3 NZ Artists At The Busan Biennale 2024: Te Tuhi Presents Commissions By Abigail Aroha Jensen, John Vea & Layne Waerea

New Zealand artists Jensen, Vea and Waerea will all exhibit new work commissioned by Te Tuhi and the Busan Biennale Organising Committee at the Busan Biennale 2024. Titled Seeing in the Dark, this year’s edition of the Biennale is curated by Vera Mey and Philippe Pirotte, and will run from 17 August to 20 October in Busan, South Korea.

Seeing in the Dark is underpinned by a conceptual framework which links ideas of pirate utopias with the Buddhist enlightenment. This exhibition will feature 62 artists/teams from 36 countries and will be centred around the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art and the historic downtown area.

Curated by Te Tuhi International Director and Artistic Director of the 2024 Busan Biennale Vera Mey and Te Tuhi Programme Manager Andrew Kennedy, the three commissions presented by Te Tuhi have generously been supported by Jo and John Gow, Jenny and Andrew Smith, and Creative New Zealand.

Abigail Aroha Jensen: Inside my papahou: puoro tuatini. Her site, Désirée - ā whakamātao owha
Concrete benches, pink candle wax, kawakawa balm, Sol de Janeiro Delícia  Drench Body Butter, Rom&nd lip tint, kōkōwai wax, dirt, abalone shell, 8-channel  sound, 12 min 38 sec  
Co-commissioned by Te Tuhi and the Busan Biennale Organizing Committee

Inside my papahou: puoro tuatini. Her site, Désirée - ā whakamātao owha is a new 8-channel sound installation by Abigail Aroha Jensen. The work gathers together field recordings from the Tokomaru Bay Freezing Works, an industrial ruin that bears witness to the economic growth and decline of the Tairāwhiti region. The recordings are imagined as a sonic tukutuku (act of weaving back and forth), threading together sites of whakapapa and waiata. Materials found within the surrounding environment, such as pipe and rubble, are used to echo the sound of taonga puoro, making lively the imperceptible histories embedded in the ruins.

Opened in Waima in 1911, the Tokomaru Bay Freezing Works was founded by a group of local farmers and purchased in a deal brokered by Ta Apirana Ngata. The freezing works were part of an extensive East Cape industry, continuing Ngāti Porou’s struggle against land alienation through collective land consolidation, and the ownership and development of agricultural exports. When the works closed in 1952, it devastated the local community, leading to the loss of Waima’s electricity supply until 1960. The title of the work makes poetic reference to a frozen relic, and borrows the name of the artist’s marae which is also located in the coastal town. Using the language of taonga puoro and improvisation as a relational practice, the work speaks alongside the past, bringing to light recent histories of connectivity, ingenuity and resistance.

John Vea: 96 degrees in the shade
Performance video and sound, 7 hr 53 min 49 sec
Co-commissioned by Te Tuhi and the Busan Biennale Organizing Committee

96 degrees in the shade is a new durational performance by John Vea that explores ideas of impermanence and itinerancy through the entanglement of labour and access to shelter. In the work, which is presented as a video installation, the artist disassembles and reassembles a mobile shoe-shine kiosk under the partial shade of a post as it moves throughout the course of a working day. The performance was inspired by a phone call taken outdoors in the summertime while Vea sat under the shade of palm trees. Vea recounts: “We talk into the late afternoon, the shadows of the trees grow long, we chase the shade to keep cover. We continue this choreography until the conversation ends.”

On a visit to Busan, the artist noticed the small footpath kiosks run by shoe shiners, whose mobile units provide scarce shelter from the fearsome sun. 96 degrees in the shade acknowledges the often extreme conditions that labourers work in, and raises questions about the politics of shelter: who has access to shade, and what might this shade obscure? In his performance of labour, Vea reveals how these tensions resonate within the increased precarity that global migrant workforces face: through the erosion of workers’ rights and the effects of climate change.

Layne Waerea: Free Promises
Performance with public
Co-commissioned by Te Tuhi and the Busan Biennale Organizing Committee

A promise is an offer of social obligation for the near future, often made with premeditated confidence and the desire for mutual fulfilment. Yet promises are liable to failure, with the potential for unforeseeable challenges to thwart the performance of one’s duties, inviting disagreement and conflict. Layne Waerea’s Free Promises explores the concept of social agreements or ‘promises’ as interpersonal practices governed by highly individual and spontaneous systems of values by giving away free promises during the opening week of the Busan Biennale 2024.

Free Promises will take place at the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan where members of the public are invited to kōrero and enter into a reasonable ‘promise’ with the artist. This ‘promise’ could include carrying out a small action, saying something, or even an agreement not to do something. Free Promises examines the fleeting and optimistic space where social promises are located, intervening upon the codified behaviour of civic spaces in metropolitan Busan. In doing so, Free Promises suggests the slippery or ultimately unreasonable nature of social promises, asking the public to reimagine the underlying social or legal transcripts at stake.

About the artists

Abigail Aroha Jensen is an artist who lives in Kirikiriroa, Hamilton. She holds a BMA from Waikato Institute of Technology with Honours from Toihoukura, School of Māori Visual Arts. Recent exhibitions include: Glittering Images, Grace Aotearoa (2024); Spring Time is Heart-break: Contemporary Art in Aotearoa, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhteū (2023); Old/Niu, A Drawing Showcase with Māpura

Avondale Artist Group, All Goods Artspace (2023); Rope Play (I-IV), sites across Tāmaki Makaurau, Pōneke and Köln (2022-23); R.Boudoir, RM (2022); Ata Koia!, Te Tuhi (2022); and Te Pō, Papatūnga (2022).

John Vea is an Ōtautahi Christchurch based artist who works with sculpture, video and performance art. Vea examines narratives of labour, migration and gentrification that exist within Te Moana Nui a Kiwa. By enacting stories that have been collected through everyday interactions with people, he offers a humorous and powerful counterpoint to the Western meta narrative. Vea’s work has been recently exhibited at Gus Fisher Gallery (2023); 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (2019); Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki (2018); Dunedin Public Art Gallery (2018); and the Honolulu Biennale (2017). Vea completed his Ph.D. at Auckland University of Technology in 2021 and is currently a Lecturer at The University of Canterbury.

Layne Waerea (Ngāti Wāhiao, Ngāti Kahungunu, Pākehā) is an Aotearoa based artist whose practice involves carrying out performance art interventions that seek to question and challenge social and legal rules of preferred behaviour in the public sphere. As a former lawyer, and now a part-time lecturer in law and visual art theory, Waerea uses this experience to inform her performance interventions with a particular focus on how te Tiriti o Waitangi could continue to play a critical role in the developing cultural fabric of Aotearoa New Zealand. Waerea has a PhD from AUT and is a lecturer in the School of Art and Design at AUT and is the current president of the chasing fog club (Est. 2014). Recent exhibitions include Auckland Arts Festival (2024); Performance Art Week Aotearoa (2024); Takiwā Hou: Imagining New Spaces, Te Tuhi and Malta Biennale (2024); and Huarere: Weather Eye, Weather Ear, Te Tuhi (2023).

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