Artwork information

Drenched in an acidic, dusky glow, First Cinema Camera 5, continues Ngahuia Harrison’s expansion upon the ‘Fourth Cinema’, a proposition towards a Māori approach to lens based work by developed by Māori filmmaker and writer Barry Barclay (Ngāti Apa, Te Āti Haunui-a-Pāpārangi, Ngāti Hauiti). Barclay theorised a cinema grounded in mātauranga Māori, Māori knowledge systems, to express a Māori world view in principle and practice.

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Barclay’s idea of a Māori lens being on the land, looking towards the sea to observe a colonial power, is reversed by Harrison. She places her body and camera at sea to look back at the land from her kayak. This work takes a hallucinatory quality as a horizon line of waves merge with the side of an oil tanker in extreme close-up. Docked in the Whangarei harbour, these tankers deliver crude oil into Whangarei Harbor, Marsden Point Oil Refinery, later distributing the refined petrol, diesel, and jet fuel, nationally. With a near photomontage effect, Harrison creates a landscape of an industrial kind.