Mai i te kei o ngā waka ki te ihu o ngā waka, a digital video installation by Jeremy Leatinu’u, is at Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga – Hastings Art Gallery until November 26.
Mai i te kei o ngā waka ki te ihu o ngā waka, a digital video installation by Jeremy Leatinu’u, is at Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga – Hastings Art Gallery until November 26.
Tāmaki Makaurau-based artist Jeremy Leatinu’u is bringing his exhibition, Mai i te kei o ngā waka ki te ihu o ngā waka, to Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga – Hastings Art Gallery from September 9 to November 26.
The digital video installation traces people’s journeys to finding a home in Aotearoa New Zealand.
“Sometimes the threads of connection are so obvious, they’re never really discussed,” said Leatinu’u, who is of Ngāti Maniapoto and Samoan descent.
The exhibition’s title translates as “from the front of the canoes to the back of the canoes”.
Mai i te kei o ngā waka ki te ihu o ngā waka centres on Leatinu’u’s family home, which is in Ōtāhuhu and overlooks the narrow strip of land between the Tāmaki River and Manukau Harbour - once a canoe portage route for Māori.
The title suggests the multiple individual viewpoints in a collective journey.
Jeremy Leatinu'u in front of the David Lange memorial in Ōtāhuhu. Photo / Richard Robinson
The three haerenga, or journeys, that make up this body of work explore two of the threads of Leatinu’u’s own whakapapa, putting them in conversation with the arrival of European settlers.
“I think there’s an expectation that we already know [the connections], that we get it, but there’s always nuances in everybody’s story.
“Those are the nuances I’m interested in, because it helps differentiate someone’s experience, their worldview, or their perspective on their own whakapapa or history, [as well as] the whakapapa and history [of] a place that they don’t have a connection to,” Leatinu’u said.
The first haerenga recalls the voyage of Tainui iwi from Hawaiki to Aotearoa.
The second haerenga picks up five centuries later, recounting the arrival of the Queen’s Army to Ōtāhuhu in the early 1860s.
The third haerenga brings us to the present day in Leatinu’u’s parents’ home, which he describes as a marae for his Samoan extended family, and where the door is always open to visitors.
Leatinu’u described this childhood home in Ōtāhuhu as a bastion for all of his family, explaining whenever they go to Auckland, they go straight to the house.
A still from Jeremy Leatinu’u digital video, Mai i te kei o ngā waka ki te ihu o ngā waka (2018).
“The address has never changed since the 80s, so they know where to go.
“Buying it was a milestone for my parents because it was the start of them investing permanently in New Zealand,” he said.
With both Leatinu’u’s grandparents being ministers of a church in Ōtāhuhu, there were always people visiting or staying with the intention of living in New Zealand, so there were always people coming and going.
Leatinu’u, who attended Hastings’ Ebbett Park Primary School as a child when his parents came down to work in the fruit industry, said while each of the films traces the different intentions of settlement in the area, there was also common ground between the three groups of people.
“They all were wanting - are wanting - the same, in terms of moving to a new place.
“I feel like that’s an ongoing thread for people today who migrate to a new place. There are all sorts of reasons for that and the reasons in those three stories are all very similar, even though they have three different groups of people with interwoven histories,” the artist said.
Leatinu’u specifically wanted to bring this work to Te Matau-a-Māui, because of the similarities in journeys of arrival here, from ngā waka Māori to Captain Cook and Tupaia to the many whānau from the Pacific who still journey here to work in the fruit industry.
A still from Sorawit Songsataya's film, "Comfort Zone" (2021).
Also following the theme of journeys is another exhibition at Te Whare Toi o Heretaunga titled Comfort Zone, by Sorawit Songsataya.
This moving image work combines animation and film to explore the kotuku, or white heron, and its only nesting ground in New Zealand.
The animated film is narrated by Awa Puna of Ngāti Kahungunu ki Wairoa, and explores the proximities between human, non-human, and celestial forms, testing our collective fundamental sense of connection and belonging within the natural world.
On show from September 9 to November 26, Comfort Zone also explores the limits of human understanding and the distances we put between ourselves and other species.
