Te Papa’s Slow Burn reframes women’s image‑making in Aotearoa
Saturday, 21 March 2026
Plants in ceramic pots cluster at the entrance to the new exhibition Slow Burn: Women and Photography | Ahi Tāmau: Māreikura Whakaahua at Te Papa. The plants are spindly and human-height; we know this because two humans pace among them. Dressed in black, they uncurl a length of rope and loop it around the base of the pots to make a star-like pattern on the floor.
We are at a performance, That’s you Mugwort!, by artist Ann Shelton and her collaborators, which was commissioned by Te Papa for the opening weekend of Slow Burn. Taking mugwort as a starting point, a plant that was, the performers tell us, “used in midwifery and as a medicinal plant for women’s health”, the two performers deliver quotations from wide-ranging sources: books about contraception, mysticism and herbalism; speeches from politicians about abortion reform in Aotearoa; and texts about human/animal/plant intermingling.
The work’s thesis is constructed by the performers’ speech and the movement of the black rope across the floor and around the pots. While one performer speaks, the other moves a pot, and a line of the rope, so that the theatre’s space is always shifting. This is an artwork constructed out of quotations; an essay where plants are placeholders and punctuation; a performance whose conclusion is always deferred.
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Shelton’s work was performed on the opening day of Slow Burn Ahi Tāmau, where Shelton also has two accompanying photos on display. We might ask: is That’s you Mugwort! photography, though? To which I would reply: who cares?
The exhibition, curated by Lissa Mitchell, takes an expansive approach to women’s image making. Photographs are chopped up and rearranged into sculptural shapes; photos are presented in books, albums, jewellery, and on the wall; photos are accompanied by embroidery samplers; and an evocative moving image work by Johanna Mechen is presented in a darkened room.
In a moment when we incessantly make and view images of ourselves and the world around us, when this activity interpolates every moment of our waking and dreaming lives, Mitchell makes a case for a porous definition of photography, one which not only drifts into other media, but, crucially, highlights the viewpoints and creative work of women and non-binary artists.
The exhibition draws on Te Papa’s collections and, in a deft move of curator/artist collaboration, arranges itself into thematic groups that are taken from the titles of artists’ photobooks or series of photographs: Joyriders, Nighthawks, Ancestor Technologies and The Near Future.
In Joyriders, the show opens with the busy conversation of Edith Amituanai’s series Julie Public, a selection from 100 Instax mini prints. These are taken of Amituanai’s friends, family and community out and about at protests, community gatherings and on the street in Tāmaki Makaurau. Amituanai uses these small images as ways to introduce herself to a community; photography becomes an act of exchange between artist and subject.
In many of the small snaps, the subjects take reciprocal photos of the artist, or of themselves, or we see another camera in the image photographing a sitter – a lens looks through or at another lens. This is not a singular moment distilled and captured, but multiple moments that overlay, intersect and watch each other.
At the opening-day symposium for Slow Burn, artist Natalie Robertson (Ngāti Porou, Clann Dhonnchaidh) delivered an extraordinary keynote where she explained a Māori model of photography, as framed through Māori cosmology, pūrakau and whakapapa. I won’t attempt to summarise this rich presentation here, but Robertson spoke about whakaahua (images/photographs) as objects with their own agency and interconnectedness with the phenomenal world.
Robertson’s photographs show the Waiapu river and surrounding rohe, an environment degraded by deforestation and land development since European settlement. Her images document sedimentation and erosion of the land, slow processes that are reflected in Robertson’s patient, seasonal approach to image making.
Much of Robertson’s talk reached outward from both the technological hardware and physical product of photography to their analogies in the rohe of Tairāwhiti. The Waiapu river mouth, Robertson said, is like the camera’s aperture, opening and closing. The light (the basic raw material of photography) of each new day in Aotearoa, first hits Hikurangi maunga, and the world is made discernible, observable and imageable by cameras. Tairāwhiti participates as a reciprocal agent in the images that Robertson makes of this place.
Slow Burn Ahi Tāmau is based on thorough research by Lissa Mitchell. Her impressive 2023 book Through Shaded Glass: Women and photography in Aotearoa New Zealand 1860-1960 examined the lives and work of amateur and professional women photographers, and it’s excellent that she has had the opportunity to extend that research into this experimental, engaging exhibition.
Extraordinarily, though, Slow Burn will be on display for a year. A whole year! Shouldn’t I be happily returning to Te Papa to write about three shows of this size and scope a year?
In an article in The Listener published in January, journalist Paul Little reiterated the long-held complaint that Te Papa doesn’t regularly show enough of its art collection. For that article, Te Papa was asked what shows it had coming up, and Slow Burn was the single exhibition that could be shared from its future programming. What’s going on? Granted, art galleries often can’t release specific details about their future exhibitions, but Te Papa should have, at the very least, a multi-year forward programme of new and touring art exhibitions, some of which it can tell us about.
Slow Burn is an idiosyncratic, original show, filled with important art from our national collection, that demonstrates what is possible when a curator has space and time to research deeply and collaborate with a community of artists; the mood at the opening symposium was happy, inquiring and exploratory. Please, Te Papa, can we have some more of the same?
Slow Burn: Women and Photography / Ahi Tāmau: Māreikura Whakaahua, Toi Art, Level 4, Te Papa, free, with museum entry