Mataaho Collective
WHEN MATAAHO COLLECTIVE—a group of four Māori women from Aotearoa New Zealand—won the Golden Lion for the best participant in the International Exhibition at the 2024 Venice Biennale, it was in recognition not only of last year’s monumental installation Takapau, but of a visual system developed over centuries. At the heart of their collaborative work is a reverence for, and deep research into, Māori weaving practices. These are almost always the province of women, and they sit at the core of the Māori worldview, or Te Ao Māori, which emphasizes the crossing of thresholds—between life and death, between different physical spaces, and between human and mythical states. The weaving patterns—in which material crosses over itself—are as much storytelling devices and repositories of ancestral knowledge as they are techniques to manufacture functional items such as clothing, mats, and wall decorations.
Mataaho Collective have often used modern, mass-produced materials to expand these techniques to the scale of international installation art. Takapau, for example, was woven from several miles’ worth of trucking tie-downs. In contrast, the group’s latest work, Hautāmiro, 2025, at New Zealand’s Dunedin Public Art Gallery, sees them using traditional muka fiber derived from harakeke, or New Zealand flax. Blending this with locally produced wool, Mataaho Collective have constructed a vast wall work that draws its inspiration from the striking embellishments found on Māori kākahu, or cloaks, using sheep-fencing equipment to attach hundreds of small embellishments to the wall as if it was a flattened kākahu.
These intensely local material specificities also evoke the history of European colonization. In the nineteenth century, harakeke rope, used in shipping, was briefly one of New Zealand’s earliest exports. Sheep’s wool followed soon thereafter, with British colonizers confiscating huge tracts of land from Māori and clearing it for grazing. By the mid-twentieth century, this dispossession had helped to make New Zealand one of the wealthiest countries in the world on a per capita basis.
But that was then. Now the political climate of New Zealand, like that of other parts of the Western world, is exhibiting worrying signs: an economy that is depressed and indebted; a government pursuing massive cuts in public spending, including to arts funding; and a rising populism that casts Māori progress over the past forty years as the result of favoritism, wokeness, and an antidemocratic distribution of power. Mataaho Collective’s work, which seamlessly combines the forms and procedures of global contemporary art with traditional pūrākau (storytelling) and meticulous archival research, is a vital beacon in this increasingly dark context: an affirmation of New Zealand’s blended cultures and of the survival, agency, and ongoing, brilliant complexity of Māori art.
—Anthony Byrt
FOR HAUTĀMIRO, we’ve been given the big wall at Dunedin Public Art Gallery. It’s more than sixty-five feet long, and over twenty feet high. Though we’ve been doing this for more than a dozen years, a big blank space can still be intimidating; this project was especially daunting because we hardly ever work flat against a wall. The work is inspired by kākahu—particularly the small, eye-catching decorative details that embellish these garments and that are intended to move when the cloak is worn. These were traditionally made from materials such as harakeke and feathers, but we were also thinking about the beautiful cloaks that Māori weavers made when wool was introduced to Aotearoa. They began to incorporate it pretty much as soon as it reached these shores. The kākahu started to become really eccentric and full of color, as weavers used new and different embroidery techniques in their construction.
We try to contextualize installation practice within a Māori worldview, letting those concerns influence how we work with stories, how we move through space, and how we fill space.
Often in our work, we think about narratives associated with atua wāhine [female gods]. It’s important that those atua wāhine are with us in the making, and are there throughout. We need them as much as we need the audience to recognize them. Here, we are thinking of ways to uplift different figures, and to connect that to the form of a cloak. Because the embellishments are designed to move, we looked at atua wāhine associated with the wind. We came across a kōrero [account] of four pou [posts]—the four different winds that hold up Ranginui [the sky father]. So the work consists of four different types of embellishment, each representing different colors, weaving techniques, and combinations of material. We’ve attached these to the wall, essentially turning it into a huge cloak. Overall, this project has been very research-based—a way to learn new techniques. One of these, which we’ve learned and executed hundreds of times this past summer, is Kārure. We extract muka, or fibers, from the harakeke plant and twist them by hand into cords. When you use your right hand, the fibers naturally twist into a perfect twine. We’re using a reverse technique, working with our left hands, which makes them start to curl against one another, resulting in DNA-like strands.
There’s no formula for how we work together, though we always hold some things dear: We love working on a large scale; we have a tendency to be quite minimal; and we love matching materials to particular pūrākau [stories] or atua wāhine. So those are the loose starting ingredients. There’s no clear division of labor; we share the work as much as possible: Everyone just dives in and takes a path, and we come back together regularly. There’s a lot of talking and figuring out. We put so many layers of research into each of our works, and we hope audiences can access that mātauranga [knowledge]. Hopefully there’s always a way in, and maybe the work is intriguing enough to push audiences to dig deeper into something that they may not recognize immediately.
We spent a lot of the summer collecting harakeke for the work. We can’t use it when we exhibit overseas—New Zealand biosecurity laws make it hard to bring it back into the country. So it’s great to have an opportunity to work with it at home. It’s a very loaded, beautiful material. Using harakeke requires specialized knowledge and visits to the local pā harakeke [flax plantations]. That’s a part of this project we’re really excited about—spending time with people. Harakeke is an industrial material as well. We’ve spent a lot of time looking at the history of harakeke rope—if we could still purchase large stocks of it, we definitely would. For years we’ve wanted to bring harakeke and wool together. With the addition of wool, we’ve also had to think about what the introduction of sheep and huge farms into Aotearoa has meant for Māori, and for our access to land and materials. So we’ve attached our embellishments to the wall with fittings and fixtures that are used in sheep farming, like insulators and fence staples. There’s the land confiscation side of this, but also the current state of sheep farming: Farmers who raise their animals for wool are struggling, and this resource isn’t currently being used to its full potential.
We try to contextualize installation practice within a Māori worldview, letting those concerns influence how we work with stories, how we move through space, and how we fill space. It’s a funny quirk of our practice that we focus on delineating space and creating thresholds, and often invoke narratives that also involve movement through different states, such as birth, death, and passage through the whare tangata [the house of life/existence]. A lot of these stories involve coming up against adversity, and how you get beyond that: Things shift and a threshold is crossed, whether real or metaphorical.
Something has definitely changed internationally for work like ours. Indigenous practices were very present at Venice in 2024, even at that year’s edition of Art Basel Hong Kong, as were textiles. To have textiles presented in a contemporary space, and the fact that they’re textiles isn’t the first thing that’s talked about, is huge. So we see a lot of championing of Indigenous practices, and also women makers, women artists. We just continue to do what we do and express it in the best way that we can, and it happens to be this whakapapa [genealogy] of fiber.
All of our conversations at the moment are shaped by what’s happening in Aotearoa. Movements like populism, which want to make culture this monolithic gray thing, are so scary. The axing of funding is scary too, because it’s taking away important opportunities for people. There’s just this huge pool of amazing, creative young people here in Aotearoa, and, as a group, we have been thinking a lot about how our international exposure might influence this next generation. But how can this happen when resources are so limited?
Māori are super-resilient; over and over, we show how we band together at moments of crisis. We see that in the hīkoi [march] that took place in November 2024 and in all the submissions for the Treaty Principles Bill [a bill introduced by the current coalition government that seeks to redefine the founding agreement between Māori and the British Crown]. In a way, this climate also creates a space for us to show our resilience, and that exists regardless of what’s happening at a government level. It reinforces the importance of just being there and continuing to do what we do, and of creating space for other people to do that as well.
Mataaho Collective are Erena Baker (Te Atiawa ki Whakarongotai, Ngāti Toa Rangātira), Sarah Hudson (Ngāti Awa, Ngāi Tūhoe), Bridget Reweti (Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi), and Terri Te Tau (Rangitāne ki Wairarapa).
