Performance and grief

Finally, in this section there's a little part – sombre part really about the connection between performance and grief, he pare kawakawa, which is the greenery that's worn during times of mourning. And, in fact, you can see the greenery. And one of the – there are three photos in this section, and one of them is Mrs Ripeka Love from Te Ati Awa, in 1946 when welcome to the Māori Battalion was happening on the waterfront on the wharf in Wellington.

And below that is an image that Vicki-Anne found of the Awatea Māori Choir singing for the Kiwi Request Session at the British Forces Radio Station in Bari in Italy. And what those women were tangi-ing about was the return of those soldiers and, of course, the soldiers who hadn't come back or the soldiers who'd been wounded. And some of those are the men below though during the war sort of recording and singing and recording messages for people back at home.

Then the last image in the section about performance and grief is an image from the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Christchurch in March 2019, which was something that happened while we were researching for Pūkana. And it was a horrendous thing to happen while we were thinking about Māori performance, but it was so significant we were thinking about ways of including it. We came across an image of schoolchildren doing haka outside one of the mosques, the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch.

And this photo was taken by Associated Press by Vincent Tien, a photographer of Associated Press, which actually meant we had to buy this photo to use it. But again, remembering those foundational ideas in this exhibition of trying to see collections from a Māori perspective, we tried to find out who these girls were. Because the photo focuses on two girls.

And we knew that the uniforms were Christchurch Girls I think and Rangiura. And because Ariana Tikao, one of the other curators, is from Christchurch, she activated her networks and through finding their mothers we found out that this is Nakisha Kingi and Azaria Thompson. So that's a great example of ways that you can make the collections,you can make the collections work a bit harder, and you can ask different questions of the collections. And we've collected the websites with this image. This image went all around the world. It's been – on millions of websites.

But it's great to have that information, and we've made contact with the girls. And one of them has actually written to us with her memories of that day. So it's – we might sort of revise our label and interpretation for this section. So, particularly the influence of Ariana really on me, that idea of always challenging yourself and not just thinking, oh, well, we don't have much that's actually collected by Māori, generated by Māori. You can actually ask different questions of the collections and tell different stories.

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