A grandmother’s sweet hymn carries keynotes of prayers in a grandchild’s memory, stacking plastic chairs are dragged back into storage, dented from the joy and grieving of mass family gatherings. Paternal and maternal kinship ties deepen through time-honoured iTaukei ceremonies with masi, a kala-noa calls ‘autalavou laiti (youth) to fall in love with their stories marked on tapa.

Ocean of Whispers brings together measina from Elsie Andrewes (Navala, Nakoroboya, Ba. Fiji, Pākehā), Jimmy Ma’ia’i (Sapapali’i and Fasito’outa, Samoa and Edinburgh, Scotland), Natasha Ratuva (Naioti, Bualomanihoro, Fiji), Jasmine Tuiā (Matautu Lefaga, Falefa, Anoama’a, Malifa, Samoa)  and Kasi Valu (Lapaha and Ma’ufanga, Tonga). 

Curated by Etanah Falagā Talapā.

On behalf of Enjoy, fa’afetai tele, vinaka vakalevu, malo ‘aupito to everyone who generously donated to our BoostedxMoana campaign in 2021. It is with your love, trust and support that Ocean of Whispers has been realised.

Header artwork: Elsie Andrewes, Drink, 2022.

“Through my claystone eyes, I experience both body and place as lively; unmoving yet turbulent…Body-form becomes earth-form, landscapes of bone, rock and earth fluidly span time to the inner reaches of our bodies and minds.”-Through Claystone Eyes, Eleanor Díaz Ritson.

Everybody SoundSystem is a project about friendship and the transformative potential of creative collective endeavor. For artists Eve Armstrong, Josephine Cachemaille and Gabby O’Connor, dance parties were their first experiences of making installations. These endeavors often involved activating spaces by enhancing sensory environments, usually through repurposing found materials and an ethos of ‘making do’.

There is an awkwardness to the way in which a sheet of A4 paper fits inside of a foolscap filing box. ‘Foolscap’ in the name refers to the foolscap folio, a paper size that is uncommonly used and yet boxes made to its specific measurements are ubiquitous. Though they feel slightly too long for the A4 scale, the foolscap filing box has become standard in the storage of documents, receipts, notes and exchanges.[1]

On a visit to the North Shore Rockhounds, Ron holds a slice of rock up to a cabochon sizing chart. Here a series of holes are used to guide the shaping of the rock into predetermined scales.[2] The guides sit in old ice-cream containers, alongside the home-made tools and collections of the other rockhounds. Slices of rock, ready to be shaped are filed in trays under workbenches. 

In the Neues Museum in Berlin, a display of delicate stone tablets and sheets of papyrus slide back and forth from within a series of hidden drawers. Pressing a button on the side of the cabinet labelled “Knowledge: Mathematics and Astronomy”, the third drawer from the top slowly moves out and past the camera. After a short time, the drawer retreats, reducing its exposure to sunlight.

[1] The foolscap filing box usually measures 15x10x3.3” (381x254x84mm) and can be found in abundance in offices, archives, and homes.  

[2] Cabochons are judged on their conformity to scale, as well as their subjective qualities

Eros exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counter-glance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and language are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, in the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, that I realise I never can. 

Pōneke is a city full of streams. At least five run through the district named Te Aro, formerly amongst diverse wetlands and gardens, meeting Te Whanganui-a-Tara at the shoreline of Te Aro Pā.

They are still here. Waimapihi flows down from the gully in Waimapihi Reserve, through a forest of trees reaching up like vines into a shaded canopy. It meets the top of Holloway Road, channelled through a low concrete wall, a steel grate, and a pipe. It follows the road down Aro Street. If you know where to stand you can hear the gushing, tumbling of a waterfall under your feet. It traces ancient pathways now hidden, underneath buildings, crossing streets and the hum of people. Finally, Waimapihi flows past the foundations of Te Aro Pā at the end of Taranaki Street, before its waters rejoin Te Whanganui-a-Tara.

The stream is named for Māpihi (Ngāi Tara, Ngāti Māmoe) a wahine Rangatira who bathed here, although her stories are also hidden from view to most who cross her stream. Fish follow its course up and down dark underground paths, migrating through brick culverts and reinforced concrete apertures. Kōkopu can be seen upstream, and tuna and kōaro are among a thousand other species who touch this awa. Except, Waimapihi, for most of its length, is not a stream. It’s not even water.

Tension and precarity are not new concepts for most cultures, especially since the upheaval caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Māori have dealt with these issues before. Great migrations, wars and the constant onslaught of colonisation have given us examples of how our tīpuna handled these situations.

Soft, sewn sculptures by Hanna Shim 심한나 make space for elastic encounters within the rigid white walls of a gallery space. One of the artist’s goals in creating pliable art is to defeat the architecture that restrains and constrain the artist and their works from the wildness of making.

"He kanohi kitea" (a face seen) is an important saying and value in Māoridom, acknowledging the importance of meeting people face-to-face to build relationships and trust. Enjoy’s new commissioned artwork He Kanohi Kitea is situated in our reading room, an inviting place to nurture and encourage these interactions to take place. Within a global pandemic this acknowledges kanohi kitea hasn't always been possible, along with the realisation of how important the physical presence of seeing people face-to-face is to our overall wellbeing.

The name He Kanohi Kitea was gifted by our close friend and neighbour Tehani Buchanan. Thank-you so much for supporting this kaupapa. Much aroha to the whānau and for your mahi.

Sophia Coghini, Tautai Arts Intern 2021 at Enjoy has overseen this project as commissioning curator.

Thank-you to Jim & Mary Barr for your crucial support of this project.

Precious items can have an important role in ritual and performance, with connections to sacred and intimate body parts; be it a handmade vessel we drink water out of, a comb we brush our hair with, or an elegant ring passed down from generations. They can be made of rare materials, be well-crafted and artisanal, but more vitally tend to have emotional significance or spiritual importance, something that is passed on and carried through us, evoking the memory and presence of loved ones.

Pieces of is an exhibition of handmade ceramics, video work and biofuel research by Tamaki-based artist and cook Ruby White. Concentrating on rediscovering and repurposing traditional clay working techniques to create functional ceramic cookers White combines old and new technologies to "look with apprehension and hope toward climate change and our collective future."

This exhibition is created for each other, excuse our selfishness. We offer each other conditions to work that avoid and deter the ridiculous and indefensible aspects of "normal" practice. This has been an extended period of trust and experimentation, resulting in an exhibition that cradles and nurtures the others’ ambitions, at times quite literally.

—Grace Ryder

I started making this work when my kuia passed. I traveled home to live at her house for a year. I wanted to be close to her again. A story she told me that has stuck with me: the account of her father’s drowning on the Tongariro River in Tūrangi. I have since visited the spot again and again.

How does time pass in a day, in a year, in a life? Within Māori cosmology, Māui and his brothers famously bound Tama-nui-te-rā, onwatcher to our humanity. Before, it was cold and Māori were starved of time. Perhaps our movements were slow. Inhibited by an endless night.

Lay in measures is a new exhibition by Ōtepoti Dunedin-based artists Megan Brady and Ed Ritchie. The exhibition considers how architectural composition unconsciously affects bodily experience, through small-scale interventions of sound, subtle sculptural installations and replicated furnishings.

Working with discarded goods and salvaged materials, Bound in secret knots includes new sculptural and moving image works by Pōneke Wellington-based artists Bena Jackson and Teresa Collins.

For History reserves but a few lines for you, Areez Katki presents a series of textile works which build upon the artist’s ongoing enquiries into craft traditions, sites of queer intimacy and the complexities of migratory experience.

JustUs is a new solo exhibition by Te Upoko o Te Ika-based artist Chevron Hassett. Drawing from his experiences growing up in Te Awakairangi Lower Hutt, Hassett has developed a photographic installation that explores the lived realities and representation of Māori men in contemporary Aotearoa.

Optimism and its afterlives thinks around a series of transitional moments, including works by artists who have found themselves witness to or bound up in scenes of change.

Cutouts is an exhibition of new paintings and assemblage sculptures by Ammon Ngakuru. Exploring the material economies of gathered objects and a particular architectural site, Cutouts prompts us to reconsider biography or identity, exploring the way that history is read in the post-colonial context of Aotearoa New Zealand.

For !ERROR! Pōneke-based moving image artist Laura Duffy has invited artists to dance in front of a green screen set up, and transported them to another, limitless, realm.