Kainga tahi kainga rua
Can art based on politics be interesting as ‘Art’? Are polemics and aesthetics mutually exclusive? Since post-colonialism claimed a place for political and social critique in the postmodern art world, meaning and moralising have claimed a place in art once more. In general postmodernism cocked a snoot at the more politically concerned art of modernism. But artists from oppressed, marginalised and colonised cultures challenge what might be seen as postmodernist amorality. Emerging from obscurity, using art to voice their anger, to lay bare hidden historical realities and to examine the oppression of imperialism, these practitioners use their media to make statements, lay complaints, reveal injustices and to challenge complacency. As the world once more corrodes into a war-torn place and acts of terrorism become more commonplace, many artists—not just those from oppressed or colonised socio-political positions—seem to have rediscovered their political consciences and once more we are seeing politically informed, challenging art.
Recently the Adam Art Gallery at Victoria University of Wellington, brought together three exhibitions on the theme of propaganda, war, nuclear weaponry, and imperialist exploitation. ‘Bombs Away’, curated by Sophie Jerrum, was a compilation of seven contemporary artists’ responses to various nuclear nations’ propaganda.1 Indian artist, Nalini Malani’s Remembering Tob Tek Singh explored Partition and threat of nuclear war with specific reference to Pakistan and India. While in the bowels of the gallery, Kainga Tahi Kainga Rua, an installation by Auckland artist Brett Graham, inspired by the doctoral research of Dr Katerina Teaiwa, was based on the degradation and eventual destruction of the Pacific island, Banaba (in the Kiribati Republic), through phosphate mining. Potentially the most didactic of the three exhibitions, based as it was on a