How are Arts Institutions and Organisations in New Zealand enabling Diversity through Policy and Practice?
with Courtney Johnston, Elisapeta Heta and Ane Tonga
By Holly Howe
Our members were joined by three New Zealand women who shared their experience around diversity in New Zealand’s artistic community. Courtney Johnston is the Tumu Whakarae/Chief Executive of Te Papa, Aotearoa’s national museum.
Elisapeta Heta is a Māori design leader within architecture firm Jasmax. She is one of the founding members of Waka Māia, Jasmax’s team of dedicated design professionals who specialise in engaging with Māori mana whenua and applying the Te Aranga Māori Design Principles.
Ane Tonga is an artist and also the inaugural Curator of Pacific Art at Auckland Art Gallery. The new role aims to enable collection and exhibition development, as well as targeted research, that will increase access and engagement with Pacific art and artists, and give greater visibility to Pacific narratives in the gallery’s collection.
Te Papa is New Zealand’s national museum, “and technically our National Art Gallery as well although some people would debate that” laughs Courtney, which grew out of the original colonial museum which was set up in the 1860s. Te Papa opened in 1998 and was one of the first institutions in New Zealand to be known by a Māori name. “One of the important things to know about Te Papa is that it was purposely disruptive. It was meant to challenge all kinds of ideas and that was coming out of social change but it was also the dawn of the new museology.”
“The way I think of Te Papa is that we are here to collect and treasure and share and give voice to all the stories that are there about peoples coming together in this place and this environment.”
The museum has a co-leadership model of a chief executive and a Kaihautū since it opened.
“As a leadership model for me it has been very natural and sharing the responsibility of leadership with someone like Arapata Hakiwai [who is the current Kaihautū] who is skilful and strong in his relationships and has a very different personality and manner to me, means it doesn’t feel like power-sharing, it feels like partnership.”
The museum’s practice is centred on mana taonga. Courtney explains: “This is the principle that every item in our collection derives its power and its importance from its connection to its source community, to its original maker, and to the people who live with it. That determines how we make decisions, how we store, how we return, how we loan.”
It is important to have a strong Māori presence that isn’t just tokenistic, and the museum has an Iwi in residence. “That’s an opportunity for that Iwi to tell their story to the museum and the New Zealand public and to international visitors – when we have them! It’s also an opportunity for them to research and regain that connection to the collection and to make use of our expertise and our knowledge and our staff and institutional power that we have for their objectives.”
The museum also works to bring back Māori human remains from other museums. “It’s a very belated change in museum practice to stop seeing people as scientific specimens or things to be studied and that there is a greater claim for western knowledge over thousands people. There is the claim of their people for them.”
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Elisapeta spoke about her experience working for Jasmax, one of the oldest architectural firms in New Zealand, who designed Te Papa. She is also an artist and a writer, and was the first Māori Pacific woman and the youngest ever to join the National Institute of Architecture’s board.
She joined the Jasmax as a graduate in 2015, and formed Waka Māia within the practice with three other graduates to serve as the Māori design leaders for the Firm, which was challenging at times given their perceived youth. Elisapeta elaborated
“We released a manifesto as a practice that talked about core values and principles that we will hold as a practice that guide us or steer us with the projects that we are doing and it informs the policies and ways in which we work in the practice. Architecture sits within a particular western construct that we know, but the practice of architecture from a Māori construct is something that has been sort of severed from being lived and embodied.”
She realised that there was a strong demand within New Zealand cities and in particular local governments, for architecture projects to have engagement with Māori, but many commissioners didn’t really know how to ask for that or what kind of capabilities or capacities architecture firms had to deal with that, so it was essential for Jasmax to have authentic Māori input.
“What we have been doing is making space for ourselves, to be in power and reinvigorate traditional practices alongside contemporary or western practices of architecture and trying to marry those things up.”
Working with mana whenua means working with the people of the land and of particular sites who have sovereignty over certain areas, to get their story, their narratives, their descendants, and their connection back to those places, and into the built environment.
“One of the big picture purposes behind what we do, is this notion that we want to see our faces in our places. It’s quite a commonly used sort of term by a lot of indigenous designers, but what’s that really talking about is going back to the indigenous way of knowing how to make spaces.”
Looking at architecture from a Māori perspective offers a new way of thinking: “It’s flipping a model that was predominantly founded around making money and making profit designing the coolest thing you could, to actually making space is driven by narratives, driven by descendancy, and making space is driven by ancestral connections.”
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Ane was born and raised in Auckland and has been working as a curator for over a decade. She joined the Auckland Art Gallery as Curator of Pacific Art six months ago, though laughed as she admitted “with Covid and lockdown, it almost feels like two years!” Her appointment marks the first time a Pacific person had been appointed in a curatorial role at the gallery since its opening in 1888.
“Currently in Aotearoa [New Zealand] there is no other curatorial position in existence that focuses solely on Pacific art, despite its commonplace existence in institutions abroad which have significantly lower populations…Therein lies one of the key issues around Pacific curatorship and so the formation of my current role can perhaps be seen as a necessary structural response. To give you context, a total of around 400,000 people from 30 distinct groups live in New Zealand and the majority, 64%, live in Auckland.”
This is despite the fact that Pacific artists have continued to make significant contribution to the contemporary New Zealand art scene, both locally and on the global stage. Another ‘first’ that Ane flags is that New Zealand’s chosen artist for the 2022 Venice Biennale is Yuki Kihara, who is the first artist of Pacific descent, the first Fa’afafine (Samoan for ‘in the manner of a woman’ broadly understood as the LGBTIQ+ in the Western context), and the first artist without formal training to represent New Zealand at the biennial.
But being ‘first’ comes with challenges:
“I think one of the dangers of being the first of anything are some of the implications. I guess for me one of the implications of being an inaugural Curator of Pacific Art is that it kind of assumes that this is the first ever Pacific representation in the building or within curatorial roles at large. Pacific curatorship has developed through the emergence of curators of Pacific heritage in many kind of municipal galleries and museum institutions across Aotearoa including Te Papa, so part of my practice and approach builds on the work that has been done by these people.”
Ane is currently “examining how Pacific communities have been serviced prior, through collection and exhibition development at my organisation and attempting to establish and ground this work in the values that are shared and driven by the many communities that I am responsible to. If we think of the Pacific beyond a landmass it is also a third of the world’s surface so that is kind of the remit of which I have given myself. And thinking how to tackle this because we know with systemic issues, it requires long-term change.”