Tim Melville is pleased to present ‘Assimilation’, an exhibition of eight new paintings by Nephi Tupaea (Ngāti Koata, Ngāti Tiipa, Ngāti Koroki Kahukura, Ngati Kahungunu).

“In terms of the Māori experience”, Tupaea writes, “assimilation is another way of talking about occupation, but it’s also a story of resilience, survival and adaptation. Our tūpuna were not passive participants in history but, rather, active navigators of immense social and cultural change.”

In the current issue of Art News Aotearoa the writer and decolonial scholar Dina Jezdic speaks with Tupaea about her focus on artists such as Gauguin, who “framed the Pacific as paradise, the exotic and as material.

[Tupaea’s] engagement with these artists is also an engagement with the curriculum itself, where European art functioned as the dominant visual language, and she uses appropriation to ask what decolonisation might look like within that inherited pictorial field.”
 
Tupaea explains: “I was introduced to Gauguin in the early 1980s at school. He drew me in because he painted people who looked like me […] I’m not cancelling Gauguin, but nor am I excusing him. I simply acknowledge that his work exists. What interests me is what happens when those images are reclaimed and the stories are told through a Māori lens.

Re-appropriation is the language I use to disrupt the colonial gallery; that’s where the conversation begins for me.”

Nephi Tupaea is a multi-media artist and long-standing member of the artist collective Pacific Sisters. She is a graduate of Toimairangi – Te Wānanga o Aotearoa and has exhibited throughout Aotearoa and internationally including Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Te Papa Tongarewa and Queensland’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA).

Photography: Kallan MacLeod