Auckland Arts Festival: Life, death and birds' nests

Tai Whetuki/House of Death, by Lisa Reihana, explores ancient Maori and Polynesian traditions of mourning.

Native birdsong contrasts with a haunting karanga in Aotea Square. Linda Herrick reports

"Woo-oo! Woo-oo! Honk honk! Woo-er-woo-er-woo-er!" Artist Niki Hastings-McFall does a terrific imitation of police sirens - easier to say than write - but she's actually imitating the rescue birds she looks after at home. The magpies are masters at mimicking her ringtone, wolf whistles, fire engines, and police and ambulance sirens. Any sound that takes their fancy.

Hastings-McFall brings injured birds into her Oratia home to rehabilitate them while they recover. She specialises in magpies, but has nursed a range of species including a wood pigeon she found on a footpath that had a serious spinal injury. Unable to move, it developed an expensive taste for cherries, pawpaw and lychees, eaten from her hand. The pigeon, now able to perch, was recently moved to a rehab sanctuary where it will stay for a year before release.

Looking around Aotea Square, there's not a great variety of birds to be seen: sparrows, pigeons, seagulls. So it is a gift that Hastings-McFall has brought native birdsong into the space with her installation Fale Ula, there for the duration of the Auckland Arts Festival. It's a large-scale project in which she has "polynised" the trees in the square by wrapping them in her signature synthetic lei (or ula, in Samoan). The installation references Samoan oral history which says the architectural form of the fale was made in heaven, then gifted to Earth containing treasures such as the ava bowl.

Hastings-McFall's fale in the square has open-sided walls, and the roof is the sky. When a visitor walks through, sensors activate six "nests" emitting the sound of singing birds like tui and kokako. "Project Nest" has been created with Hubbub Studios, three musicians who use technology to enhance theatre productions and public art installations.

Niki Hastings-McFall has wrapped the trees in synthetic lei. Photo / Supplied

"We've been going about, lurking in the bush, recording birdsong," says Hastings-McFall. "A lot of it was generated in the bush corridor from the Waitakeres into the city."

Her mission statement for Fale Ula is: "Plant a tree ... a bird will come ... While never disparaging gulls, pigeons or sparrows, as a shining example of biodiversity this tally doesn't rate. Imagine if the birds from the Waitakere Ranges could fly down a bush corridor to make commonplace in Queen St the song of the tui or the chirp of the piwakawaka."

Fale Ula is an exuberant celebration of life. But death is in the neighbourhood too, in her friend Lisa Reihana's Tai Whetuki/House of Death, a fearsome multimedia work that explores ancient Maori and Polynesian traditions associated with mourning.

"A wounded Maori warrior looms out of the primordial landscape, finds a safe haven to lie down, and dies," writes Reihana in her brief for the festival. "Accompanied by his frightening attendant, the exalted Tahitian chief mourner takes a villager's life in a frenzied attack, re-enacting a long-vanished ritual. A Maori woman performs a karanga to open up the space between heaven and earthly realms."

"I was watching American Horror Story and loving the spooky side, the gothic nature, how it can be very productive to be open about the grieving process," says Reihana. "It's the hiddenness of the grieving that is the problem. Grieving is a type of healing."

Reihana shot the footage for House of Death at Karekare, in the area around the cave, the site of a massacre in 1825; a place of death and mourning. "It's a very important and sad place to shoot this material," she says.

One of the figures is played by her youngest nephew; the chief mourner is played by an actor.

"The actor is 1.9m tall and when he puts on the headpiece he is 2.4m tall," Reihana points out. "The chief mourner was a figure in Tahiti. Joseph Banks and James Cook saw a chief mourner ceremony when they were based in Tahiti recording the Transit of Venus. Tupaia [a famous Polynesian navigator who travelled with Cook] did a drawing. The chief mourner would go out in the mornings and evenings and if anyone got in their way, they'd kill them. They would put on the mask and take on a new personality."

House of Death also features a soundtrack, including the call of the karanga, a sound rather than specific words. "It's a cleansing ceremony so people feel safe," says Reihana. "We spend so much of our lives trying not to think about death. I know I don't but as I get older I just have to look at it. It's not a bad thing."

Niki Hastings-McFall also has an installation in the rear window of Q Theatre and an exhibition, Flock, at Whitespace, 12 Crummer Rd, Ponsonby, March 11-29.

• Niki Hastings-McFall also has an installation in the rear window of Q Theatre and an exhibition, Flock, at Whitespace, 12 Crummer Rd, Ponsonby, March 11-29.

What: Tai Whetuki/House of Death by Lisa Reihana
What: Fale Ula by Niki Hastings-McFall
Where and when: TimeOut Festival Garden, Aotea Square, to March 22