KEY POINTS:
The AK07 festival has brought out of the woodwork several survey shows which should probably be in the Auckland Art Gallery schedule, if that institution was not beholden to big-dollar donors, grandiose building plans and the search for what may draw in paying punters.
Restless and Urban Pacific offer windows into work by some of the Maori and Pacific artists who are becoming an increasingly important part of the city and the nation's cultural discourse.
Not that Restless curator Lisa Reihana wanted her show to be pigeon-holed into ethnically-loaded categories. She was just looking for artists telling strong stories.
"I capitulated because I thought maybe there would be people who would come and see it because it was a Maori and Pacific Island show," she says.
Restless is the inaugural show at the Moving Image Centre, across Karangahape Rd from Artspace.
It includes eight artists who are not necessarily known for film or video.
The tuakana or senior figure is John Miller, a photographer who for more than 30 years has chronicled protests, hui and political and social activities which might otherwise have passed unrecorded except for police intelligence snapshots or the brief incursions of news photographers and television crews.
Miller is re-making an installation Reihana first saw at Elam more than 20 years ago: images of the Springbok Tour protests projected with a soundtrack of contemporary news items.
"I wanted the piece because New Zealand is very bad at teaching its own history," she says.
Other contributors are exploring historical narratives, rather than having been there recording them.
Brett Graham's piece, shown once before at the Adam Art Gallery in Wellington, is about the removal of the Banaban population so their island could be mined for fertiliser. "It's quite poetic and Brett's a beautiful object maker," she says.
Lonnie Hutchinson, a Maori-Samoan artist, has an animation work on "blackbirding" in the Pacific, where people were enticed on to ships and kidnapped to work in the Queensland sugar plantations.
That provided an explanation for the stories Hutchinson heard growing up in the islands about women going missing at sea.
Reihana saw Parikawhia Whakamoe's installation last year at the Melbourne Centre for Contemporary Art and felt it should be shown in this country.
The Tuhoe artist has worked across the Tasman for eight years, but her work looks back here at father figures and prophetic figures such as Te Kooti Rikirangi.
Reihana is drawn to video-based installations because of the saturation of stimulus they can offer.
"It makes me think about being inside the body of a wharenui, the time it takes to be in there, the sights and the smells and the sounds, the oral things that come out of it.
"I did an exhibition a few years ago and someone said to me, 'You really need to edit,' and I said, 'This is nowhere near saturated - a wharenui is so full, every surface has a meaning, a texture, a colour, a story. People have told stories inside them, and even if you do not know what they are, you feel them. You know people have lived in them.' "
Urban Pacific is showing on the other side of Newton Gully, in a gallery attached to studios occupied by Whitecliffe students.
Curator Giles Peterson throws around words and phrases like "cutting edge", "youth", "street" and "pushing the buttons" as if there was still an edge to cut in art - and for young Polynesian artists trying to claw their way into the art world from working class, non-Palagi backgrounds, there may well be.
The work includes Kiwi Biddle's paintings of gangsters in his neighbourhood, Lusia Samuels' Perspex beer crate, Anita Jacobsen's photo of a young Samoan woman ironing a blond wig, Donna Campbell's light boxes of weaving patterns and Matt Dowman's comic book style paintings.
These are young artists who are not falling back on stylised frangipani blossoms or tapa cloth or tiki to load their work with some Pacific or Maori significance, but are trying to work with their lives here and now.
It was fine for the previous generation to try to reclaim their culture from tourists or anthropologists, but Apia may be a long way away for these kids. They want manga (the Japanese cartoon form), not mango.
"I went for a range of diverse perspectives and backgrounds. There's no one set position," Petersen says.
"I think that fluidity and diversity reflects very much the urban youth and energy and the Pacific flavour of Auckland which is after all the largest Polynesian city in the world."
Even before the opening there was interest in picking up the show in Australia, and Peterson has been invited to speak on Urban Pacific at a conference in Paris in July.
Exhibition
What: Restless
Where and when: Moving Image Centre, 321 Karangahape Rd, March 10-April 21
What: Urban Pacific
Where and when: Randolph St Gallery, Newton, March 8-April 7
