Before is Now - Ko Muri Ko Nāianei

9 November 2017 - 18 February 2018

Fiona Amundsen, Dieneke Jansen, and Natalie Robertson.

FotoNoviembre Biennial Official Selection, TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain.Curated by Gilberto González.

Before is Now—Ko Muri Ko Nāianei presents the work of three artists focused on quite different subjects—Māori cultural and community histories and environmental protection; gentrification, social justice and the rights of government housing tenants; and the involvement of Japan and Australasian countries colonised by Britain in the Asia Pacific Theatre of War of World War Two. Working with photography and moving image, drawing on archival footage, testimonies, oral traditions and inter-generational knowledge that is typically tied to specific places, the works present personal and collective narratives that through their specificity often run counter to those commonly known and propagated in the mainstream.

Before is Now—Ko Muri Ko Nāianei is a response to the invitation to curate an exhibition as part of the FotoNoviembre 2017 Official Selection, curated by Gilberto González. The Biennial’s title, ‘Kenosis’ – from the French Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida – seeks to reflect on the constant resignification of images.  The appropriation and decontextualization of the term Kenosis opens a discussion about the need to be alert to the different narrative processes that operate within images and to what extent we are aware of these. In particular it touches on the current context of post-truth, suggesting the need for a detailed study of the image archive that sustains popular discourse, on the premise that the often accepted “truthfulness of the image is yet another form of structuring a false narrative.” (González). This, González proposes, forces us to reformulate the “foundations on which common mythology/history is structured,” and questions our inability to realise the equivocal value of photography as a tool for the construction of a common indentity. Before is Now—Ko Muri Ko Nāianei responds through work that is committed to refiguring and telling lived experiences past and present and into the future through localised narratives. The artists share an approach that is committed to maintaining deep relationships with the past, present, and the future, along with people as they are connected to place and history. In presenting this work the exhibition considers the archive as a relationship; the archive not as something to be retrieved from the past, but something that we are in relation to, and coexist with.