NZ Herald
  • Home
  • Latest news
  • Herald NOW
  • Video
  • New Zealand
  • Sport
  • World
  • Business
  • Entertainment
  • Podcasts
  • Quizzes
  • Opinion
  • Lifestyle
  • Travel
  • Viva
  • Weather

Subscriptions

  • Herald Premium
  • Viva Premium
  • The Listener
  • BusinessDesk

Sections

  • Latest news
  • New Zealand
    • All New Zealand
    • Crime
    • Politics
    • Education
    • Open Justice
    • Scam Update
  • Herald NOW
  • On The Up
  • World
    • All World
    • Australia
    • Asia
    • UK
    • United States
    • Middle East
    • Europe
    • Pacific
  • Business
    • All Business
    • MarketsSharesCurrencyCommoditiesStock TakesCrypto
    • Markets with Madison
    • Media Insider
    • Business analysis
    • Personal financeKiwiSaverInterest ratesTaxInvestment
    • EconomyInflationGDPOfficial cash rateEmployment
    • Small business
    • Business reportsMood of the BoardroomProject AucklandSustainable business and financeCapital markets reportAgribusiness reportInfrastructure reportDynamic business
    • Deloitte Top 200 Awards
    • CompaniesAged CareAgribusinessAirlinesBanking and financeConstructionEnergyFreight and logisticsHealthcareManufacturingMedia and MarketingRetailTelecommunicationsTourism
  • Opinion
    • All Opinion
    • Analysis
    • Editorials
    • Business analysis
    • Premium opinion
    • Letters to the editor
  • Politics
  • Sport
    • All Sport
    • OlympicsParalympics
    • RugbySuper RugbyNPCAll BlacksBlack FernsRugby sevensSchool rugby
    • CricketBlack CapsWhite Ferns
    • Racing
    • NetballSilver Ferns
    • LeagueWarriorsNRL
    • FootballWellington PhoenixAuckland FCAll WhitesFootball FernsEnglish Premier League
    • GolfNZ Open
    • MotorsportFormula 1
    • Boxing
    • UFC
    • BasketballNBABreakersTall BlacksTall Ferns
    • Tennis
    • Cycling
    • Athletics
    • SailingAmerica's CupSailGP
    • Rowing
  • Lifestyle
    • All Lifestyle
    • Viva - Food, fashion & beauty
    • Society Insider
    • Royals
    • Sex & relationships
    • Food & drinkRecipesRecipe collectionsRestaurant reviewsRestaurant bookings
    • Health & wellbeing
    • Fashion & beauty
    • Pets & animals
    • The Selection - Shop the trendsShop fashionShop beautyShop entertainmentShop giftsShop home & living
    • Milford's Investing Place
  • Entertainment
    • All Entertainment
    • TV
    • MoviesMovie reviews
    • MusicMusic reviews
    • BooksBook reviews
    • Culture
    • ReviewsBook reviewsMovie reviewsMusic reviewsRestaurant reviews
  • Travel
    • All Travel
    • News
    • New ZealandNorthlandAucklandWellingtonCanterburyOtago / QueenstownNelson-TasmanBest NZ beaches
    • International travelAustraliaPacific IslandsEuropeUKUSAAfricaAsia
    • Rail holidays
    • Cruise holidays
    • Ski holidays
    • Luxury travel
    • Adventure travel
  • Kāhu Māori news
  • Environment
    • All Environment
    • Our Green Future
  • Talanoa Pacific news
  • Property
    • All Property
    • Property Insider
    • Interest rates tracker
    • Residential property listings
    • Commercial property listings
  • Health
  • Technology
    • All Technology
    • AI
    • Social media
  • Rural
    • All Rural
    • Dairy farming
    • Sheep & beef farming
    • Horticulture
    • Animal health
    • Rural business
    • Rural life
    • Rural technology
    • Opinion
    • Audio & podcasts
  • Weather forecasts
    • All Weather forecasts
    • Kaitaia
    • Whangārei
    • Dargaville
    • Auckland
    • Thames
    • Tauranga
    • Hamilton
    • Whakatāne
    • Rotorua
    • Tokoroa
    • Te Kuiti
    • Taumaranui
    • Taupō
    • Gisborne
    • New Plymouth
    • Napier
    • Hastings
    • Dannevirke
    • Whanganui
    • Palmerston North
    • Levin
    • Paraparaumu
    • Masterton
    • Wellington
    • Motueka
    • Nelson
    • Blenheim
    • Westport
    • Reefton
    • Kaikōura
    • Greymouth
    • Hokitika
    • Christchurch
    • Ashburton
    • Timaru
    • Wānaka
    • Oamaru
    • Queenstown
    • Dunedin
    • Gore
    • Invercargill
  • Meet the journalists
  • Promotions & competitions
  • OneRoof property listings
  • Driven car news

Puzzles & Quizzes

  • Puzzles
    • All Puzzles
    • Sudoku
    • Code Cracker
    • Crosswords
    • Cryptic crossword
    • Wordsearch
  • Quizzes
    • All Quizzes
    • Morning quiz
    • Afternoon quiz
    • Sports quiz

Regions

  • Northland
    • All Northland
    • Far North
    • Kaitaia
    • Kerikeri
    • Kaikohe
    • Bay of Islands
    • Whangarei
    • Dargaville
    • Kaipara
    • Mangawhai
  • Auckland
  • Waikato
    • All Waikato
    • Hamilton
    • Coromandel & Hauraki
    • Matamata & Piako
    • Cambridge
    • Te Awamutu
    • Tokoroa & South Waikato
    • Taupō & Tūrangi
  • Bay of Plenty
    • All Bay of Plenty
    • Katikati
    • Tauranga
    • Mount Maunganui
    • Pāpāmoa
    • Te Puke
    • Whakatāne
  • Rotorua
  • Hawke's Bay
    • All Hawke's Bay
    • Napier
    • Hastings
    • Havelock North
    • Central Hawke's Bay
    • Wairoa
  • Taranaki
    • All Taranaki
    • Stratford
    • New Plymouth
    • Hāwera
  • Manawatū - Whanganui
    • All Manawatū - Whanganui
    • Whanganui
    • Palmerston North
    • Manawatū
    • Tararua
    • Horowhenua
  • Wellington
    • All Wellington
    • Kapiti
    • Wairarapa
    • Upper Hutt
    • Lower Hutt
  • Nelson & Tasman
    • All Nelson & Tasman
    • Motueka
    • Nelson
    • Tasman
  • Marlborough
  • West Coast
  • Canterbury
    • All Canterbury
    • Kaikōura
    • Christchurch
    • Ashburton
    • Timaru
  • Otago
    • All Otago
    • Oamaru
    • Dunedin
    • Balclutha
    • Alexandra
    • Queenstown
    • Wanaka
  • Southland
    • All Southland
    • Invercargill
    • Gore
    • Stewart Island
  • Gisborne

Media

  • Video
    • All Video
    • NZ news video
    • Herald NOW
    • Business news video
    • Politics news video
    • Sport video
    • World news video
    • Lifestyle video
    • Entertainment video
    • Travel video
    • Markets with Madison
    • Kea Kids news
  • Podcasts
    • All Podcasts
    • The Front Page
    • On the Tiles
    • Ask me Anything
    • The Little Things
  • Cartoons
  • Photo galleries
  • Today's Paper - E-editions
  • Photo sales
  • Classifieds

NZME Network

  • Advertise with NZME
  • OneRoof
  • Driven Car Guide
  • BusinessDesk
  • Newstalk ZB
  • Sunlive
  • ZM
  • The Hits
  • Coast
  • Radio Hauraki
  • The Alternative Commentary Collective
  • Gold
  • Flava
  • iHeart Radio
  • Hokonui
  • Radio Wanaka
  • iHeartCountry New Zealand
  • Restaurant Hub
  • NZME Events

SubscribeSign In
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.
Home / Entertainment

Throwing down the gauntlet

NZ Herald
12 Apr, 2014 01:11 AM5 mins to read

Subscribe to listen

Access to Herald Premium articles require a Premium subscription. Subscribe now to listen.
Already a subscriber?  Sign in here

Listening to articles is free for open-access content—explore other articles or learn more about text-to-speech.
‌
Save

    Share this article

Michael Parekowhai's controversial 'The World Turns'.

Michael Parekowhai's controversial 'The World Turns'.

Aboriginal artist Fiona Foley joins the line-up today for a major symposium on indigenous art. She has a bone to pick with one of our leading artists, Adam Gifford reports

Fiona Foley has a wero for one of New Zealand's most successful Maori artists. Michael Parekowhai didn't respond when she challenged him in 2011 over his handling of a commission for a public art work in Brisbane, so she will use today's Changing The Story symposium at Auckland Art Gallery to lay out the case against him.

In 2011, when Parekowhai was asked to make a sculpture in the forecourt of Queensland's Gallery of Modern Art, Foley wrote to him pointing out the absence of any indigenous Australian culture in Brisbane's Southbank cultural precinct, and asked him to pass the $1 million commission to an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander artist.

His piece, The World Turns, was based on an African story of an elephant and a mouse. Parekowhai switched the mouse to the native marsupial water rat, or kuril, which gives the museum's Kurilpa Point site its name.

"That's when the piece became very problematic, because now you've got a Maori artist referencing Aboriginal culture but there is no real consultation in that process," Foley says. "I'd love to have a conversation with him but he didn't avail himself, and culturally what he did was theft. He stole part of a dreaming story, and he is accountable for his actions, and I want his people in New Zealand to know what he did in Brisbane.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

"I am not invited to Auckland to do a public work and stick a big dingo up on a marae. Culturally, it wouldn't be done."

Foley, who has just won the 2013 Australia Council Visual Arts Award, sees The World Turns as an example of the way cultural institutions like GOMA silence Aboriginal people.

Work by photographer Fiona Foley which is part of the My Country Aboriginal exhibition on at the Auckland Art Gallery. Photo / Dean Purcell
Work by photographer Fiona Foley which is part of the My Country Aboriginal exhibition on at the Auckland Art Gallery. Photo / Dean Purcell

None of the artists featured in My Country: Contemporary Art from Black Australia has been curated into the Asia Pacific Triennial, Queensland's flagship showcase for contemporary art. Despite living in Brisbane for almost 20 years, Foley's first invitation to speak at GOMA was for a panel as part of My Country.

It's not that she doesn't have a way with words. Foley is an adjunct professor at the University of Queensland and is invited to speak around the world. She says Maori artists need to show solidarity.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

"They need to think more deeply when they come across for the APT. They're put on pedestals, but their poor cousins, the Aborigines here, are nowhere to be seen, and they lap up all the attention. But they don't ask any questions. They are in a very privileged position, but they never say anything that is going to cause any controversy at the institution because they fear they won't be invited back.

Australian artist-curator Fiona Foley giving the keynote address in London.
Australian artist-curator Fiona Foley giving the keynote address in London.

"I've watched this year after year, and they never say, 'How come Vernon Ah Kee isn't speaking? How come Fiona Foley is not speaking? What is happening in these institutions?' They have a voice at the table. We don't."

Foley feels she is fighting a society that isn't just ignorant of its history, it doesn't want to know. One of her public sculptures was created after a curator at the 1999 Asia Pacific Triennial told a room of 1000 people that Australia was settled peacefully.

"I didn't think I'd heard him right, so I asked what he'd just said. He qualified it by saying it was settled 'relatively peacefully in comparison with New Zealand'. That made me think, so in 2004 I did the work, Witnessing to Silence, outside the Brisbane Magistrates Court.

"I asked a researcher to find all the massacre sites in Queensland from the public records, and I engraved the names of the 94 places in the pavement.

"The work was done by stealth - I told the commissioners these were places of fire and flood. That was the only way I could get the piece in.

"Where I come from, Fraser Island and Hervey Bay, they put up a 20-year resistance. There were strong warriors but they were not written about."

Foley's reading of Aboriginal history is seen in her work, as in the photographs in My Country based on the capture of an Aboriginal woman by oyster fishermen.

Queensland's economic expansion in the 19th and early 20th centuries was due in large part to the unpaid labour of Aboriginals, including young children, who were forced to work on farms, in factories, fishing boats and pearl diving.

Another work, Black Opium, shown at the State Library of Queensland in 2009, looked at the practice of graziers feeding Aboriginals the dregs of opium pipes to get them addicted and make them a compliant workforce.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

The Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act, passed in 1897 in response to public concern about the practice (and also driven by anti-Chinese sentiment), ended up not being about protection but became a tool to restrict the freedom of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and deny them their civil and human rights - as well as their children, their wages and whatever else took the fancy of the officials.

"I can see why I have never been invited to speak on a panel at APT, because they don't want to examine their own backyard," Foley says.

In New Zealand the debate has evolved in different ways but our institutions are evolving ways to incorporate an indigenous presence.

Foley hopes some of that will be brought into GOMA by new director Chris Saines, who saw the change during his 16 years as head of Auckland Art Gallery.

Symposium

What: Changing The Story: How Do We Understand Contemporary Indigenous Art Today?

Where and when: Auckland Art Gallery, today; free but bookings needed

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

What: Artist floor talk by Fiona Foley

Where and when: Auckland Art Gallery, level 1, tomorrow at 1pm

Save

    Share this article

Latest from Entertainment

Premium
Entertainment

Inside Universal’s big bet on How to Train Your Dragon

21 Jun 02:00 AM
Premium
Lifestyle

'Two small boys left fatherless and their mother cast as a scarlet woman'

20 Jun 10:00 PM
Premium
Opinion

Victor Rodger's play Black Faggot, was groundbreaking - how relevant is it today?

20 Jun 07:00 PM

Help for those helping hardest-hit

sponsored
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

Latest from Entertainment

Premium
Inside Universal’s big bet on How to Train Your Dragon

Inside Universal’s big bet on How to Train Your Dragon

21 Jun 02:00 AM

NY Times: Universal believes audiences will take flight with Hiccup and Toothless again.

Premium
'Two small boys left fatherless and their mother cast as a scarlet woman'

'Two small boys left fatherless and their mother cast as a scarlet woman'

20 Jun 10:00 PM
Premium
Victor Rodger's play Black Faggot, was groundbreaking - how relevant is it today?

Victor Rodger's play Black Faggot, was groundbreaking - how relevant is it today?

20 Jun 07:00 PM
Entourage star’s stand-up success and unhinged urinal encounters

Entourage star’s stand-up success and unhinged urinal encounters

20 Jun 06:00 PM
Inside Leigh Hart’s bonkers quest to hand-deliver a SnackaChangi chip to every Kiwi
sponsored

Inside Leigh Hart’s bonkers quest to hand-deliver a SnackaChangi chip to every Kiwi

NZ Herald
  • About NZ Herald
  • Meet the journalists
  • Newsletters
  • Classifieds
  • Help & support
  • Contact us
  • House rules
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of use
  • Competition terms & conditions
  • Our use of AI
Subscriber Services
  • NZ Herald e-editions
  • Daily puzzles & quizzes
  • Manage your digital subscription
  • Manage your print subscription
  • Subscribe to the NZ Herald newspaper
  • Subscribe to Herald Premium
  • Gift a subscription
  • Subscriber FAQs
  • Subscription terms & conditions
  • Promotions and subscriber benefits
NZME Network
  • The New Zealand Herald
  • The Northland Age
  • The Northern Advocate
  • Waikato Herald
  • Bay of Plenty Times
  • Rotorua Daily Post
  • Hawke's Bay Today
  • Whanganui Chronicle
  • Viva
  • NZ Listener
  • Newstalk ZB
  • BusinessDesk
  • OneRoof
  • Driven Car Guide
  • iHeart Radio
  • Restaurant Hub
NZME
  • About NZME
  • NZME careers
  • Advertise with NZME
  • Digital self-service advertising
  • Book your classified ad
  • Photo sales
  • NZME Events
  • © Copyright 2025 NZME Publishing Limited
TOP