited upstairs in a single room at the Wallace Arts Centre’s Pah Homestead. Compared with the earlier commissioned artists, this year’s cohort have a slightly different focus. Qiane Matata-Sipu, Raymond Sagapolutele and Saynab Muse all tap into current traumatic events, training their photographic gaze on communities affected by colonisation and discrimination as a way to explore notions of ‘The Unseen’ which is this year’s theme.

Young Somalian photographer Saynab Muse presents two moody black and white portraits – Women, 2020, and Feminism, 2020 – of her family members in a suburban environment. In the first, a young girl regards us through a window, framed by filmy lace curtains. Her gaze is confident, her head slightly tilted and her chin resting on calmly clasped hands. Muse plays with notions of interiority and exteriority by placing us inside the house looking out at the girl through a pane of glass. The frame of the window reminds us of the way we ‘frame’ the other – in this case Muslim refugees living in Auckland who are part of a wider diaspora the city has welcomed (or in some cases not) into its midst in recent years.

In the second image of a young girl wearing a hijab we’re positioned as onlookers rather than participants in the scene. She sits in her living room and gazes absently out of the frame, oblivious of the viewer. Her profile is silvered by oblique light, her face framed by her black, enveloping headscarf. Behind her, we see full-bodied upholstered furniture; the intricate carved legs of a coffee table. The velvety tones and elegant compositions of Muse’s photographs make them sensual, but more than aesthetics are at stake here. Muse, who is deaf, uses the camera to communicate her lived experience of being a diasporic Muslim woman who identifies as a feminist. She wants you to question your assumptions about Muslim women’s passivity, their lack of agency in making decisions about their lives. Like Iranian photographer, Shirin Neshat, Muse stages her photographs in ways that are quietly subversive, confronting us with our often-unconscious assumptions about our Muslim sisters.

Another artist engaging in a very contemporary conversation, is Qiane Matata-Sipu, another one of the 2020 cohort. Matata-Sipu is a social activist and photo journalist who has been documenting her whānau and papakāinga of Ihumātao for the last 13 years. She and her cousins co-founded the campaign to protect their whenua from destruction and ongoing urban development – a campaign that succeeded in halting the building of the proposed Special Housing Area on the whenua. In one of her photographs, Matata-Sipu’s cousin Harmony Smith stands on the wintry slopes of her maunga at dusk, her head wreathed in kawakawa leaves. The dying light and the wreath can be read as mourning the people who have passed on as well as the confiscation of the land. Titled Uri, 2020, which means descendant, the work embodies the whakataukī ‘ka muri, ka mua,’ which means to walk backwards into the future, taking your ancestors and their knowledge with you. The native kawakawa is used as a medicinal plant by Maori, and the two works in this exhibition direct our attention to customary knowledge of the plant and to the unseen forces of history. Together they stress the need to heal intergenerational trauma in order to help future generations thrive, and they construe photography as a reparative medium capable of doing so.

The third member of the 2020 cohort, South Auckland-resident artist, Raymond Sagapolutele, draws from his Samoan heritage in his diptych, Indonesia, 2020, and Free West Papua, 2020, to bring attention to a conflict that’s largely invisible in the news media, even though it’s happening on our Pacific doorstep.

In one photograph a skull painted a bloody red represents the Indonesian flag; in the companion image the artist has painted the same skull with the colours of the banned ‘Morning Star’ flag of the West Papuan independence movement. The skull is draped with a red lei given to the artist during a 2019 march to commemorate the struggles of the Samoan Mau Independence movement, which resisted New Zealand’s repressive colonial administration before Samoa gained independence in 1962. Sagapolutele’s photographs belong to his Momento Moni series and stem from his interest in the Samoan practice of ‘fagogo’ – the passing of knowledge from one generation to another through oratory and chant. Like Matata-Sipu, Sagapolutele leverages photography’s reparative power and its ability to transmit intergenerational knowledge.

10 years of Annual Commissions (1)

Another artist guided by the idea of walking backwards into the future, and perhaps also concerned with healing past traumas, is Russ Flatt. His two photographs, Bleach, 2016, and Shame, 2016, revisit his experiences of coming out as a gay Maori man in the 1980s. In lavishly constructed works (Flatt worked as a fashion photographer for ten years) using actors and elaborate staging, he re-imagines volatile scenes from his past. These photographs resemble film stills, capturing heightened moments of tension between a young, man and his parents in their suburban home - complete with cane furniture and rice paper ceiling lights. In one image a father confronts his son about his bleached hair, while the mother and the young man’s boyfriend look on. The mother places a restraining hand on the father’s arm.

Flatt’s works pack a narrative punch but there’s no mystery lurking in the brightly lit corners of his domestic interiors – we enjoy the carefully drawn characters and their choreographed actions but they doesn’t pique our curiosity about what happened before and after the shutter closed.

Samoan-born Tanu Gago’s night-time, flash-lit photograph of four Pacifica young women in a suburban backyard, Lauryn, Luisa, Sini, Hilda, 2014, also invokes the aesthetics of film and works through issues of cultural identity and representation. Gago has a background in performing arts and writing and directing for the screen; like Flatt, he’s an expert at creating sumptuous, narrative images.

Roberta Thornley was the first commissioned artist in the Annual Commission series and her melancholic head and shoulders portrait, Jenny, 2011, prompts us to ponder the inner life of this classically beautiful young woman with a faint sheen of perspiration on her forehead. With her veiled head and chaste expression, Jenny reminds us of Renaissance paintings of the Virgin Mary – she seems coolly distant, her three-quarter profile gazing out of the frame, almost swallowed up by the velvety, darkness surrounding her.

Like the subjects in Bill Henson’s sexually charged portraits of teens, Jenny appears on the brink of transformation. Thornley leverages the allure of youth to harness our fickle attention but the fact she’s a woman photographer, and closer to the age of her subjects, distinguishes her work from Henson’s more calculated portraits.

Interestingly, most of the photographers in this exhibition are ‘insiders’ in regard to their subject matter. The question of ‘who’ is taking a photograph remains controversial and was hotly debated when Luke Willis Thompson was shortlisted for the 2018 Turner Prize for autoportrait, 2017, a 35mm moving image portrait of Diamond Reynolds, whose partner Philando Castile was fatally shot by a policeman during a routine traffic stop in Minnesota in 2016. The work, which addressed race and police violence, fueled a heated discussion about ‘trauma porn’ and whether Willis Thompson (who is of Fijian and European heritage) was an ‘outsider’ and therefore not ‘entitled’ to make such a work.

Yvonne Shaw’s two portraits of psychodrama participants and their qualified director mid-session investigate social interactions and the way our past emotional experiences continue to shape how we respond to the world – sometimes to our detriment. Her photograph, Enactment 28/4/2019 3:11, 2019, is so emotionally raw it’s almost harrowing. We see a tight group of four participants. The woman in front looks down, re-living a cathartic moment from her past. Although this woman is the emotional centre of the group, our eyes are drawn to the tear-streaked face of the woman behind her who is rigid with grief. The work stems from Shaw’s own participation in and research into the practice of psychodrama, which was founded in the early 1900s by Jacob L. Moreno. He saw his role as allowing people to act out their conflicting roles in their own homes and natural environments and to help them put the parts back together again in order to heal.

Shaw’s two works hover intriguingly between staged and documentary image making. Although the action looks staged, it’s not – she invited a local psychodrama group to hold one of their sessions inside the Crystal Palace Theatre in Auckland and then made a record with her camera.

Janet Lilo’s joyous work Hand, 2016, a photograph of an upraised hand printed on eye-popping yellow fabric, is arguably more experimental than the other works in the exhibition because it pushes the boundaries of what a ‘photograph’ can be. Originally made as a site-specific work for the robust, industrial architecture of the silos in Auckland’s Wynyard Quarter, it was so tall it dwarfed the viewer, and it’s equally dramatic at the Pah Homestead. New Zealand audiences don’t usually walk on this work, which trails on the floor, but when it was displayed at the Pingyao International Photography Festival in 2017, the audience was less reverent. Maori/Samoan/Niuean artist, Lilo, was unfazed by this ‘audience participation’ as her practice is marked by strongly democratic values and often involves different communities in its making.

I very much enjoyed the diversity of works in these two exhibitions, which provide a snapshot of a much larger collection resulting from the Annual Commission. It was interesting to trace the changes in approach to methodology and subject matter by local photographers working over the last ten years. Thanks to the ongoing support of the Auckland Photography Festival, lens-based artists in Auckland have been given the chance to make ambitious new series and to present them to the public as part of a wider programme of photographic events. Long may this continue.

Virginia Were is a freelance writer and artist who recently completed a Master of Fine Arts at Elam School of Fine Arts, specialising in photography and video. Before that she was Editor of the quarterly magazine ‘Art News New Zealand’. She lives in the Muriwai Valley and loves making photographs, writing about art and riding horses.

Footnote

(1) Auckland Festival of Photography Annual Commission artists

Roberta Thornley (2011), James K Lowe (2012), Jennifer Mason (2013), Tanu Gago (2014), PJ Paterson (2015), Russ Flatt (2016), Janet Lilo (2017), Alex Plumb (2018), Yvonne Shaw (2019), Saynab Muse (2020), Raymond Sagapolutele (2020) and Qiane Matata-Sipu (2020).

Review supported by funding from Creative New Zealand.