Rachael Rakena - Poutereraki

RACHAEL RAKENA Poutereraki

8 - 26 November

You are warmly invited to attend the opening preview - Tuesday 8th November, 6 - 8pm.

Please note the slightly later time of this opening to accommodate visitors from Palmerston North who are coming to support both Rachael and her college Ngatai Taepa who also has an exhibition opening in Wellington.

We are pleased to present a new exhibition by internationally acclaimed video artist Rachael Rakena. Poutereraki is another verse of He Waiata Whaiaipo, a video series first exhibited here in the gallery in 2009. Since then it has been shown in Beijing, in several public gallery exhibitions around New Zealand and has been selected by City Gallery Wellington as the New Zealand contribution to a ten country video programme.

Poutereraki is the darkest realm of Te Po (the night). In Maori cosmology Hineatauira (also known as Hinetitama) fled in shame and grief from the world of light, through the realms of Te Po, to arrive at Poutereraki where she resides as Hinenuitepo, the great woman of the night.

In Rakena’s new installation dark suffocating images are 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 are conflated with references to the world. Here the oil blobs building up on the screen surfaces and walls of the gallery recall the black tides of Rena's oil spill and become metaphorical stains on dreams.

This is the second major work Rakena has produced this year. Haka Peepshow launched as a public art work in Dunedin presciently anticipated the debate about the role and place of the haka that surfaced during the Rugby World Cup.

Rakena’s work sits within a context described as Toi Rerehiko - a moving image art form immersed in Maori tradition, tikanga (custom) and values. The word rerehiko plays on rorohiko the Maori word for computer, which translated literally means electric brain and Rakena coined the term Toi Rerehiko to situate her practice.

Rachael has exhibited in New Zealand, Australia, China, Italy, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, France, Spain, Britain and the United States. In 2009/10, her work was included the Spanish exhibition FEEDFORWARD (with an accompanying 230 page catalogue) which explored how artists internationally are using digital technologies to interpret the world. In 2008 her work was included in the Busan Biennale. Aniwaniwa, a collaborative project with Brett Graham, was selected for inclusion in the 2007 Venice Biennale. In 2006, she and Graham represented New Zealand at the Sydney Biennale with the collaborative installation UFOB. Other major international exhibitions have included Pasifika Styles at Cambridge University in the UK, and in Dateline: Contemporary Art from the Pacific at Neuer Berliner Kunstverien, Berlin.

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