Election Day saw maverick space Mokopōpaki launch a multi-faceted exhibition by PĀNiA! Marama Inc. called Te Pou Wiini Atu: First Past the Post, a reference to the pre-MMP election system and to horse racing, long popular among Māori. The works on show – some durable and for sale, some temporary – were created by anonymous artist PĀNiA!, more often than not in collaboration with academic/artist p. mule of et al.

Collaboration is not unusual at Mokopōpaki, where the mysterious sister and brother duo Yllwbro also show regularly. The mode of working seems particularly relevant in the context of this exhibition, which tackles questions of Māori sovereignty, the legacy of Te Tiriti o Waitangi (with its various versions and signatories), and the nature of Mokopōpaki itself, a collective that seeks to enact or embody a Māori worldview in a country dominated by Pākehā politics and, in the words of Mokopōpaki, ‘multicultural myth-making’.

There is a list of works yellow-taped to the wall in the space’s house style, but Associate Director and ‘Keeper of the House’ Jacob Terre provides any detail required, acting as an adaptable intercessor between artist/artwork and visitor. As is so often the case with Mokopōpaki shows, the works are marked by wit and whimsy. Pithy titles and frank visual puns give them an immediate appeal, but none represents a one-liner or throwaway thought. All unpack and linger.

I’m particularly impressed by the poetic Māori Rolls (2017), a set of seven crusty white supermarket or local bakery rolls, floating and staling on the brown wall of Mokopōpaki’s back room. Standing in for the seven Māori seats in Parliament, the work seems to ask not whether the seats should remain, but whether we should put up with so insubstantial, so disposable an ‘offering’ – a question that feels all the more urgent following the Māori Party’s exit from Parliament.

Francis McWhannell, The Unmissables: Four Exhibitions to see in October (The Pantograph Punch, 6 October, 2017)

In partnership with Mokopōpaki on Karangahape Road, Te Tuhi is holding a solo exhibition by PĀNiA!, known as ‘the anonymous and enigmatic but always interesting über-cool-girl, artist-about-town’. The title of her exhibition at Te Tuhi is derived from American artist Bruce Nauman’s iconic wall sign, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign) (1967) in which a pair of parallel neon red tubes form a spiral frame encasing the words in the title in neon blue.

In PĀNiA!’s version, the True Artist is all about trust. Pakuranga Customs House or Attitude Arrival Lounge (2019) transforms the exhibition space at Te Tuhi into an immigration and border control office, made up of transparent, walk-through walls, which 'represent the change of heart necessary for trust, allowing visitors access to the unexpected realm of PĀNiA!’ Once through, viewers encounter works such as Cloakroom Motukiore Māori School (2019), a wall installation of a row of neon orange beanies on coat hooks, and Portrait of the Artist as Bruce Nauman (After Bruce Nauman) (2019), a black-and-white image of a seated figure with her face blocked out by an orange dot.

On the first day of the Fair, PĀNiA! launches the second part of her solo show, The True Artist Helps the World by Asking for Trust, at Te Tuhi in Mokopōpaki’s exhibition room known for its unconventional brown walls. In association with Yllwbro, the anonymous sister-and-brother artist duo, and A.A.M. Bos., PĀNiA! is to display works that explore the relationship between people and place. Together, they entertain an alternate scenario to James Cook’s landing at Poverty Bay in 1769 in favour of Abel Janszoon Tasman’s, the first recorded European to have sighted Aotearoa in 1642. Works in the exhibition include Yllwbro’s Internal Circulation Klosterstraβe 50 (2019), a drawing depicting a white line work of a complex, building-like compartment on tank wheels, with an orange sitting at its heart, against a black background.

Sherry Paik, Shows to See in Auckland: The Lowdown (Ocula, 27 April, 2019)

This is the second Billy Apple® show in Mokopōpaki’s Brown Room, one that came about when Jacob Raniera, the front person for Mokopōpaki, organised a conversation (via email) between the art entity Yllwbro (whom he represents) and Apple®. This involved looking at two paintings designed to present a newly minted Māori identity, te reo versions of the artist’s English Christian name, surname and registered logo; a second painting (on the right) responding to the first painting (on the left). With this statement and response format, it had affinities with the first exhibition.

Yllwbro rejected the idea of a simple Māori correlation/translation of ‘Billy Apple’ such as ‘Piri Āporo’. It was too obvious, too predictable-especially the ‘Āporo.’ The surname’s chosen replacement—‘Poho’—mirrors ‘Piri’ by way of starting with a ‘p’, and having one letter used twice that flanks the third letter on both sides.

‘Piri’ as a te reo ‘Billy’ also means (when a verb) to adhere or cling, while the juxtaposed ‘poho’ as a single word means chest, bosom or seat of affections. Attached to ‘piri’, the new word ‘piripoho’ means precious or treasured. It can also mean maternal love, referring to breastfeeding and parental bodily proximity.

The chosen colours are extremely important too—beyond their formal beauty and subtle softness. The brown of the gallery walls and background fields of the two canvases is obvious in its political significance, while the white of the letters in both paintings and the field surrounding the apple shape is not starkwhite but bone, a super pale—slightly warm and brown—gray. The te reo word for that colour is ‘iwi’ which of course means tribe and a particular collective community identity. Note also that in the doorway is a piece of nailed up Thar bone that Jacob, early on in the gallery’s history, installed as his own kind of mezuzah, a Jewish container for a tightly scrolled sacred text. Another unexpected resonance.

Of interest also are the two fonts, nuanced branding devices which Mokopōpaki and Apple® have swapped over in the two canvases so that sans serif Futura is on the right and tilted-seriffed Phinney Jenson on the left. The sense of togetherness or clinging between the two is accentuated.

With all this semantic layering you do wonder if the project is being a little over-determined, too controlled, too densely articulated, too obsessed with adding on meaning—and if the paintings can develop a life of their own, collaborating osmotically with the viewer, not the artists. Yet the bodily experience in the immersive brown space, with the occasional bone coloured field, is viscerally rewarding. Tertiary mixtures like dark brown are unusual for gallery or domestic walls. As part of a narrow space, they provide pleasantly strange sensations to walk into.

In the outer Grey Room, there are works by Apple®, Yllwbro and PĀNiA!. The Apple® study for a national flag uses tonal values to correlate Māori population statistics (via a percentage) with the national figures. Yllwbro focuses on the room next door, lining up a suspended Granny Smith apple—hanging from a brown string-with the brown Apple® logo as sort of target, and nodding to PĀNiA!’s toy horticultural tractor—placed near the Brown Room—on which the affectionate term ‘Piripoho’ is painted. Yllwbro also has a canvas wedge (painted brown) on the wall pointedly opposite the Apple® flag. Its tapered cross-section alludes to Māori population increases, the inevitable gaining of political power, and the eroding of Eurocentric hegemony within Aotearoa.

Two rooms: Grey and Brown: fierce and friendly—shrewdly juxtaposed.

John Hurrell, Cultural Transmutation (EyeContact, 26 July, 2018)

…The same is true of an unusual work made by a collaboration called Yllwbro. A cross, crowned with a Don Binney-like painting of a bird, is formed by versions of the Māori division of the world into three realms and flanked by a closely printed framed myth about the discovery of fire and of honey. The insects, birds and trees involved in the myth act partly as in Māori lore and partly with European vocabulary such as “King of the Mountains”, or references to the riddle posed by Sampson in the Old Testament about honey and a lion. The myth itself is eloquent and complex in contrast to the bold simplicity of its setting.

TJ McNamara, Artspace functions at its best with richly varied show of new work (New Zealand Herald, 8 October, 2016)

Can you tell us a bit about Piki Mai: Up here ^^. What will it bring to the fair?

In the words of the artists Yllwbro, who developed the identity, “Piki Mai: Up Here^^ is shamelessly attention-seeking much like the fresh perspective and change in elevation offered by a young, forward-looking generation with the energy and inclination to confront the future.”

Located on the mezzanine of The Cloud, this new section and initiative will feature a small number of young galleries, artist-run-spaces and art schools (Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland University and Victorian College of Arts, University of Melbourne). Separate from the main section on the ground floor, Piki Mai: Up here ^^ will offer a snapshot of artists whose work could appear in future fairs around the region.

Alongside the art schools, galleries in this section will include Auckland’s Mokopōpaki and Interlude from Sydney, plus a stand showing the work of recent graduates of Chinese Arts Academies.

Katie Milton, Q&A with Hayley White, Auckland Art Fair Co-Director (Art Collector, February, 2018)

A clever extension of the recent The True Artist Helps the World by Asking for Trust show at Te Tuhi, this exhibition brings in two other Mokopōpaki art entities to make clearer aspects of that initial PᾹNiA! presentation. Many details of the work shown at Pakuranga are mirrored, but here too, the products of the three contributors are very cohesively interwoven, the different producers at times riffing off each other’s images and methods. The results are visually more elegant and more thematically complex than before.

The show’s title, The Dutch Embassy, beside alluding to PᾹNiA!’s Pakuranga Customs House / Attitude Arrival Lounge included earlier at Te Tuhi—and a smaller more portable version (Customs Authority & Passport Control, Central City Office) here—specifically references a famous Rem Koolhaas building in Berlin—the Dutch Embassy. The sibling couple Yllwbro use a found cube-shaped bar fridge as a model, sticking sheets of scaled elevation diagrams onto its sides with tape, and also cardboard terraces and protruding box forms that match Koolhaas’s sculptural design.

Yllwbro also exhibit a Ministry of Traction screenprint/relief sculpture as a ‘working drawing’, and PᾹNiA!, a cardboard model of the building on wheels (Honorary Consulate (Mobile Cardboard Detachment)). There is also a tabloid-format newspaper with a conversation between Yolo and Blu of Yllwbro about another Koolhaas project, the China Central Television building (Universal Modernisation Patent, Skyscraper Loop; also affectionately called ‘Bent Skyscraper’ or ‘Big Pants’) in Beijing, and the comparatively dull and unimaginative Auckland architectural environs.

Another Yllwbro work has two silkscreened images on an old section of pup tent. One shows the parliament beehive building and other the Māori ‘Tent Embassy’ set up after the 1975 Māori Land March led by Whina Cooper ended in Wellington, and which existed for ten weeks until Prime Minister Muldoon forcibly closed it down.

In PᾹNiA!’s You’ll Never Be a Kiwi, lined-up differently coloured sauce holders become symbols for cultural diversity and a reaction against the assumption in its advertising jingles that consuming (red packaged) Watties Tomato Sauce is a sure sign of ‘Kiwiness’.

In her Polder & Boulder, we also see a set of clever Duchampian puns on the use of the shower in the gallery space—where the tray on the floor is covered with fake grass and the sides reference the dikes in the Netherlands—Polder the word for the enclosed, sealed off, dry land, and Boulder for bolder.

Mashed Potato Cream Cheese Moon obviously inks to PᾹNiA!’s Te Tuhi moon film. Here though, the flat circular potato bread positioned on a Kleinian Blue field references an old Scottish nursery-rhyme where the bread becomes a membranous drum that is repeatedly hit by the adjacent ladle. The ladle and drum originally were seen merrily as male and female genitals: the crust a vagina, and ladle, erect penis and scrotum.

A.A.M. Bos, like PᾹNiA!, draws heavily on his Dutch heritage, and sometimes on his fourteen months as a young Dutch soldier serving in Lebanon as part of the U.N. peacekeeping force. The line up (on a shelf) of plastic oranges mounted on toy tanks—with flowers in their gun barrels—references aspirations for a better world, and PᾹNiA!’s Plastic Orange Band at Te Tuhi.

In two other works, Bos’s Dutch references become more historic and less contemporary. His duraprint, The Drapers’ Guild Sets Up Shop in Dusky Sound, uses a famous painting by Rembrandt of Amsterdam merchants taking a coffee break during a negotiating meeting. Strangely this is set in a wild landscape backdrop with a cascading torrent painted by William Hodges during Cook’s second voyage. Three mugs on the table repeat a detail from Rembrandt’s scene, as if recently purchased from a museum shop.

Another suite of seven photographs blends Dutch with Aotearoa images. Portraits of tūī are described as Dutch ambassadors within the Netherlands confederation of provinces, each emissary being an individual named after the state it represents. Suspended beneath each portrait is a unique bag of spice, alluding to the entrepreneurial reach of the Dutch East Indies Company with its vast range of cultivated products shipped from S.E. Asia and Africa, and its formation of the world’s very first stock exchange.

This is a nice looking show where you can delve into the copious explanations and footnotes in the Mokopōpaki catalogue if you wish, or just enjoy the sensuality (especially the colour) and imagination-prodding free associations for themselves. You don’t have to get caught up in the wordiness of this gallery’s PR—informatively interesting as it may be. These objects often have a poppy exuberance and humour that is pure pleasure anyway.

John Hurrell, Ambassadorial Preoccupations (EyeContact, 21 June, 2019)