Blenheim-born artist Ana Iti (Te Rarawa) has won the Walters Prize 2024 - and $50,000 - with her sculptural and sonic work "A resilient heart like the mānawa” currently on show at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.
Blenheim-born artist Ana Iti (Te Rarawa) has won the Walters Prize 2024 - and $50,000 - with her sculptural and sonic work "A resilient heart like the mānawa” currently on show at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.
A large-scale installation reimagining a historic Hokianga wharf has won the country’s richest visual arts award, the $50,000 Walters Prize.
Blenheim-born artist Ana Iti (Te Rarawa) was named the 2024 winner at an event on Friday evening at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.
Iti’s sculptural and sonic work A resilient heart like the mānawa reimagines the structure and surroundings of Rāwene wharf and considers relationships between people, whenua and the natural world.
The 35-year-old artist was shortlisted for the prize – alongside Juliet Carpenter, Owen Connors and Brett Graham – in March last year. All four artists were then invited to complete new works for the Walters Prize 2024 exhibition, from which a winner would be announced.
International judge Professor Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (Berlin-based director and chief curator of Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Germany’s centre for the presentation and discussion of international contemporary arts) was in Auckland this week to make his selection.
A closer look at the Walters Prize 2024 winning work, "A resilient heart like the mānawa" by Ana Iti (Te Rarawa) on show at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki.
Ndikung said Iti’s work stood out because of the “radicality of its manifestation”.
“Stripped to the bare minimum, the work shares something in common with great poetry: the ability of accessing multiple universes through the availability of a few words.”
He said the installation, which he likened to “drawing in space”, expressed the weight of histories.
“... Of industry, of extractivism, of capitalism, of the colonial enterprise and of connections in Rāwene that was transformed into a timber town with a mill and shipyards in the early 1800s.”
“Manawa” translates to “heart”. Meanwhile, the macron-carrying “mānawa” is a word for “mangrove”.
Ndikung said the mangrove’s ability to protect shorelines from erosion “seems to me like an anecdote of resilience and resistance – emotionally, spiritually, politically, economically and otherwise”.
Berlin-based Professor Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung was in Auckland this week to judge the Walters Prize 2024.
The Walters Prize was established at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki in 2002. Shortlisted artists are nominated by an independent jury, based on an outstanding body of work made within a two-year period.
Iti was nominated for recent video and sculptural installations including The woman whose back was a whetstone (Govett-Brewster Gallery, New Plymouth), Roharoha (Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland) and I must shroud myself in a stinging nettle (City Gallery Wellington).
The other nominees were Waipukurau-born Juliet Carpenter (aged 33) for recent work exhibited internationally, including her film installation EGOLANE, 2022 at Städelschule Rundgang; Owen Connors (32, from Greymouth) for recent exhibitions including your cart and plow over the bones of the dead and Incubations (2021), both at Robert Heald Gallery, Wellington, and 57-year-old Brett Graham (Tāmaki Makaurau, Ngāti Korokī Kahukura, Tainui) for Tai Moana Tai Tangata, first exhibited at the Govett-Brewster.
Artist Ana Iti (Te Rarawa) is the recipient of the Walters Prize 2024, the country's richest visual arts award.
The jury panel was Robert Leonard (director of Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art), Tendai Mutambu (an Auckland-based curator and writer), Melanie Oliver (Christchurch Art Gallery’s curator of contemporary art) and Hanahiva Rose (an assistant curator at Te Papa).
The jury’s selection was based on projects presented in 2020-22, which the panel said was “a time of unsettled exhibition opportunities, disrupted by Covid lockdowns and restrictions on travel. Despite this, the artists presented extraordinary works that address the cultural, social, and political conditions of our time.”
The Walters Prize was founded by benefactors and principal donors Erika and Robin Congreve and Dame Jenny Gibbs and is further supported by major donors Dayle Mace and Christopher and Charlotte Swasbrook.
Its inaugural winner was photographer Yvonne Todd and, in its 10th iteration in 2021, it went to the Mataaho Collective and Maureen Lander.
From this year, the prize will be awarded every three years, allowing shortlisted artists more time to develop new work specifically for the Walters Prize exhibition.
The Walters Prize 2024 exhibition is on at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki until October 20.
Kim Knight is a senior journalist with the New Zealand Herald’s premium lifestyle team.
