Ōhakō Exhibition

Last year I was involved with an exhibition celebrating the Rongowhakaata iwi. Te Papa Tongarewa museum has for the last few years been hosting exhibitions from different tribal regions around NZ. Now it is the turn of the Rongowhakaata iwi. 

Copyright 2017 Zak Waipara

The first stage was local exhibitions at each of the marae around Manutuke and Gisborne, which I affiliate to all of them through my iwi connections, but our family was asked to contribute to Ōhakō Marae. The wharenui, Kiko-ote-Rangi (open unto the heavens), is unadorned by carvings, so there was some concern about what we could exhibit. The hapū decided that since many of the uri (descendants) were artists and musicians that we could show both traditional and contemporary examples of our craft. 

Copyright 2017 Zak Waipara

I decided my contribution could be a motion graphics piece to illustrate a short piece of oral history. It could also double as a very low-key proof of concept project, essentially using motion graphic techniques e.g. mixture of animated elements, kinetic type, to tell non-fiction stories, which is something I have become more interested in. The process involved listening to an hour’s worth of audio recorded at a whakapapa wānanga session, to find a short section that would work as a self-contained story, then transcribe that part of the audio. I edited the audio down further, to remove some extraneous sounds, and some tangential stories that might work better in another style. This became a three-minute piece, but also has the potential be developed more fully at a later stage (for instance, using those other excised stories). The style I adopted was based on modified carvings with an illustrative approach (flat rather than 3D), but also to have these located on a physical plane, mimicking the walls of a house. The various font treatments were meant to replicate tukutuku weaving panels. 

Copyright 2017 Zak Waipara

The second stage was to curate items from all the marae into a smaller exhibition at Tairāwhiti Museum, that opened September 15th 2016. The third and final stage for this exhibition opened at Te Papa in Wellington in September of this year. I was asked to contribute an animated project to this – which I will talk about in a later post!