Te Hīkoi Toi: the loop of the moving image

This article on the work of Christopher Ulutupu, Lisa Reihana, and Nova Paul was originally published in the Dominion Post.

I had been watching Christopher Ulutupu’s video installation What’s the Worst You Could Do? through a couple of its loops when the gallerist at Wellington’s Jhana Millers Gallery opened the door of the room to check on me.

At the moment she put her head round the door, one half of Ulutupu’s work showed a man sitting at a table watching an out-of-shot karaoke performance. The man watched the performer, I watched him, the gallerist watched me. For a few seconds, we were a triptych of surveillance, inside and outside the camera’s frame, and it seemed apt: Ulutupu’s work is often about who is doing the looking, how they are looking, and the power that this gaze projects.

What’s the Worst You Could Do? is installed as two large looping projections on a wall right next to each other. A woman dances against a sparkly tinsel backdrop, but she seems self-contained, and doesn’t pose or strut; she is dancing for herself. A group of young men eat ice creams in front of flickering fire, but they are impassive, still, and contemplative. They are at the same level as the seated viewer, returning the gaze of whoever might be watching.

We also see a pair of women reciting lines from scripts, their lips move, but we can’t hear what they’re saying. In another shot, a woman stands against a deep purple curtain and mouths ‘There are worse things (I could do)’, Rizzo’s solo number from the musical Grease.

The videos are highly staged and play to the conventions of cinema, and yet they are, paradoxically, unperformative, in that the people on camera resist cinema’s codes and expectations.

Ulutupu has been busy in recent years making work that addresses the exoticisation of the Pacific and the violence of the imperial project. In What’s the Worst You Could Do? the Pacific peoples in the frame are not completed by the camera. There is a sense that the work could continue, on its loop, making meaning regardless of the gallery audience.

In the wonderful new catalogue Māori Moving Image, published by Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, Nina Tonga writes about “the playback loop as a Möbius strip: a continuum with no distinct beginning or end, where the past, present and future have no boundaries”. When a video work repeats in a gallery, we can come across it at any point in its cycle and sit for as long, or as short, as we like, or wait for it to start again. When used by Māori artists, Tonga proposes “repetition creates infinite opportunities for decolonisation and change”.

Tonga’s words looped in my head as I made the walk to Lisa Reihana’s extraordinary in Pursuit of Venus [infected] (2015) at Te Papa. It runs for 64 minutes, during which time it loops twice, with one difference: in one scene Captain Cook appears as a man, and then as a woman. The work never stops, there is no distinct beginning or end, and, like Ulutupu, Reihana’s work complicates the idea of performance, as there is no focal point.

The interactions that Reihana shows between colonial agents and Pacific peoples are dispersed and simultaneous, and the work is constantly moving through its long loop, patiently scanning the action, so that our gaze never rests. Reihana’s work reflects Tonga’s idea of the moving image loop as counter to the linear, European conception of time – the Pacific’s past of colonial violence is felt now, its effects present and ongoing.

At City Gallery Wellington, there’s a group of image works on a collective loop, this time in a cinema. Tai Timu! Tai Pari! The Tide Ebbs, the Tide Flows is a selection of work by Māori artists, curated by artist Shannon Te Ao, in collaboration with Circuit Artist Moving Image. Originally exhibited at the Remai Modern museum in Canada, it includes work by Janet Lilo, Neihana Gordon-Stables, Jamie Berry, Natasha Matila-Smith, Layne Waerea, Ana Iti, Jeremy Leatinu’u, and Nova Paul.

Paul’s film This is not Dying (2010) uses the same slow, patiently observant pace as Reihana, and any focal point in the film is also dispersed, but this time by the technicolour technique of three-colour separation that Paul uses to exquisitely beautiful effect.

This is not Dying shows the everyday activities of a Māori community, but the colour separation makes the events and objects appear as bright, repetitive layers that start and then start again, so that the work is full of lots of little internal loops that dance with each other. These loops accumulate as a way of giving space, care, and time to both the people and whenua under the camera’s eye.