Bunnie’s Blue Moon marries threads of Arapeta Hākura’s inquiries into kākahu (adornment and fibre practices), hekengaru (surfing) and waiata wawata (songs of longing or desire).

Bunnie’s Blue Moon marries threads of Arapeta Hākura’s inquiries into kākahu (adornment and fibre practices), hekengaru (surfing) and waiata wawata (songs of longing or desire). For Hākura, these practices speak to continuity and continual renewal within Māori material practice, and explore and affirm takatāpuitanga as a means of inhabiting and knowing the world.

Installed in the Open Window Bunnie’s Blue Moon comprises a makawe takatāpui—a beehive wig constructed from kiekie, alongside an oho—or surfboard—carved from whau wood, and textile installation which references the form of a shower curtain. The gathered works represent a material outcome from an inquiry that spans two coastal sites, on either side of Te Ika-a-Māui: the shoreline of Omaha, north-east of Tāmaki Makaurau, where the artist’s whānau are katiaki and from which the kiekie was gathered, and the waters of the Taranaki region, around and within which the artist has spent the last year researching and building relationships.

Throughout the exhibition’s season, a series of short films will be screened in the Len Lye Cinema alongside our regular programme of feature films. Honouring generations of high-camp, high-glamour performers and wave riders who preceded the artist, these films work to undo and remake the tropes and conventions of the surf film—lodged within the settler colonial imaginary as a masculine, competitive, and primarily white, endeavour.

Bunnie’s Blue Moon unfolds as a hokinga mai—or homecoming—in multiple senses: in re-establishing a connection to Taranaki following the departure of the artist’s tūpuna Hōkapa and Merepeka during the Taranaki Land Wars in the 1860s, as well as in offering routes to refamiliarise themselves, and us, with the nuance and potential of takatāpui joy at the edge of the moana.