Explore Shannon Te Ao’s Ka mua, ka muri
Ka mua, ka muri is a new moving image project by Aotearoa New Zealand-based artist Shannon Te Ao (Ngāti Tūwharetoa), exploring our experience in time, history and song.
The title is derived from a whakatauki (proverb) often cited as a central guiding principle within Māori ideology. Meaning “to walk backwards into the future," it suggests that time exists on a continuum where past, present and future co-exist and are inherently tethered through ancestry and action.
The exhibition consists of a two-channel film, which uses the road movie genre as its starting point, and locates two sisters in the immediate wake of an unnamed tragic event. Within the simple setting of their moving vehicle, the protagonists deliver two separate verses that consider ways one might understand the temporality of our lived and understood experience, cited through events within both the natural and spiritual realms. Following Te Ao’s most recent work, what was or could be today (again) (2019), these songs were developed in collaboration with Kurt Komene (Te Ātiawa, Taranaki Whānui).
Ka mua, ka muri is co-commissioned by Remai Modern and Oakville Galleries, with the support of Creative New Zealand, marking the first time Te Ao’s work has been presented in Canada.
If you can’t make it to Saskatoon before January 3, 2021 to see the exhibition at Remai Modern, explore below to learn more about Te Ao and his work.
HEAR FROM SHANNON TE AO
Read a new text by Matariki Williams and Shannon Te Ao. Developed in response to Ka mua, ka muri, the text is a personal exchange, reflecting on memory, relations, language and land.
GO DEEPER
View a videos and slideshows of Shannon Te Ao’s Ka mua, ka muri presented at Oakville Galleries in early 2020 via Contemporary Art Daily.
Read “Time and Water: Shannon Te Ao’s Ka mua, ka muri in Canada” by Maya Wilson-Sanchez via Contemporary Hum.
Artist Bios:
Shannon Te Ao (Ngāti Tūwharetoa) was born in Sydney in 1978. He holds a BFA from University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts and an MFA from the College of Creative Arts at Massey University Wellington. Te Ao's moving image work, Ka mua, ka muri (2020) was co-commissioned by Remai Modern and Oakville Galleries, with support from Creative New Zealand. Other recent solo exhibitions include: my life as a tunnel, The Dowse Art Museum, Wellington (2018); With the sun aglow, I have my pensive moods, The Edinburgh Art Festival, Scotland, and Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, Auckland (2017); Tenei ao kawa nei, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu (2017). In 2016, Te Ao was awarded the Walters Prize.
Matariki Williams (Ngāi Tūhoe, Ngāti Hauiti, Taranaki, Ngāti Whakaue) is Acting Senior Curator Mātauranga Māori at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and the co-editor of ATE Journal of Māori Art. She is also co-author of the award-winning publication Protest Tautohetohe: Objects of Resistance, Persistence and Defiance. Her writing has been featured in multiple publications including frieze, e-Tangata, Pantograph Punch, The Spinoff, PhotoForum, and ArtZone. She is a Trustee of the online critical arts writing site Contemporary HUM.