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1 For many years engineering students at the University of Auckland performed a drunken 'haka' designed to desecrate & mock Maori culture. Today two Auckland art graduates, Teghan Burt & Jerome Ngan-Kee, are performing a similar desecration at a gallery off K Rd. (thread)
2 Burt & Ngan-Kee run Mercy Pictures, which is showing an exhibition organised by Nina Power, a UK thinker who began her career on the activist left of the political spectrum & has moved to the alt-right. The show juxtaposes flags of indigenous peoples with symbols of fascism.
3 Inside Mercy Pictures, the Tino Rangatiratanga banner, which has flown over so many hikoi & occupations, has been placed beside the emblem Brenton Tarrant drew on the gun he used in Christchurch. The flag of the Tuhoe people sits next to the slogan 'It's Okay to be White'.
4 The distinction between tapu & noa, sacred & profane, is central to Polynesian culture, & p'haps to all cultures. AU engineers knew this, when they set out to insult Maori by wearing blackface & drawing profanities on their bodies before their 'haka'.
5 By putting fascist emblems beside sacred flags Mercy Picture also creates what @MorganGodfery calls 'a degradation of the mana & mauri of Maori'. @AntiFascistAkl notes how hurtful it is for NZers to see a symbol of Tarrant, only months after the terrorist was sentenced.
6 Unlike Power, the pair who run Mercy Pictures are not motivated by bigotry. Like many bourgeois kids who drift through Elam, they have come to treat art as a parlour game, desensitized to the power of symbols & metaphors. They are playing with fascism, not advocating it.
7 But symbols have power. Images have power. In 1979 protesters calling themselves He Taua smashed into a room at Auckland University where students were rehearsing their racist 'haka'. A score of students were sent to hospital. The 'haka' has never since been performed.
8 It is possible for artists to use fascist imagery, & to try to understand the power of that imagery. But they must work carefully, & they must not lay claim to what does not belong to them. The work of Tongan-NZ artist Benjamin Work is exemplary.
9 In a series of paintings, Work has blended fascist, Stalinist, & imperialist motifs with symbolism from ancient Tonga. Unlike Nina Power, Work has the right to use the indigenous imagery in his paintings. I wrote about Work's 'Tongan swastika' here: http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2014/04/kim-dotcom-benjamin-work-and-tongan.html
