Created as one of four inaugural commissions in a partnership between Hastings Art Gallery and Gwen Malden Charitable Trust, Kawe Mate by Te Kīra Whakamoe (Tūhoe, Ngāti Ruapani) is the first exhibition encountered when entering the gallery. Inside a vestibule with blackened walls and a soundtrack of birdsong from Whakamoe’s home in Kawekawe, in the valley of Rūātoki, the dark is a welcoming and unnerving experience. The latter perhaps only if you are among the uninitiated to Whakamoe’s work, which operates in communion with the taiao and atua Māori. In bringing herself into the gallery, so too does Whakamoe bring these elemental forces in the form of pelts, bones, wings, rākau, whenua.

Kawe Mate engages with trauma head-on, surfacing histories that polite society would have us swallow and absorb, taking individual responsibility for collective punishment. Wā Kōrero features both the Mana Motuhake o Tūhoe flag and a Palestinian keffiyeh, each draped over a chair. Within Tūhoe, the actions of the Crown and their scorched-earth policy led to starvation and ushered in widespread raupatu; this history sits alongside what we are witnessing in Palestine at the hands of occupying forces. There is no equivalency being assumed here; rather, as is intimated in the title, these histories speak to each other, and Whakamoe offers a space for visitors to contemplate the connections together.

State intervention is an insidious thread in Kawe Mate. Pepper Potting references the assimilationist policy that sought to integrate Māori within Pākehā neighbourhoods and therefore a Pākehā society. The checkerboard arrangement of pallets from the local Wattie’s factory, some of which have been charred black, alludes to a Māori labour force in factories connected to the agricultural industry. Te Matau-a-Māui is known as the food bowl of Aotearoa, and the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions in the region are indeed the agriculture, forestry and fishing industries. Drawing a line between emissions, climate change and the devastation of Cyclone Gabrielle is a current throughout Kawe Mate, as Whakamoe was personally impacted by the floods and has repurposed flood-affected materials in some of these works.

Kawe Mate is an exhibition that swirls the visitor within it, eddying through feelings of righteous anger and despair, moments of stillness and reprieve, allowing for contemplation of the stories shared. Ultimately, the forceful power of the elements steadies itself, a reminder that we are but a tributary on the continuous river of time, that too will wash away.