Friday 27 September 2024
Ana Iti (Te Rarawa) has won the Walters Prize 2024 for her formidable sculptural and sonic installation A resilient heart like the mānawa, 2024.
The announcement was made this evening by this year’s esteemed international judge, Professor Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, during a celebration at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Ana Iti receives a cash prize of $50,000 for the honour of Aotearoa New Zealand’s national contemporary art prize.
Professor Ndikung, who serves as the director and chief curator of Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin, says: “Ana Iti’s work A resilient heart like the mānawa has been singled out because of the radicality of its manifestation. Stripped to the bare minimum, the work shares something in common with great poetry: the ability of accessing multiple universes through the availability of a few words.
He continues, “The concreteness of metals of the de-concretised wharf infrastructure that stand majestically in the gallery express the weight of histories of industry, of extractivism, of capitalism, of the colonial enterprise and of connections in Rāwene that was transformed into a timber town with a mill and shipyards in the early 1800s. While in a very delicate balancing act, the kauri timber floats almost unhinged over the heads of the visitors."
“In [the work] was the idea of drawing in space. The feet of each of the metal structures, just like the bodies thereof, and the floating wood seemed like abstract drawings in space. Constellations. Compositions."
“The notion of the mānawa that encapsulates several meanings — the heart and the mangrove, thus the title of the work could be understood as A Resilient Heart Like the Heart or the A Resilient Heart Like the Mangrove seemed to further ground the poetics of the work."
