September 22, 2016
Hinenuitepo meets Rena in Scape sculpture
Ngai Tahu artist Rachael Rakena has been selected to put a work in Christchurch’s Scape Public Art festival.
The festival is now an annual six-week season of contemporary public art placed around the central city.
Rakena will show her 2011 work Poutereraki at Wynn Williams House with additional video works and a new wall-based takarangi or spiral form made using electrical cabling.
Poutereraki is the darkest realm of Te Po, the night, where in Maori cosmology Hineatauira (also known as Hinetitama) fled in shame and grief from the world of light to become Hinenuitepo, the great woman of the night.
In Rakena’s installation dark suffocating images are paired with black oil blobs to evoke notions of destruction, drowning and a search for the unattainable.
The oil blobs building up on the screen surface and through the gallery also recall the black tides of the Rena oil spill.
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