In KŌIWI (2022), Victoria Hunt navigates an embodied living archive, bringing meaning into the present through advocacy and intergenerational healing. Reinscribing her diasporic experiences and cultural identity onto the future of her iwi (tribe) by accessing nonlinear knowledge systems, her performance practice deals with a living legacy that is held collectively.

Hunt’s performance KŌIWI was commissioned and presented as part of the exhibition Dreamhome: Stories of Art and Shelter at the opening of the Sydney Modern Project at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2022. It was created and performed alongside Moe Clark, a Métis multidisciplinary artist, vocalist and drum carrier from Turtle Island and Rosie Te Rauawhea Belvie, a Māori vocalist, haka custodian and performer from Aotearoa. Boris Bagattini, an object and lighting designer, and James Brown, a sound designer and composer, co-created the performance. In KŌIWI, the embodiment of the Māori epistemologies whakapapa (genealogy) and kaitiaki (custodianship) decentralizes the collection and documentation of cultural knowledge whilst upholding tikanga (customary–political protocols).

KŌIWI can be seen as performing the rematriation of Hinemihi. Hinemihi is both a female ancestor of Hunt and an ancestral meeting house imbued with the spirit of Hinemihi built on tangata whenua (land of her people) for her hapū (subtribe) to gather. Recounting Hinemihi’s story across generations is beyond the scope of this essay but is further discussed in a conversation between Hunt and curator Lisa Catt.¹ There, Hunt notes that,

Hinemihi remains dislocated, dismembered and displaced. The rematriation of Hinemihi to her homelands has involved ongoing advocacy from community members and over two decades of my own dedication. Negotiations for her safe return to Aotearoa are underway between the Tūhourangi Tribal Authority, Te Arawa, Ngāti Hinemihi, the British National Trust, Ngāti Rānana, Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga, Te Papa museum, New Zealand Māori Arts and Crafts Institute and community members.

As a member of Ngāti Hinemihi, Hunt is bound together with Hinemihi via whakapapa which transcends temporal and spiritual worlds. In contrast to Western approaches to archiving, whakapapa is a Māori epistemology or framework that determines identity and provides access to cellular memory and cultural lineages. Whakapapa binds together ancestors, environments and atua (spirits or gods) across time and is infused with deep cultural codes that serve to amplify Māori cultural knowledge while ensuring it is transmitted according to these ethics.² Hunt speaks to this,

As a descendant, I inherit and activate a role to keep Hinemihi ‘warm’; my way to enact that role is through dance and performance-making. Hinemihi is fundamental to me as an artist as we—Hinemihi and I—are bound together through genealogy and ancestral narratives. I speak, and she speaks. I dance, and she dances me.³

Here, Hunt signifies that Hinemihi is kept ‘warm’ through the vitality of her living body, or through ‘the warm blood in her veins’ that enables her to dance her meaning.⁴ The role of artist transforms into kaitiaki or caretaker as Hunt contrasts the politics of rematriation with the institutional desire to maintain ownership, destabilising both the intellectual and personal property principles that govern imperial archives and collections. Hunt created KŌIWI for a museum, arguably the crowning jewel of imperialism and European hegemony and the institutional perpetrator responsible for the dispossession of Hinemihi. This charged framing of KŌIWI allows Hunt to juxtapose the imperial value placed on objects in collections and archives with the intangible value of cultural memory.

The performance begins with Clark using a song of voice and drums to welcome the audience into a space that is dimly lit and shrouded in a haze of mist. Presented in the hybrid ‘grey space’ of the new building, KŌIWI parallels the grey of pumice stones with the institutional grey of the curtains and carpet and likens the mutated palate of the institution with the expired vitality of bones.⁵ Sound and lighting transform the room into a liminal environment, producing a threshold that allows Hunt to push through the ārai (veil) and ‘dance Hinemihi or Hinemihi to dance the space’.⁶

Continuing as a sequence of junctures and transitions, the performance oscillates between moments where the performers are active and passive, the effect varying between fervour and introspection. The dramaturgy of the performance plays out through choreography that accesses Māori cosmology, conjuring imagery through movement that supports the transmission of Hinemihi to the performers as the audience bears witness. Layers of archival research and memories were mapped by Hunt to create a script or notation system for the performance which gives shape and form to the different body states of Hinemihi. In a conversation with Hunt, she pulls out one thread regarding the Mangōpare (hammerhead shark), which is a key kaitiaki of Ngāti Hinemihi and is present in stories that recount the migration of Māori to Aotearoa.⁷

Hunt accumulates imagery related to her whakapapa through the construction of ‘prophetic bodies’ and the adornment of her performing body with an assemblage of bone, creating links between humans and animals and beyond—to elements and matter.⁸ The word ‘kōiwi’ may be translated to ‘skeletal remains’ or ‘burial place’ or ‘decedents’, demonstrating the value Māori ontologies place on human and non-human beings, matter and space.⁹ Reading KŌIWI through a new materialist lens further confounds the perception of objects as mere property, bestowing agency on the non-human and deriving meaning from the matter of things. Thus, the performance validates Hinemihi as both ancestor and house. In a final allegorical ceremonial act, Te Rauawhea Belvie approaches Hunt’s adorned body and snaps off individual bones, echoing the historical looting of Hinemihi’s carvings.

KŌIWI is an example of dance transcending the reductive materiality of Western approaches to archiving. Memory, a device of dance, can be accessed through embodiment as a methodology and can be transmitted between individuals and across generations. Time, a formal element of dance, locates movement through spaces unattached to the imperial perceptions of time, which shape Western narratives of colonisation and cultural flattening.

Braced with practical methodologies from artistic lineages (including Body Weather, improvisation, theatre and visual arts) and Māori epistemologies, Hunt deftly code shifts between the Māori conception of time, whakapapa and cosmology. The Māori word for ‘past’ is ‘mua’, which also means ‘in front’, alluding to the cyclical nature of their ‘event time’ and the potential to reinscribe history. For Hunt, the body is the chosen site to transcend linear time, with which she creates a circular, temporal and cellular embodied link with the Ngāti Hinemihi and redresses a speculative future.

Moving beyond her role of kaitiaki, Hunt becomes matakite (a seer or visionary) as she conjures sacred realms and memory. Hunt speaks of the influence of the Māori specificity towards Te Ao (light), Te Pō (darkness) and Te Kore (nothingness or the void) in her transmission of Hinemihi.¹⁰ In Māori belief systems, the void is a state that reaches far beyond the daily cycle of life. Hunt describes Te Kore as the realm where she waits for the transmission of the spirit of Hinemihi, which will then creatively guide Hunt through te ārai and manifest the spirit from the mua.¹¹

KŌIWI becomes a container for Hunt to practice and reach for Hinemihi. It is not intended to be chronological or comprehensive, nor a closed static system, but a dynamic reflection of her cultural identity that enables her to embody her ancestral history and reclaim Hinemihi’s future. Through KŌIWI, Hunt is calling for a new museum—a call echoed by Francoise Vergès—that doesn’t ‘fossilize history or memory’ or base itself on the ownership of objects.¹²

KŌIWI (2022) was commissioned by the Art Gallery of New South Wales as part of the exhibition Dreamhome: Stories of Art and Shelter. It was co-commissioned by Precarious Movements: Choreography and the Museum, an Australian Research Council Linkage Project hosted by The University of New South Wales, in partnership with the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Monash University Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Victoria, Tate UK and the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. It was supported by the Neilson Foundation and residency programs at the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Sydney, and at Marrugeku.