Who Are We To Judge? Professor Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung On The Walters Prize

By Culture 101 of RNZ

Artist Ana Iti has been awarded Aotearoa New Zealand’s most prestigious art award, the Walters Prize at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Her sculpture and sound installation, A resilient heart like the mānawa, is on display at the gallery.

Like Britain’s Turner Prize, the Walters Prize 2024 has four finalists in exhibition, chosen by a jury.

Yet, while with the former the same jury awards the final prize to one winner, the Walters Prize has since its inception been judged by an international curator, often coming to the Aotearoa art scene fresh.

Despite the acceleration of globalisation in the art world over recent decades, getting an outside view on art in Aotearoa is rare within New Zealand itself. And we also don’t have the luxury like bigger art world centres of seeing much of the work of our artists’ contemporaries from elsewhere.

The Walters Prize final judge for 2024 was Cameroonian Berlin-based Professor Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung. He brings a distinctive international overview – he’s director of Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Germany’s national centre for international contemporary arts.

His international engagements have included curator of the Finnish Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, guest curator of the Dakar Biennale of Contemporary African Art 2018, and a curator-at-large of major international art event Documenta 14. Next year he is the curator of the Sao Paulo Biennial, the second oldest art biennial in the world after Venice.

Of Iti’s winning work, Ndikung writes: “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.”

As well as a soundwork, Iti’s installation consists of three tall rusted cradles that hold a precarious network of kauri planks. There are allusions here to the wharf and mangroves of Rāwene in the Hokianga, which Iti whakapapa to.

“The concreteness of metals of the de-concretised wharf infrastructure that stand majestically in the gallery,” Ngikung writes, “express 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.”

Ndikung also comments on a play on words in the work’s title, A resilient heart like the mānawa. Without a macron manawa means heart, with a macron mangrove, thinking of the resilience of people and the environment as it relates to the Hokianga harbour foreshore and globally.

The other finalists’ who have work currently on display at the gallery are Juliet Carpenter, Owen Connors and Brett Graham.

Professor Ndikung spoke to RNZ’s Culture 101.

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