Mā te wā

Shannon Te Ao

Mossman Gallery
Level 2, 22 Garrett St, Te Aro, Wellington

12 September – 10 October 2020

Te Whiti o Rongomai’s whakatauākī goes, “Ko te pō te kaihari i te rā. Ko te mate te kaihari i te oranga.”

The night is the bringer of the day. Death is the bringer of life.*

Mossman is pleased to present Mā te wā, a solo exhibition of new work by Shannon Te Ao.

Working predominantly with performance and film, Te Ao’s elegiac installations explore fraught dynamics of indigeneity, language, and loss. Richly layered, Te Ao’s works enact a compression wherein past and present co-exist, and daily life is permeated with multifarious social, political, cultural, and philosophical histories.

The photographs in Mā te wā take their starting point from the artist’s own oeuvre, using footage from his archive as filmic backdrops. Te Ao situates the body in a state of flux, set in relation to personal narratives of loss, grief, love, identity, and his own processes of de-colonisation.