Gun, Paper, Obelisk

Gun, Paper, Obelisk brings together the work of Ashleigh Taupaki and Tristen Harwood. The exhibition’s title riffs on the hand game rock, paper, scissors to echo the tripartite nature of the colonial project: militarism, administration and extraction. Taupaki and Harwood’s intervention and reinterpretation of public records in Aotearoa and Australia indexes the material conditions and spatial encounters of the late 19th century. Through this research, Gun, Paper, Obelisk articulates ideas of colonial ambivalence, ideological justification, and Indigenous self-identification.

Sites of exchange, compromise and dispute provide a structure for Taupaki’s work. Through five extracted scenes, Taupaki emphasises the key events that trace an autobiographical history of Ngāti Hako resistance to Crown activity. The play opens with a meeting between a young girl and a taniwha, to whom she tells her story; the following acts set forth the circumstances of Ngāti Hako shooting a colonial surveyor’s assistant and the unanimous agreement from the hapū that this action was warranted, as recorded in court proceedings. Working with a visual language that retains only essential relationships and directions, the work operates as a partial script with which to reenact the situation. Te Whakatau constructs the colonial encounter through a typographic blueprint of the wharenui Te Kotahitanga at Taupaki’s marae. This discursive site spatially maps both physical and ideological points of contact between tangata whenua and the Crown.

Harwood’s research concerns the direct relationship between late 19th-century labour prisons and concurrent international exhibitions in Australia, in particular the 1888 Melbourne Centennial Exhibition. These environments produced parallel developments in the category of Aboriginal art and the Australian national identity. The large-scale prints included in Gun, Paper, Obelisk register instances of display history that formed an aspirational vision of Australia connected to colonial industry, exploration, and European cultural ideals. Harwood’s works on paper likewise draw out the excess aesthetics involved in justifying the colonial project. By working anti-productively with the residual matter of this period, Harwood presents a counterpose to a singular narrative of colonial interests and Indigenous agency.