Protest, prophecy and power: Inside Whai Wāhi at Te Pātaka Toi

Saturday, 21 February 2026

Slip through the sliding doors of the Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi and you are immediately observed. You might have come to look at art, but you are, in fact, looked at by art. Melanie Tangaere Baldwin’s Hine Whakawetewete, resplendent in lustrous-sounding fabrics – velveteen, leatherette, suedette, and latex PVC – stands in the entrance foyer, a banner showing a red-taloned, two-headed woman, surrounded by a sewn border of watching eyes.

Hine Whakawetewete is guardian and herald for the group exhibition Whai Wāhi. She is supported by other wāhine in Baldwin’s other paintings: Matakite and Pou Karanga. This trio repeat motifs that recur in many of Baldwin’s works: angular hands and faces, crackling fire, breasts and eyes. They are powerful symbols of the mana wāhine, of caregiving and returning to whenua as acts of resistance.

Matakite translates in English to a prophecy, or, as a verb, to prophecise, foresee or foretell. These wāhine look outwards and forwards to the future, but also to the past, and into our present moment of rupture and protest, and what potential that rupture might bring.

When Te Papa opened the doors of its new waterfront building in 1998, William Hobson’s English version of the Treaty of Waitangi hung in its central Signs of the Nation exhibition, on a wall opposite Te Tiriti o Waitangi in te reo Māori. In 2023, Te Waka Hourua, an activist group, entered Te Papa and, in a potent act of protest, redacted Hobson’s text with spray paint and an angle grinder. In removing the text on the panel, the group exposed the myth underpinning the exhibition that the English version of the treaty was a faithful translation of the reo Māori and of equal historical and legal importance.

This panel has been relocated to the Adam Art Gallery as part of Whai Wāhi; it hangs in the upper gallery; the menace of its dripping black spray paint is counterpointed by the levity of the text that Te Waka Hourua left behind. Article the Second reads: Her Majesty the Queen of England is the alien; and Article the Third reads: ration the Queen’s veges.

This panel was central to the narratives that Te Papa told about Aotearoa New Zealand, and it is also central to the flow of Whai Wāhi, but the narratives of this exhibition are of indigenous protest and opposition to insidious orthodoxies, and how the scaffolding of the settler colonial state can be deconstructed. Whai Wāhi also asks questions about the relationship between art and societal change: What impact can art have on lived experience? When does art become activism, and when does activism become art? Or is this just a flimsy linguistic distinction?

Te Waka Hourua’s panel is surrounded by John Miller’s photographs. A patient and participatory photographer of Aotearoa’s protest movements and Māori resistance for more than six decades, Miller recorded the 1975 Māori Land March, the Bastion Point protest and 2004’s foreshore and seabed hīkoi. On the back wall of the gallery is a trio of photos that show protesters pressed against a banner that reads HONOUR THE TREATY. In front of them, implacable, are a line of police officers who obscure some letters on the sign. Like the panel that hangs next to it, these words accrue more meaning the more they are obscured.

At the same time imperialist expansion and the systemic discrimination of Indigenous peoples continues worldwide, institutional monuments, statues and symbols of colonial oppression are being reclaimed and questioned by noninstitutional voices. Whai Wāhi draws these parallels between Aotearoa and the rest of the world with the inclusion of fascinating video works by Palestinian artist Inas Halabi and Sky Hopinka of the Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians.

Past these works, follow the exhibition down to the lower galleries of Te Pātaka Toi and you come to a kind of endpoint and starting-out point with a sequence of works by Emily Karaka and Robyn Kahukiwa that incisively contradict my early division of art and activism because, for both artists, these roles are intertwined.

The 1991 triptych by Kahukiwa, What will be the end?, reaches across time; the rhythmic paintings look forward like Matakite in the galleries above and are a bridge back to the agreement that was entered into by Māori rangatira in 1840. The title of the painting comes from the kōrero of Ngāpuhi chief, Mohi Tāwhai, who signed Te Tiriti in 1840 and speculated in discussions prior to the signing: “What will be the end? Our sayings will sink to the bottom like a stone, but your sayings will float light, like the wood of the Whau-tree, and always remain to be seen.”

Floating in the gallery above is the blackened text of The Treaty of Waitangi, its visibility diminished, its remains no longer to be seen.

Whai Wāhi is part of the Aotearoa NZ Arts Festival and shows at Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery until March 29.