Te Ia Tangata by Rachel Rakena for SCAPE Public Art Season 2016

Rachael Rakena Te Ia Tangata 2016. Image: video still, courtesy of artist, Bartley + Company Art, Wellington.

Rachael Rakena (Ngāi Tahu), showed Poutereraki (2011), with additional video works and the new wall-based takarangi (spiral forms) made using electrical cabling. Poutereraki is the darkest realm of Te Pō (the night). In Māori cosmology Hineatauira (also known as Hinetitama) fled in shame and grief from the world of light, through the realms of Te Pō, to arrive at Poutereraki where she resides as Hinenuitepō, the great woman of the night. In Rakena’s installation, dark suffocating images were paired with black oil blobs to evoke notions of destruction, drowning and a search for the unattainable. As with all of Rakena’s work, references to the mythological were conflated with references to the world. Here the oil blobs building up on the screen surface and through the gallery recalled the black tides of the Rena oil spill and became metaphorical stains on dreams.