Hirini Moko Mead and Neil Grove’s book Ngā Pēpeha a Ngā Tīpuna collects several te reo Māori idioms for expressing admiration of great examples of weaving, carving or tattoo. One that offers fitting praise for Mataaho Collective’s recent work equates these human arts with the intricate beauty of the insect world: Ānō me te whare pūngāwerewere. “As though it were a spiderweb,” as they translate the saying; “A compliment for a fine piece of work ….” [1]
In Patricia Grace’s classic children’s book, the kuia and the spider won’t settle their rivalry over whose weaving is better. [2] As if they might join forces instead, Mataaho’s craft has adopted some arachnid strategies. Where earlier pieces hang and drape, two recent works find form in mid-air, tensioned between threads anchored on walls, ceilings and floors, in their Te Papa survey, Te Puni Aroaro, and at the 14th Gwangju Biennale, soft and weak like water.
A group of four, Mataaho Collective contains diversity, but the force of their practice under this name is powerfully unified. [3] While they avoid individual authorship, clearly conceived commitments developed over more than a decade generate an author function more defined than many or most individual artists.
Each of their works draws on an ever-expanding repertoire of ancestral textile techniques, learned from a teina relationship to tuakana artists such as Dr Maureen Lander, as well as from archival research. [4] These are honoured and shared by being applied at a larger-than-customary scale. Knots, weaves and patterns are monumentalised in a manner comparable to the way that Filipe Tohi has magnified Tongan lalava, lashing.
The two recent commissions, Takapau (2022) in Pōneke and Tuakirikiri (2023) in South Korea, extend this quality through the works’ construction in suspension. Anchored horizontally as well as vertically in the spaces they occupy, their constituent threads extend out from woven sections, extrapolating warp and weft, further laying bare the piece’s set-up and structure; making the container spaces into giant looms.
What is rendered vivid is no less than the power of combination evoked by the group’s name: the way that the over-under-over-under mesh of weaving brings to life a mata, a surface (or face, or seeing eye), out of aho, strands. [5]
Cassandra Barnett offers the precise phrase “atua scale” for the presence of these pieces; many bodies make something architectural of the components of garments, bags or straps, wherein Mataaho’s works, always centring mana wāhine, often also figure for us female atua, gods and demigods. [6]
A case in point, Tuakirikiri is named for a great-great-granddaughter of Tāne, atua of kirikiri, stones or small rocks. Discussing this whakapapa, Elsdon Best’s Maori Religion and Mythology records the whakataukī “He ope na Hine-tuakirikiri e kore e taea te tatau,” rendering it in English as the wisdom that “a company of the Gravel Maiden cannot be numbered.” Best’s take is literal, saying it “tells us how hopeless is the task of numbering the sands and gravels of the sea shore.” [7] But the figurative implication of a power in numbers is plain. [8]
On Instagram, Mataaho share these words as a thinking point for the work, linking the power of the multitude to the massive popular uprising against the South Korean military dictatorship that was led by students in Gwangju in 1980, in which large numbers of civilian protesters are estimated to have been killed: “We think of times when our people have come together, to work, to fight, to build, to strategize, to move forward.” [9] Despite the fact that the Gwangju Biennale was founded in part as a memorial to these events, the reference is left indirect by the curator’s framing of Mataaho’s work, referring obliquely to “the humble potential and power of community.” [10] Sweeping tautly through the cavernous exhibition hall, the work is woven from hi-vis tie-downs, polyester-weave strapping made for securing loads for transportation. Three vertical lines of anchor points are formed by hooks on pillars, three horizontal ones by hooks on the floor. The sets of straps intersect in a square, sixty by sixty, forming a mat that folds slightly down the centre into two triangles—thick, orange stripes chequered with thinner grey accents. The standard-issue industrial colours chime with the idea of rock and the mineral load of artesian water. (Alongside Tuakirikiri, the collective invoke the name of Parawhenuamea, atua of wai māori, fresh water, imagining the orange as iron in solution.)
Such hardware-store materials—and their readymade references to blue-collar, suburban and rural realities—are another constant in Mataaho’s work that they offer as a potential point of relatability for a broader audience, in addition to their formal and abstract tendencies. (In this, I think of their kinship to artists like Niki Hastings-McFall, Ani O’Neill and Lonnie Hutchinson, and their employment of synthetic and industrial materials in perpetuating traditional patterns.)
At Te Papa, Takapau is also constructed with ratchet-tensioned tie-downs and on a larger scale still, a vast 200m2, and in monochrome, echoing the reflective silver in the earlier ‘Kaokao’ (2014) works (which scale up a chevron-shaped tukutuku motif related to growth, and so childbirth) also on display in the survey. Soaring through two storeys, it appears stronger and more symmetrical, raising a gigantic mat as a ceiling, a shade- cloth-like shelter that welcomes visitors into their camp.
Mataaho’s titles sometimes render words abstract in a way that is similar to what they do to physical forms, allowing multiple meanings to layer. The kupu ‘takapau’, for example, most obviously refers to a floor mat, but also to the action of spreading one (or something) out. Given their critical attention to gender, the phrase ‘hurihanga takapau’—associated with women’s role in lifting a tapu—could also be suggested; and the ‘mat’, queered by being suspended, might raise the word’s use in naming a sexual preference. [11]
The collective have always underscored the correlation between their working together and the scale on which they can make, and their interest in how this allows them to take up physical—and so symbolic and institutional—space with their work as wāhine Māori. Curated by Nina Tonga, Te Puni Aroaro is a triumph in these terms, regrouping five older works alongside the new and largest-ever one. The exhibition title aptly names just this significant presence that is their long-standing kaupapa: “to negotiate what mātauranga Māori looks like within [the] spaces [of Western art institutions].” [12]
The same year that Mataaho, with Maureen Lander, won the Walters Prize, in 2021, the United Kingdom’s preeminent art prize, the Turner, shortlisted only collectives: Array Collective, Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S), Cooking Sections, Gentle/ Radical, and Project Art Works. In 2022, the world’s leading contemporary art exhibition, documenta, was directed by the Indonesian collective ruangrupa, who in turn devolved the organisation of the events through a network of other collectives (including Aotearoa’s FAFSWAG). As someone who’s been long involved in collectives, I’m familiar with the double-edged cachet that can accrue to this way of working: on the one hand, it arouses a desire for special relevance—the idea that turning away from the norms of individualism offers political promise in the face of compounding crises—on the other, it invites a disillusioned conservatism about precisely the same thing: that if collectivity is not a panacea, then it’s just suspiciously fashionable.
In the wake of the global Covid pandemic, Dean Spade usefully clarifies the Marxian concept of ‘mutual aid’ as “collective coordination to meet each other’s needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them.” [13] If this sounds like something usual and practical, as opposed to something novel and strategic politically or artistically, it is because there is an obvious outside to and undoing of the way that capitalism and colonialism have “created structures that have disrupted how people have historically connected with each other and shared everything they needed to survive.” [14]
Mataaho’s example presents the imperative to understand their collectivity in its multiplicity, to understand distinct valences of togetherness in their work. They can, of course, claim the opposite of novelty: the traditional collectivity of Māori society in general and weaving practices in particular; and the pure pragmatism, for mothers and their friends, of working with many hands to share the artistic and domestic labour required to get things done. As Skye Arundhati Thomas reminded documenta’s audiences, under widespread conditions, “Collectives are often born out of necessity.” [15] But in its negotiation of the present, Mataaho’s work must help us, too, to conceive new constellations of human and more-than-human coexistence.
[1] Hirini Moko Mead and Neil Grove, Ngā Pēpeha a Ngā Tīpuna: The Sayings of the Ancestors (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2004), 17.
[2] Patricia Grace, Te Kuia me te Pūngāwerewere/The Kuia and the Spider (Auckland: Penguin, 1981).
[3] Mataaho Collective are Erena Baker, Sarah Hudson, Bridget Reweti and Terri Te Tau.
[4] Rachel O’Neill has noted the role of speculation and conjecture, too: “attention to knowledge through time—in which what is not known, what is coming to being known, and what can only be imagined contributes to making something.” Rachel O’Neill, ‘A Pathway to the Guts: Mata Aho Collective at documenta14,’ Art New Zealand 164, Summer 2017/2018, 80.
[5] Perhaps by working a mata, a spell in another sense of the word, of aho, threads.
[6] Cassandra Barnett, ‘Wave, Whip, Rise, Roar: The Art of Mata Aho Collective,’ The Spinoff, 20 June 2020.
[7] Elsdon Best, Maori Religion and Mythology Part 2 (Wellington: P. D. Hasselberg, 1924), 326.
[8] Mataaho write: “These words allude to a timeless solidarity, interconnectedness, power in numbers, and draw strength from ancient ties.” Mataaho (@mataahocollective), ‘Tuakirikiri (2023)’.
[9] Mataaho (@mataahocollective), ‘He ope nā Hine-Tuakirikiri e kore e taea te tatau,’ Instagram post, 20 April 2023.
[10] ‘About,’ 14th Gwangju Biennale.
[11] Google Translate’s hive-mind-informed algorithm currently goes straight for ‘gay’ as an equivalent for ‘takapau’.
[12] Tim Corballis interviews the Mataaho Collective, ‘Mata Aho: Mana Wāhine in Contemporary Art,’ Counterfutures 5, 2018, 72.
[13] Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) (London: Verso, 2020), 7.
[14] Ibid, 7–8.
[15] Skye Arundhati Thomas, ‘“The Double Bind”: On Documenta 15,’ e-flux Criticism, 3 August 2022.
Header image: Mataaho Collective, Tuakirikiri, 2023, polyester webbing, dimensions variable. Installation view, 14th Gwangju Biennale: soft and weak like water, Gwangju, South Korea, May 2023. Photo: glimworkers
Reverse Shot: Aotearoa Artists Head to Venice