Shamefully, I've not participated in ANY of @MuseumsUnlocked but for Day 126, ‘casts, copies and forgeries' here's my contribution!

This is a plaster cast copy of a life mask gifted to the British Museum by Gov. Sir George Grey. It's currently on display in @ExploreWellcome

It represents Taupua Te Whanoa, a Ngati Whakaue man from Rotorua who consented to a casting and it is one of many plaster cast copies of the original that are currently held in museums across the world.

This copy is displayed in @ExploreWellcome's exhibition, 'Medicine Man'.

In the gallery, the mask is displayed next to a piece of tattooed human skin to represent global tattooing practices. This curation also gestures towards the European fascination with - and fear of - Indigenous tattooing practices they encountered in the Pacific.

The mask is displayed with little interpretation. The label simply reads: 'plaster cast of a man from the Arawa tribe, showing facial tattooing'.

This leaves the item difficult to register as representing a real person & instead reduces the representation to a "colonial curio".

On the website an additional clue is revealed. Here, the subject is identified as 'Tauque Te Whanoa' and the donor is 'G. Guy'.

This case of mistaken identity made it v. difficult for me to uncover any additional story about the person represented. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/e2f7qb9e 

After coming across references to Te Taupua (rather than Tauque Te!) I contacted @Te_Papa to ask if this was who was represented in the @ExploreWellcome mask.

With their help we recovered more information that we can now restore to the representation of Te Taupua in the gallery.

According to this, Te Taupua descended from Pukaki of Ngati Whakaue, Rotorua. He met with Sir George Grey at Te Ngae (the Bay of Plenty) & consented to have his likeness taken in the form of a cast. This was a difficult procedure, but apparently he expressed no issue with it.

Life masks of Maori peoples in museum collections are often related to the violent history of toi moko appropriation. When I first encountered the mask, I assumed this was the colonial history it pointed to. However, with careful research and decolonial methodology - (1/2)

(2/2) - we see this item points us to consider the liberatory strategies Indigenous peoples *always* found to resist and navigate colonialism, and to assert their agency. ( @sadiahqureshi)

The lack of information in the gallery turns Te Taupua into a "displayed object" (Qureshi, 2011). By restoring this information and imagining Te Taupua as a kind of virtual cosmopolitan traveller who sent his representation to London, we can recover him as a person with a story.