Tame Iti & Delaney Davidson: {Suite} Wellington
Past exhibition
Overview
"I Will Not Speak Māori" is a line Tame Iti was forced to write out hundreds of times by his school teachers. Now, following the kaupapa Tame has been working with for the last 50 years, Delaney and Tame collaborate to present I Will Not Speak Māori as a silkscreen print, bringing the message into monumental and corporate language, echoing Tame's work with Billy Apple.
Playing with the ideas of tapu and noa, the cliches of white and black and the sanctified idea of law, the artists infiltrate the very territory the message originally came from. The exhibition also includes three photographs of Tame by Delaney, and an image of Tame and Delaney creating the silkscreen prints at Massey University by Billy Hemmingson.
I Will Not Speak Māori is an invitation to consider attitudes that exist today and highlights the remaining reluctance to speak te reo Māori or accept it as an official language of Aotearoa.
Meanwhile, Tame has an installation in Odlin's Plaza on the Te Whanganui-a-Tara waterfront to celebrate Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori, Māori Language Week. The installation marks 50 years since the Māori language petition was delivered by Iti and Māori activist group Ngā Tamatoa from Tāmaki Makaurau to Parliament in 1972, calling for recognition of te reo Māori.
Playing with the ideas of tapu and noa, the cliches of white and black and the sanctified idea of law, the artists infiltrate the very territory the message originally came from. The exhibition also includes three photographs of Tame by Delaney, and an image of Tame and Delaney creating the silkscreen prints at Massey University by Billy Hemmingson.
I Will Not Speak Māori is an invitation to consider attitudes that exist today and highlights the remaining reluctance to speak te reo Māori or accept it as an official language of Aotearoa.
Meanwhile, Tame has an installation in Odlin's Plaza on the Te Whanganui-a-Tara waterfront to celebrate Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori, Māori Language Week. The installation marks 50 years since the Māori language petition was delivered by Iti and Māori activist group Ngā Tamatoa from Tāmaki Makaurau to Parliament in 1972, calling for recognition of te reo Māori.
Works
Installation Views
