Aotearoa New Zealand is a nation created from misunderstandings. The founding agreement between Māori and the British Crown, the Treaty of Waitangi—known in te reo Māori as te Tiriti o Waitangi—exists in two versions, the meanings of which are, at times, wildly different. Since the treaty’s 150th anniversary in 1990, the country has largely taken a progressive approach to these discrepancies, focusing instead on the fluid and cooperative principles behind them. But a recent reactionary turn in New Zealand politics has forced a hugely destabilizing debate about whether the meaning of these principles should be set in stone. This tension provided the backdrop to “Prompts,” the first in a series of shows at Artspace Aotearoa through 2025 that pose the question, “Is language large enough?” Pairing local artist Michael Parekōwhai with Turner Prize–winning British artist Lubaina Himid, the show put colonialist language front and center, exploring the ongoing entanglements of race, representation, and words amid the ruins of Britain’s lost empire.
Parekōwhai’s contribution was his crucial sculpture The Indefinite Article, 1990. It was first exhibited that year in “Choice!,” an influential exhibition of contemporary Māori art, also at Artspace. Thirty-five years on, Parekōwhai’s sculpture, spelling out the phrase I AM HE in giant white letters, literalized Artspace’s question about the scale of language. The work is a three-dimensional version of New Zealand painter Colin McCahon’s semi-Cubist I AM, 1954, which quotes God’s declaration to Moses in Exodus. Parekōwhai’s addition to the statement initially seems like “he” is laying claim both to McCahon’s legacy—an artist who often borrowed from the Māori language in his work—and God’s absolutism: an act of pure hubris. But in te reo Māori, he is the indefinite article, rather than the male pronoun. With a macron added, it can also mean “wrong.” The work has been celebrated for its elliptical evasiveness, and its presentation here pointed its slipperiness squarely toward the current political discourse, in which the coalition government is weaponizing words and their meanings with a rigidity designed to turn back the conciliatory clock.
Himid’s series of paintings on paper, “Negative Positives,” 2007–17, also began its life in the context of a commemoration: 2007 was the two hundredth anniversary of Britain’s abolition of the slave trade. Himid selected spreads from The Guardian in which Black subjects—often sportspeople—are ambivalently portrayed, exposing the left-leaning newspaper’s unconscious repetition of ingrained racial tropes. Among the twenty-two examples in “Prompts” were a photo of Serena Williams smashing a forehand with bared teeth, playing, according to the reporter, with such “vehemence that one of her earrings fell off”; rugby-league player Leon Pryce praised for leading Great Britain to a famous victory, but only after it was mentioned that he’d grabbed the testicles of an opponent during a previous game; and a white journalist and amateur drummer inserting himself into his profile of Afrobeat genius Tony Allen, the writer’s self-deprecation at his own musical limitations undermining the focus on his subject. Himid’s bright, decorative overpainting on the spreads combined African-inspired patterns with bleakly comic counterpoints: a pair of floating, spotted hands in the Allen story to match the pull quote that his drumsticks seem to “float between his fingers, as if by magic”; flecky, orange-red ovals in the rugby-league story (rugby balls and male gonads are the same shape); tennis balls dripping through text below Williams, alongside a column of abstracted Wimbledon grass. In the midst of New Zealand’s simmering constitutional crisis, the ostensibly unlikely juxtaposition of Himid and Parekōwhai had a mutually amplifying effect: Their wry excoriations of imperialism’s ongoing and residual prejudices expose the truths of what the colonizing culture is really saying, even when it thinks it’s saying something else.
