The pod squad
An international exhibition featuring NZ artists looks at the deeper meaning of whales throughout the Pacific.
An international exhibition featuring NZ artists looks at the deeper meaning of whales throughout the Pacific.
Whales have never been bigger. Not only in New Zealand – with its eco-tourism and whale-watching charters – but throughout the Pacific and beyond. As well as being the workhorse of oceanic conservation, whales represent a glorious entanglement of personal, cultural and cross-species narratives.
A whale sighting can be euphoric; a stranding is heartbreaking. When hundreds of whales came ashore earlier this year at Golden Bay, a wave of emotion swept the country. When the whales returned to the Kaikoura coast after the 2016 earthquake, there was palpable relief.
Whales have a singular purchase on human emotion, as they do on the imagination. The evidence of that is throughout the exhibition Tù – Des baleines et des hommes pour la protection
des océans (Whales and mankind for the protection of the oceans) at the Tjibaou Cultural Centre in Noumea. The panPacific show features works by 11 artists, including France-based New Zealander George Nuku and Niuean painter-writer John Pule, among others, from New Caledonia and Tonga.
All spent time in residence during the whale season last year on Ouen Island (south of mainland New Caledonia) and at the cultural centre, creating what co-ordinator Cyril Pigeau calls “works inspired by ocean conservation”.
At times, it feels as if humanity’s fate is inextricably tied to that of the whale. We look to them not only to gauge the health of our oceans but to make sense of our world. In Pacific cultures, whales are granted the status of older siblings or cousins; they can also be guardians, spirits, ancestors and taniwha. Perhaps they are the only living creatures we truly look up to.
In his bestselling book Leviathan, Philip Hoare points out the sperm whale not only possesses the largest brain of any animal ever known but also “exhibits the ability for tool use,complex communication and culture, and a sense of abstract self”. According to Moby-Dick author Herman Melville, we envy the “rare virtue of interior spaciousness” of these cathedral-like creatures.
At once a living, breathing creature and an island-like mass, a whale is itself an ecosystem – alive with bacteria, pods, clams and countless life forms. When one of these great mammals dies, it sinks to the ocean bed and becomes “whale-fall” – a sub-aquatic island of mind-boggling, regenerating life.
Despite their unpromising physical appearance, whales are a pervasive presence in Western and Oceanic cultures. Magnificent sperm whales and migratory humpback whales live off the coast of Kaikoura all year round and are best seen over the winter months of June and July, when they stay closer to the shore.
The pod of whale-inspired works at the Tjibaou exhibition in Noumea washes in on a rich tradition of past imagery – from the Paikea story of Maori tradition immortalised in the 2002 film Whale Rider to the Catholic legend of St Brendan celebrating Mass on the back of a mid-ocean whale.
Decades after a lengthy stay at Akaroa in the 1840s, Frenchman Charles Méryon etched a flotilla of Pacific whales sailing into downtown Paris. In the 1970s, Colin McCahon painted Moby Dick off Muriwai Beach, Kawakawa-based Friedensreich Hundertwasser depicted airborne cetaceans floating above the streets of
New York, and photographer
Ian Macdonald memorably documented, over a period of months, the decomposition of a stranded pod on Muriwai Beach. More recently, artists as diverse as John Hovell, Shona Rapira Davies, Jo Torr, Cliff Whiting and Joanna Braithwaite have explored the cultural and imaginative potential of these charismatic and confronting creatures.
The Noumean exhibition not only proposes new ways of thinking about and seeing whales but offers an alternative map of our South Pacific region – one defined by oceanic space rather than isolated land mass. In this respect, all the artists involved could be said to share the same place of origin – the area defined by the southern whale migration route.
The Tù project had its origins in the earlier environmentally focused exhibition Kermadec, which toured New Zealand and the Pacific between 2011 and 2016. “We see nature-culture links as vital for addressing conservation challenges,” says Christophe Chevillon, of the Pew Charitable Trusts, which sponsored both projects. Such an approach is closely aligned with the world view of the whale watchers of Ouen Island, as it is to all Pacific peoples.
In Chevillon’s mind, Tù is both a celebration of an aquatic region and, more specifically, a call to the New Caledonian administration to declare a large portion of its world-renowned marine park a no-take sanctuary (fishing is allowed throughout the island’s lagoon and coastal waters).
The Tjibaou Cultural Centre – Renzo Piano’s architectural marvel – extends between the Baie de Magenta and a mangrove-laden lagoon. At the centre of the Tù exhibition is a 4m-long whale calf woven from coconut palm leaves by Ouen Islander Marie-Ange Kapetha. The suspended whale resembles both a fishing net and a flax basket – hinting at narratives of species depletion and abundance.
At the exhibition opening ceremony, director Emmanuel Tjibaou reminded the audience: “When we talk about these animals, we are talking about our own identity.”
You could feel the energy in Nicolas Molé’s Surface, an undulating, oceanic assemblage of plastic bags that traverses the gallery and abuts Tongan artist Ruha Fifita’s stately wall-mounted tapa, Lototo 1, which incorporated dyes and pigments sourced from Ouen Island.
The interdependence of land and sea is a key theme of the exhibition. On the lawn outside the gallery, Molé’s Wela me koko (whale and yam) comprises a mound of soil shaped like a whale from which sprouts, plume-like, a yam plant. “One day in winter, the whale swims close to our
We look to whales not only to gauge the health of our oceans but to make sense of our world.
shores,” he says. “She slaps the sea with her side fins. On the island, the yams sleep in the earth. The sound of the whale’s fins slapping the waves awakens the yams; startled, they put forth their first shoots. It is time for the menfolk to plant them.” If the whales don’t visit, the crop can’t get started.
In Pule’s I will carry everything, a line of ant-like humans march in formation, with cetaceans raised above their heads – bringing to mind not only the artist’s earlier meditations on Pacific and Western gods but also the recent whale strandings.
For the Tù project, the celebrated Kanak sculptor Ito Waïa chose to work with photographic prints of whales (taken in the waters around Ouen Island), across the surface of which he has drawn formations of deities, stylised figures and symbols. Whale song and a human response to it enter the exhibition in the work of musician/sound-sculptor Sacha Terrat and a totemic wood carving by Noumea-based sculptor Kapoa Tiaou, which melds a whale’s tail with a treble clef.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the exhibition is its embracing of the future. Visitors are asked to think about the evolving relevance of the whale. Nuku’s Ruawharo 1 and 2 marry customary image-making and design with the materials and effects of the modern world. His Whale Skull Cube comprises a chapel-like enclosure carved from white polystyrene and wrapped around the suspended skull of a pygmy blue whale (on loan from the local museum).
Making works out of flotsam and jetsam is common in contemporary art practice – but to make such forward-thinking, futuristic pieces without losing touch with the cultural past is rare indeed.
The prize for the most strident environmentalist statement must go to the smallest work. Comprising a live goldfish in a bowl on a plinth, Molé’s 2% is a wry intervention into an art project devoted to the largest aquatic creature of all time.
Citing recent scientific evidence that the well-being of the planet requires that at least 30% of the world‘s oceans should be protected, Molé named the goldfish in his bowl “2%”, to draw attention to the fact that less than 3% of the Earth’s ocean area has been declared a sanctuary.
In this whale of an exhibition, the goldfish reminds us that humans, as custodians of the oceans, have some growing up to do.
The Tù exhibition is at the Tjibaou Cultural Centre in Noumea until August 27.