Te Tuhi Presents A Screening Programme Of Huarere: Weather Eye, Weather Ear - As Part Of The World Weather Network

Five new moving image works launched as part of Huarere: Weather Eye, Weather Ear, Te Tuhi’s contribution to the global World Weather Network. See the artworks and meet the artists and curator at Te Tuhi on Saturday 8 June.

Huarere: Weather Eye, Weather Ear – screening programme

“Artists keep a weather eye and ear on the volatile climate; from the intimate weather visions of insects and fish in Waitaki to Aoraki in the deep South; to the soaring skies patrolled by the Kārearea (falcon) above the drumming heart of Moe-i-te rā (Brooklyn Hill) in Te Whānganui-A-Tara; to speculative futures where geological agglomerates emerge from oceans unknown.”

- Janine Randerson, curator of Huarere: Weather Eye, Weather Ear, Te Tuhi’s programme for the international World Weather Network platform.

Aligned with high energy lunar phases and the passing of seasons in the Maramataka, five new moving image works commissioned for the World Weather Network have been released between summer solstice in December 2023 to late May 2024. Now these sound and moving image artworks are showing for the first time in Te Tuhi’s screening gallery as a continuous looped presentation with a total running time of 26 min 32 sec. 

Together, they form a counter-mapping of weather’s eccentric course across the previous year as Matariki rises once more. At a political moment where resistance is required on behalf of the biosphere and te tangata in Aotearoa, artists maintain the ‘voice’ of the skies and the more-than-human in the social domain.

Tia Barrett | Summer/Raumati

Tūhononga (Cluster and Connection)
Parts I and II, 2023-24 (4 min 15 sec; 5 min 01 sec) 

Tia Barrett’s observational learning journey began in Te Waipounamu (South Island of New Zealand) with a collective hikoi (walk) from Waitaki to Aoraki. The essence of the environment —the appearances, sensations, and sounds of specific moments and weathers significant to her during the hikoi were recorded.

Then, in the summer of 2023-2024, Barrett engaged in noho wānanga (occupy meeting/discussion) on ancestral land and documented the climate crisis in Wairewa Roto (Lake Forsyth) in Te Waipounamu. Currently, Wairewa Roto is grappling with severe flooding and polluted waterways. Historically, before European colonisation and deforestation, this land and waterways were renowned for their abundance of kai (food), ngāhere (forest), clean water, and wildlife.

Through walks, videos, and community dialogues, Barrett explored the question: “what pūrākau (stories) from our past can we draw upon to benefit the future of our whenua (land)? And how can toi Māori (Māori arts) serve as a means to translate this message into action?”

The two parts of Tūhononga (Cluster and Connection) form the eighth weather report from Te Tuhi’s Te Moana nui ā Kiwa weather station Huarere: Weather Eye, Weather Ear, part of the World Weather Network.

Riki Pirihi | Autumn Equinox/Ngahuru

Ka Tangi te Kārearea a te Rangi Uaheke
2024 (5 min 23 sec)

“When the Kārearea screams on a rainy day, it is an indicator that it will be fine the following day.”

Ka Tangi te Kārearea a te Rangi Uaheke is a solo percussion performance by Riki Pirihi recorded at the summit of Moe-i-te-rā (Brooklyn Hill) in Te Whanganui a-Tara (Wellington). The composition is for drums, gongs, and cymbal, and the accompanying sky.

This semi-improvised sound piece uses a graph of the Wellington temperature history for 2023 as a rhythmic motif and a graphic score, by correlating the linear points of data with tempo, pitch, and timbral variance; while the image of the sky in the two-channel video is filmed on the day of the performance.

The maunga location, Moe-i-te-rā, is a nesting spot for Kārearea (falcon). As the summit is exposed to the volatility of the Wellington wind, Riki has located himself inside one of the bunkers on the side of the mountain, embraced in the warmth of Papatūānuku (Earth Mother) while playing to Ranginui (Sky Father).

Ka Tangi te Kārearea a te Rangi Uaheke forms the ninth weather report from Te Tuhi’s Te Moana Nui ā Kiwa weather station Huarere: Weather Eye, Weather Ear, part of the World Weather Network.

Jae Hoon Lee | Winter/Maramarima
Ocean Rain
Parts I and II, 2023-24 (10 min 45 sec; 6 min, 50 sec)

Jae Hoon Lee explores live and simulated weathers, documenting a physical location on the coast of Taiwan, and a virtual geological form rising from the ocean.

Ocean Rain Part I features mushroom-like stone formations created by geological forces in Taiwan’s Yehliu Geopark, filmed on a stormy day. The weather conditions and large seas have altered the geography into uncanny landforms that the artist speculates could become stranger still as the climate erodes the coastline. Sounds of waves mix into the cries of seabirds in Aotearoa that have flown on the winds of the East Asian-Australasian highway on one of nine global migration routes. 

Ocean Rain Part II unfolds in a digital ocean where uncanny geological forms materialise. The dynamic interaction between ocean currents and rain simulates climactic conditions, rendered through a CGI imaginary.

Ocean Rain forms the seventh weather report from Te Tuhi’s Te Moana Nui ā Kiwa weather station Huarere: Weather Eye, Weather Ear, part of the World Weather Network.

Opening Event on Saturday 8 June 2024

Everyone is welcome at a special event at Te Tuhi to celebrate the opening of Huarere: Weather Eye, Weather Ear Screening Programme on Saturday 8 June. 

Artists Tia Barrett, Riki Pirihi and Jae Hoon Lee, and curator Janine Randerson will take part in the celebration, along with other artists whose work has been featured in Huarere: Weather Eye, Weather Ear, the World Weather Network project from Aotearoa New Zealand. 

Coffee and light refreshments will be served. 

For more information visit Te Tuhi’s website here.

11am Saturday 8 June 2024

Te Tuhi
21 William Roberts Road, Pakuranga

Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland 2010

About the artists

Tia Barrett (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Mamoe, Waitaha, Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Tamainupō) is a Māori moving image practitioner and photographer based in Kirikiriroa Hamilton, Aotearoa New Zealand. Her current art practice is firmly grounded in celebrating mana wahine Māori identity (Māori women’s rights) and deepening her connection to whenua me o ngā tūpuna (land and ancestors) through a lens-based practice.

Barrett is also on a journey of reclaiming her indigenous Māori language through the art of sung Māori poetry, mōteatea, and incorporating this medium into her contemporary lens-based practice. Barrett’s most recent original mōteatea composition is embedded in her work He Pounamu Ko Āu, which was an outcome from her MVA thesis. Barrett holds a Master of Visual Arts from Auckland University of Technology. She is a 2023 Te Tumu Toi Arts Foundation Springboard recipient and recently received the 2023 AUT Blue Award for her Creative Individual Performance.

Riki Neihana Pirihi (Ngāti Wai, Ngāti Māhanga Hourua) is a multi-instrumentalist, producer, composer, and sound artist, based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. 

Pirihi has composed and conducted the big band ensemble Eru Dangerspiel and Tuone Conduction Ensemble, as well as performed and recorded alongside a diverse range of artists – Trinity Roots, Orchestra Of Spheres, Mara TK, Crowded House, Recloose, Leila Adu, Fat Freddys Drop, Seven Davis Jnr, Bic Runga, Connan Mockasin, and Jeff Henderson.

Jae Hoon Lee, a self-proclaimed cultural wanderer, Korean-born photographer, grew up in Seoul, emigrated to the USA in 1993 to study at the San Francisco Art Institute, and then in 1998 to Auckland, New Zealand, where he graduated MFA (2001) and DocFA (2012) from the University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts. Lee’s multiple migrations and his preoccupation with expanding technological advances have continued to define and inform his practice. His work makes apparent his enduring concerns of place, movement, individuality.

Lee’s digitally enhanced, hyper-real landscapes are a composite of images he personally gathers in his travels. While his works initially deceive the viewer with their familiar appearance, closer inspection reveals an acutely subjective engagement with the visual texture of a location, an elaborate visual trick.

His digital photographs, video installation and sculpture have been exhibited widely in New Zealand and internationally over the past fifteen years, and acquired for both public and private collections. Lee won the prestigious Wallace Arts Trust Paramount Award in 2013, including a 6-month residency in the International Studio and Curatorial Program in Brooklyn, New York City; and in 2014 was awarded the Asia New Zealand Foundation’s Cemeti Art House Residency in Indonesia. Lee lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand.

About the World Weather Network

In 2021, Te Tuhi joined 27 other arts organisations globally to form the World Weather Network, a ground-breaking constellation of ‘weather stations’ located across the world in oceans, deserts, mountains, farmland, rainforests, observatories, lighthouses and cities. Since 21 June 2022, artists and writers have shared ‘weather reports’ in the form of observations, stories, images and imaginings about their local weather and our shared climate, creating an archipelago of voices and viewpoints on a new global platform. Whilst each organisation reports on their local weather, every one of these ‘weather stations’ is connected by the over-heating of the world’s atmosphere. The World Weather Network presents alternative ways of responding to the world’s weather and climate, and is an invitation to look, listen, learn and act.

Curated by Janine Randerson, Te Tuhi’s online weather report programme Huarere: Weather Eye, Weather Ear continues to traverse the seasonal calendar, radiating weather signals from around Te Moana Nui a Kiwa. Transmitting dispatches from Aotearoa New Zealand, Tonga, Niue and Samoa, Te Tuhi’s is a weather station in a sea of islands, tracing the signs of a rapidly changing climate. Artists, writers, communities and ecologists transmit the new weathers of the Anthropocene in an ongoing, online exhibition, hosted at tetuhi.art and on the World Weather Network website.

The commissions for Huarere: Weather Eye, Weather Ear include artists Phil Dadson, Breath of Weather Collective, Maureen Lander with Denise Batchelor, Ron Bull, Stefan Marks, Heather Purdie, Janine Randerson, Rachel Shearer, PCA Archive, Paul Cullen, Julieanna Preston and Word Weathers, Layne Waerea, Kalisolaite ‘Uhila, Tia Barrett, Riki Pirihi and Jae Hoon Lee.

Offering different ways of looking at, listening to and living with the weather, the World Weather Network shares a diverse plethora of weather reports on its online platform filed by writers and artists from many international locations: the Himalayas, the Mesopotamian Marshes in Iraq and the desert of the Arabian peninsula; the Great Salt Lake in Utah and Te Moana Nui a Kiwa in the South Pacific; ‘iceberg alley’ off the coast of Newfoundland, the waters of the Baltic Sea and the Arctic Circle; a tropical rainforest in Guyana and farmland in Ijebu in Nigeria. Artists and writers are working in observatories in Kanagawa in Japan and Manila in the Philippines; looking at cloud data in China and lichens in France; lighthouses on the coast of Peru, the Basque Country and the Snaefellsness peninsula in Iceland; and cities including Dhaka, Istanbul, Johannesburg, London and Seoul. 

Climate scientists, environmentalists and communities have participated in a wide-ranging programme of special events held in each location and online through the platform.

About Te Tuhi

Te Tuhi is a leading platform for contemporary art in Aotearoa New Zealand, with a programme consciously and continually shaped towards rigorous, adventurous and socially engaged artistic experimentation. Based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Te Tuhi’s primary focus is on commissioning both national and international artists to make new work by creating stimulating contexts for the artists to respond to and work within. Te Tuhi offers artists and curators opportunities through development programmes, studios, awards, residencies and internships both in New Zealand and overseas. Alongside the gallery in Pakuranga, Te Tuhi runs Parnell Studios and Project Space on the platform of Parnell Train Station and operates O Wairoa Marae in Howick.

Across multiple venues, Te Tuhi delivers a strong programme of community engagement, including public events integrated into its exhibition programmes, and provides formative art experiences for schools, young people, community groups and people of all backgrounds and ages. Te Tuhi runs Arts Out East, the community arts brokering for the Howick Local Board area in East Auckland, and Te Tuhi Café, Aotearoa’s first training café for people with intellectual disabilities.Te Tuhi is an independent charitable trust supported by Auckland Council and the Contemporary Art Foundation.

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