Kākano + Wahine = Taiao

Noa Noa Von Bassewitz

29/07/26 - 22/08/26

Using the self made thinking tool of auto-archaeology, the artist has excavated the archive of her female being-ness. Through a making practice involving body, mind and ritual the performance sculptures deliver an experience of embodied memory. 

Like a limpet with proto-ocular sight the artist has turned her eyes inwards, downwards and pulled up a mountain of m-otherhood. The works speak to an anti-culture stance, a “no thank you” to patriarchal, capitalistic and human centric norms, and accepted ways of seeing. The installation is an invitation to reimagine and experience a connected, female, creative force. Their air-filled bodies glow and breathe, taking up space softly. The strong female-heart seeds are stroking the universe.

The work retells a personal journey utilising sculptural body doubles. The project talks to the female experience of aging, emotional labour, female transformative energy. The work is both enveloping and containing experience.  Yearning and giving voice to the need for female self-determination. 

Noa Noa was tangentially inspired by Tracy Chapman's song, “Mountain of things”, Clarissa Pinkola Estes Life/Death/Rebirth cycles of womanhood. The research has drawn on world mythology and philosophical critiques of culture including Deleuze and Guattari Rhizomatic chapters in Mille Plateaux. The conceptual framework reaches for unlikely bedfellows and tucks them all in together.

Noa Noa von Bassewitz is a Wellingtonian artist who contains Maori, German, Scottish cultural roots. She has planted many sons on this earth. In 2025 she completed her MFA at Massey University with Distinction. Her multi decade printmaking practice has evolved into sculptural, and moving image practice as part of her research into larger, emotive visual languages.  The core of her practice is an act of recycling, ideas, materials, motifs. Making is her way to connect with more than the observed world, a way of stroking Mauri into being.

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Wāhine (woman) is the bearer of Te Kākano (the seeds). She is Rock Mother, memory carrier in her mitochondrial DNA. Here she celebrates the third age of woman: last blood, last eggs. Rock Mother’s transformative desire is to return to the ocean—to the beginning, to the end.

Wāhine gifts her spent fertility back to the source of all life. She lets entropy play, welcoming the, softening. Her body begins to break down as she. begins the long journey home, returning to Te Taiao.

Wāhine + Kākano = Te Taiao is a call for the mokopuna of the future to hear the memory of rock mothers idea-seeds singing  out of her bones.

Count the days. Live the lives. Remember we are all one when we breathe.

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Photography by Belinda Whitta

Poster design by Harris Wilson