Ki Te Ngāhere: Conversations About Time, Material and Memory

A forest consists of many timescales. Through a constant process of renewal and decay, the ecosystem becomes a record of time passing. Similarly, human memory folds together new and old. Every moment that something is remembered material traces are reshaped and reconstructed. In this afternoon of conversation and performance, writers, researchers, and creative practitioners ask what is at stake when we look back in order to move forward.

1.00pm – 2.00pm
Hana Pera Aoake, Taarn Scott and Raewyn Martyn in conversation with Su Ballard
Lower Chartwell Gallery
Tracing an ongoing thread begun in a previous exhibition — Listening Stones Jumping Rocks (2021) — this conversation considers the way narratives and materials are interchangeable containers of ecological memory. In Invasive Weeds Taarn Scott has rendered Hana Pera Aoake’s poetry material. In Greywacke love poems: returns Raewyn Martyn explored how mutable material can dislodge skewed histories. In this conversation with exhibition curator Su Ballard, Aoake, Scott and Martyn bring their practices together to reflect on the transformational potential of material as stories and stories as material. Together we imagine new old ways to create survivable futures.

2.15pm – 2.45pm
Barbara Francis and Mike Ross in conversation with Sophie Thorn
Lower Chartwell Gallery
This conversation touches on the journey of a tangata tīriti researcher writing about a shared settler-Māori history. In writing an account of her ancestor in the recently published book Titus Angus White and the Māori Captives on Waitematā Harbour 1863/4, Barbara Francis worked with Dr Mike Ross (Ngāti Hauā) as her kaiarāhi. Francis wrote the book with the blessing of the Kingitanga, after a chance meeting with Brad Totorewa, then Te Toki a te Kiingi, Speaker for the King, who advised her to, ‘write the story for pākehā’. In this discussion facilitated by curator and director Sophie Thorn, Francis and Ross traverse such questions as: Whose history is it to tell?; How might pākehā revisit shared history without continuing to dominate the narrative?; And, where does the onus of legacy fall?

3.00pm-4.00pm
Ngā Paki Rākau
Performance by Mark Harvey
Congreve Foyer
In this playful participatory performance, artist Mark Harvey invites audience members to join him in a gesture of healing he Tōtara. Spectators will have the opportunity to engage in a fun way, thinking about notions of well-being, te taiao, ngāhere and tree hugging. Ngā Paki Rākau is the most recent development of a work originally performed by Harvey at Performance Space in Sydney in 2017 and at Coca in Otautahi in 2017.

Visit the Adam Art Gallery website for presenters' biographies.

Image: Susan Skerman, Bush Panels, 1981, 16 screenprinted perspex panels, Ngā Puhipuhi o Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University Art Collection, formerly the Wellington College of Education Art Collection, accessioned 2009. Installation view, Folded Memory, Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2023. Photo: Ted Whitaker.