Over a year of too much weather, artworks radiate outward weather signals and inward presentiments, heat, wind, grief and salt rain. Huarere, the weather, conjures rere, flying, and immersion in the fullness, hua, our saturated atmosphere. Artists give us means to radically imagine meteorological non-beings and other species, while in the midst of human struggles with the ‘one-in-one-hundred-year’ weather events that happen, paradoxically, every few months.
Huarere: Weather Eye, Weather Ear at Te Tuhi is a ‘weather station’, a physical enclosure for six online ‘weather reports’ that took place from Matariki 2022 through Koanga, spring, and Ngahuru, autumn, equinoxes and return us now to Ihu o Hinetakurua, the winter solstice, 2023. The oceanic forces of Te Moana Nui A Kiwa drive our rapid weather and animate the artworks across shorelines from Aotearoa to Tonga, Rarotonga, Samoa and Niue. Winds whisper and scream: kupu, words, tohu, signs, rise and fade within the heated, damp atmospheres of our inundating isles.
Our ‘weather ear’ attunes to sounds of birds and thunder – agitated, flying away – while our ‘weather eye’ alerts our senses, along with scientific instruments of weather observation. When the ‘atmospheric river’ entered our common lexicon, with each successive cyclone or deluge our bodies hooked into aches and scents of rain on the one hand, and the pulsing electronic blobs that creep across rain radars on screens on the other. In this exhibition, hydrophones or cameras reveal the spirits in glacial lakes and sea foams, while diurnal weathers spur the wind-cry of aeolian choirs and the aleatory electronic scores of remote sensors. Many of the artworks are less contained, expository events than un-presentational, ceaselessly rolling onward, rendering us sometimes helpless and sometimes hope-full.
Weather is not just happening to us, we, humans, are happening to the weather. While the rising debt of the climate crisis is not evenly spread amongst all humanity, across the planet we share in innumerable losses: whenua, biome, creatures, people. Huarere: Weather Eye, Weather Ear is Te Tuhi’s contribution to the World Weather Network, a platform connecting 28 arts organisations across the earth to document their collective experience of the new weathers. To signal the presence of this network, we have invited Emirati artist Nujoom Alghanem to present an image and sound work from her documentary film Honey, Rain and Dust (2016). Her work, like a postcard from a different clime, is inscribed with the Emirati experience of endless blazing Summer, full of sounds of a desert landscape, and the agitated bees that maintain life.
Links
→ Essay by Janine Randerson
→ List of works
→ About the artists
→ Huarere: Weather Eye, Weather Ear digital programme
→ Huarere: Weather Eye, Weather Ear e-publication