Toi Tū Toi Ora reframed: Doco reveals Auckland Art Gallery politics of landmark Māori exhibition

The artists are all here tonight. The always-too-small foyer of SkyCity Theatre is bursting with a sold-out crowd for the premiere of Toi Tū: Visual Sovereignty, Chelsea Winstanley’s documentary about what happened five years ago and a kilometre away at Auckland City Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.

There had been
a crowd back in 2020, too, with many of the same people in it, for the opening of Toi Tū Toi Ora, which was not only the largest show in the gallery’s history, but also the largest exhibition of contemporary Māori art there had ever been. Yet, amid the celebration, there was a whisper that something had gone wrong, that even as Toi Tū opened its doors, its curator, Nigel Borell, had resigned.

A cover story in the NZ Herald’s Canvas magazine a few weeks later finally told the public what the artists knew – that Borell and the gallery’s director, Kirsten Lacy, had fallen out over what he described as “different ways of viewing aspirations for Māori”.

Winstanley had been on the inside of it all, filming what she had imagined would be a celebratory film that would accompany Toi Tū as it toured internationally. The show never toured, and she wound up with a different story to tell.

Curator Nigel Borell: “You have a moment to make some change.” Photo / Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki

This is an audience that knows the story. It’s also an extraordinarily engaged crowd. The next 100 minutes are dotted with swirls of applause, knowing laughter and even cheers as one artist or another comes up in the tale.

What had originally seemed like an obstacle to the production – the pandemic – turned out to be something of a gift. The lockdown Zoom meetings with Borell, the gallery’s longstanding artists’ advisory board Haerewa, and Lacy and the gallery’s senior management, all tiled across the screen, are rich documents in retrospect.

There are murmurs and an audible gasp when Lacy, an Australian appointed to run the gallery in 2019, just as Borell’s five-year dream for the exhibition was becoming a reality, is shown announcing her intention to go off on her own to conduct “informal meet and greets” with iwi about how they would like to engage with the exhibition – effectively over the heads of Borell and Haerewa. Borell, sitting at home on Zoom, simply gets up and leaves the frame, to laughter from the audience.

“She’s got to go with someone,” says painter and Haerewa’s chair and founding member Elizabeth Ellis at a follow-up hui without Lacy. “She’s going to be discussing Māori stuff. We can’t send her off, this young Australian woman, to carry our message.”

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Ellis and five other Haerewa members would eventually follow Borell in resigning.

The film turns on an understanding of mana – translated on screen as “authority to lead” – that will be familiar to many New Zealanders, but was not evident to Lacy. The gallery director arrived with an admirable record of working with indigenous artists in Australia but, it seems, an incomplete sense of the moment she was entering here.

“You have a moment to make some change,” says Borell at one point in the film. “And if you don’t use it in that way, then you’re just taking up space.”

Winstanley has gone out of her way not to be inflammatory, to the extent that some viewers could even wonder what all the fuss was about. She’s after a teachable moment rather than a pile-on.

Former Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki director Kirsten Lacy. Photo / Auckland City Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki

“I don’t think she’s a villain,” Winstanley says of Lacy the following morning. “I think she is someone who … She’s not Māori, she doesn’t have the experience of having lived in this country, she doesn’t understand or know that, and I think that’s what comes across. And there’s an opportunity, I think, for people in these positions. You can do what the beautiful Dr Maya Angelou says: ‘Do the best you can until you know better – and when you know better, do better.’”

Winstanley’s original, more celebratory film survives through the twists of the story. We’re taken straight from a troubled Zoom meeting to Reuben Paterson working out the lighting for Guide Kaiārahi, the crystalline waka taua that was Toi Tū Toi Ora’s most prominent commissioned work, by virtue of its position at the gallery entrance. As commissions from Shane Cotton and Mataaho Collective take shape, we get a glimpse of the artists as purposeful engineers.

The film, also commissioned by the gallery, provides an enriching context for the exhibition that will make viewers wish for a chance to see the art again with it all in mind. Indeed, that was the role it would have played had the exhibition toured as planned. Those plans were let go after Borell’s departure – but the artists travelled even if the show did not.

Eight New Zealand artists were invited to present at the Venice Biennale last year; all were Māori and all had been part of Toi Tū Toi Ora. An investment from the barrister Kahungunu Barron-Afeaki allowed Winstanley to fly there to capture the event, where Mataaho Collective claimed the Biennale’s Golden Lion prize.

Mataaho Collective won the Golden Lion award at the 60th Venice Biennale for their installation Takapau. Photo / Creative NZ

Although Toi Tū Toi Ora had made its case by breaking gallery attendance records – at least since the return of the landmark Te Māori exhibition from New York in 1987, to which it is consciously connected in the film – following the story to Venice meant, says Winstanley, that “we were able to truly celebrate what having that kind of sovereignty meant and that’s what I’d envisioned in the beginning. Because if the whole point of Toi Tū Toi Ora was to enable our art to live and thrive through a Māori lens, it didn’t feel like it was able to do that fully, opening the way it did and with what happened.”

Lacy, who resigned in April and left in June, saw a rough cut of the film before she departed. By that time, she had received the recommendations of an independent review of the gallery’s relationship with Māori and appointed Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei chief executive Tom Irvine as her deputy director. The move had the effect of further stirring debate about Lacy’s personal cultivation of mana whenua at the expense of the mana of Haerewa. Ngāti Whātua seems like a missing voice in the film.

Irvine is currently acting director. Whoever is permanently appointed to the role will find plenty to think about and much to respond to in Toi Tū: Visual Sovereignty. A day after the premiere, the friends I went with were still exchanging messages about what it meant. Perhaps that’s what teachable moments are meant to do.

After selling out its screenings at the Auckland leg of the NZ International Film Festival, Toi Tū: Visual Sovereignty has screenings in Wellington (Aug 17, 23), Dunedin (Aug 24) and Christchurch (Aug 17, 21), see nziff.co.nz for more. Plans are underway for screenings beyond the festival. To request a screening go to https://www.thistooshallpass.nz/toitu

Director Chelsea Winstanley: “I’m not putting words in people’s mouths.” Photo / Supplied

Things Fall Apart

Chelsea Winstanley on filming in a crisis.

For film-maker Chelsea Winstanley, Toi Tū: Visual Sovereignty represents her most serious film in years. Her recent producer duties have been on former husband Taika Waititi’s Oscar-winning Jojo Rabbit and before that What We Do in the Shadows and giving Disney’s animated hits te reo makeovers. But TT:VS is also her debut feature as a director.

Her career began with directing Whakangahau, a documentary short about cousins from her Paparoa marae running a tourism venture. It was her 2003 graduating film from the Auckland University of Technology and won a Media Peace Award. Her feature directing debut also focuses on another relation with Ngāti Ranginui iwi roots – Nigel Borell. Toi Tū: Visual Sovereignty started out of conversations she had with Borell in the years running up to the exhibition about what it took to stage an event of its size and ambition.

When you spoke at the premiere, you seemed quite nervous about how the film would be received.

For a few reasons, I suppose. This is my directorial debut – I’ve done enough producing in my life – and you’re putting your film out into the world, it’s all on you this time. But not only that, it’s the community that I love the most. You love them so dearly that you just want to do right by them.

Was there a distinct point where you knew that the story was going to be different from what you had thought it would be?

Obviously, when Nigel had to make that decision, it really did change then. I was going to follow the whole exhibition and the background to it, because I don’t think we ever really understand what goes into putting on something like that. I thought it was going to travel overseas, because that’s what I was told. I was like, “Wow, this is going to be amazing, a celebration from beginning to end.” And then when he made that decision, for himself, I had to go, “Oh, all right, I have to now rethink how it’s going to happen.”

Other things were happening, too – everyone went through Covid. Even at that point, I was like, “Oh, my god, is this show even going to come to fruition?” That was actually a moment, too.

A small selection of the art shown as part of Toi Tū Toi Ora (clockwise, from left): Lisa Reihana, Ihi, 2020; Israel Tangaroa Birch Ara-i-te-Uru, 2011; Aimee Ratana, Potiki Series, 2005; and Shane Cotton, Te Puawai, 2020. Photos / Supplied

What was the response after the screening for Kirsten Lacy and the gallery staff? Was there a response?

It’s challenging for anybody to have to observe themselves. But remember, when they watched that edit, it’s not like it was a big surprise what happened there, the story was already out. It’s about how you have to reflect on your position, so that was up to them. And they knew that I had final cut anyway, and I’m not putting words in people’s mouths or anything like that.

While I watched the film, I did find myself thinking I’d like to go and see the exhibition again, having absorbed all this context.

Yeah, of course, and that’s the wonderful thing for people who were fortunate enough to see the show. A lot of people said to me afterwards that it brought back so many memories, both people who were working there and those who had gone to the show and wanted to see it again. And I think, for us as a country, we need to have spaces where we can just see that beautiful, contemporary art all the time, not just these once in 20-year timeframes.

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