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 T\u016b: Visual Sovereignty, Chelsea Winstanley\u2019s documentary about what happened five years ago and a kilometre away at Auckland City Art Gallery Toi o T\u0101maki.<\/p>\n
\n There had been
\n a crowd back in 2020, too, with many of the same people in it, for the opening of Toi T\u016b Toi Ora, which was not only the largest show in the gallery\u2019s history, but also the largest exhibition of contemporary M\u0101ori art there had ever been. Yet, amid the celebration, there was a whisper that something had gone wrong, that even as Toi T\u016b opened its doors, its curator, Nigel Borell, had resigned.\n <\/p>\n
A cover story in the NZ Herald\u2019s Canvas magazine a few weeks later finally told the public what the artists knew \u2013 that Borell and the gallery\u2019s director, Kirsten Lacy, had fallen out over what he described as \u201cdifferent ways of viewing aspirations for M\u0101ori\u201d.<\/p>\n
Winstanley had been on the inside of it all, filming what she had imagined would be a celebratory film that would accompany Toi T\u016b as it toured internationally. The show never toured, and she wound up with a different story to tell.<\/p>\n
Curator Nigel Borell: \u201cYou have a moment to\u00a0make some change.\u201d Photo \/ Auckland Art Gallery Toi o T\u0101maki<\/p>\n
This is an audience that knows the story. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
What had originally seemed like an obstacle to the production \u2013 the pandemic \u2013 turned out to be something of a gift. The lockdown Zoom meetings with Borell, the gallery\u2019s longstanding artists\u2019 advisory board Haerewa, and Lacy and the gallery\u2019s senior management, all tiled across the screen, are rich documents in retrospect.<\/p>\n
There are murmurs and an audible gasp when Lacy, an Australian appointed to run the gallery in 2019, just as Borell\u2019s five-year dream for the exhibition was becoming a reality, is shown announcing her intention to go off on her own to conduct \u201cinformal meet and greets\u201d with iwi about how they would like to engage with the exhibition \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019s got to go with someone,\u201d says painter and Haerewa\u2019s chair and founding member Elizabeth Ellis at a follow-up hui without Lacy. \u201cShe\u2019s going to be discussing M\u0101ori stuff. We can\u2019t send her off, this young Australian woman, to carry our message.\u201d<\/p>\n
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.<\/a><\/p>\n Ellis and five other Haerewa members would eventually follow Borell in resigning.<\/p>\n The film turns on an understanding of mana \u2013 translated on screen as \u201cauthority to lead\u201d \u2013 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.<\/p>\n \u201cYou have a moment to make some change,\u201d says Borell at one point in the film. \u201cAnd if you don\u2019t use it in that way, then you\u2019re just taking up space.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s after a teachable moment rather than a pile-on.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think she\u2019s a villain,\u201d Winstanley says of Lacy the following morning. \u201cI think she is someone who \u2026 She\u2019s not M\u0101ori, she doesn\u2019t have the experience of having lived in this country, she doesn\u2019t understand or know that, and I think that\u2019s what comes across. And there\u2019s an opportunity, I think, for people in these positions. You can do what the beautiful Dr Maya Angelou says: \u2018Do the best you can until you know better \u2013 and when you know better, do better.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Winstanley\u2019s original, more celebratory film survives through the twists of the story. We\u2019re taken straight from a troubled Zoom meeting to Reuben Paterson working out the lighting for Guide Kai\u0101rahi, the crystalline waka taua that was Toi T\u016b Toi Ora\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s departure \u2013 but the artists travelled even if the show did not.<\/p>\n Eight New Zealand artists were invited to present at the Venice Biennale last year; all were M\u0101ori and all had been part of Toi T\u016b 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\u2019s Golden Lion prize.<\/p>\n Although Toi T\u016b Toi Ora had made its case by breaking gallery attendance records \u2013 at least since the return of the landmark Te M\u0101ori exhibition from New York in 1987, to which it is consciously connected in the film \u2013 following the story to Venice meant, says Winstanley, that \u201cwe were able to truly celebrate what having that kind of sovereignty meant and that\u2019s what I\u2019d envisioned in the beginning. Because if the whole point of Toi T\u016b Toi Ora was to enable our art to live and thrive through a M\u0101ori lens, it didn\u2019t feel like it was able to do that fully, opening the way it did and with what happened.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s relationship with M\u0101ori and appointed Ng\u0101ti Wh\u0101tua \u014cr\u0101kei chief executive Tom Irvine as her deputy director. The move had the effect of further stirring debate about Lacy\u2019s personal cultivation of mana whenua at the expense of the mana of Haerewa. Ng\u0101ti Wh\u0101tua seems like a missing voice in the film.<\/p>\n 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 T\u016b: Visual Sovereignty. A day after the premiere, the friends I went with were still exchanging messages about what it meant. Perhaps that\u2019s what teachable moments are meant to do. <\/p>\n After selling out its screenings at the Auckland leg of the NZ International Film Festival, <\/b>Toi T\u016b: Visual Sovereignty<\/b> has screenings in Wellington (Aug 17, 23), Dunedin (Aug 24) and Christchurch (Aug 17, 21), see<\/b> nziff.co.nz<\/b><\/a> for more. Plans are underway for screenings beyond the festival. To request a screening go to <\/b>https:\/\/www.thistooshallpass.nz\/toitu<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n Things Fall Apart<\/p>\n Chelsea Winstanley on filming in a crisis.<\/b><\/p>\n For film-maker Chelsea Winstanley, Toi T\u016b: Visual Sovereignty represents her most serious film in years. Her recent producer duties have been on former husband Taika Waititi\u2019s Oscar-winning Jojo Rabbit and before that What We Do in the Shadows and giving Disney\u2019s animated hits te reo makeovers. But TT:VS is also her debut feature as a director.<\/p>\n 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 Ng\u0101ti Ranginui iwi roots \u2013 Nigel Borell. Toi T\u016b: 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.<\/p>\n When you spoke at the premiere, you seemed quite nervous about how the film would be received.<\/b><\/p>\n For a few reasons, I suppose. This is my directorial debut \u2013 I\u2019ve done enough producing in my life \u2013 and you\u2019re putting your film out into the world, it\u2019s all on you this time. But not only that, it\u2019s the community that I love the most. You love them so dearly that you just want to do right by them.<\/p>\n Was there a distinct point where you knew that the story was going to be different from what you had thought it would be?<\/b><\/p>\n 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\u2019t think we ever really understand what goes into putting on something like that. I thought it was going to travel overseas, because that\u2019s what I was told. I was like, \u201cWow, this is going to be amazing, a celebration from beginning to end.\u201d And then when he made that decision, for himself, I had to go, \u201cOh, all right, I have to now rethink how it\u2019s going to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n Other things were happening, too \u2013 everyone went through Covid. Even at that point, I was like, \u201cOh, my god, is this show even going to come to fruition?\u201d That was actually a moment, too.<\/p>\n What was the response after the screening for Kirsten Lacy and the gallery staff? Was there a response?<\/b><\/p>\n It\u2019s challenging for anybody to have to observe themselves. But remember, when they watched that edit, it\u2019s not like it was a big surprise what happened there, the story was already out. It\u2019s 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\u2019m not putting words in people\u2019s mouths or anything like that.<\/p>\n While I watched the film, I did find myself thinking I\u2019d like to go and see the exhibition again, having absorbed all this context.<\/b><\/p>\n Yeah, of course, and that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\nFormer Auckland Art Gallery Toi o T\u0101maki director Kirsten Lacy. Photo \/ Auckland City Art Gallery Toi o T\u0101maki<\/p>\n
Mataaho Collective won the Golden Lion award at the 60th Venice Biennale for their installation Takapau. Photo \/ Creative NZ<\/p>\n
Director Chelsea Winstanley: \u201cI\u2019m not putting words in people\u2019s mouths.\u201d Photo \/ Supplied<\/p>\n
A small selection of the art shown as part of Toi T\u016b 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<\/p>\n