Kereama Taepa, WahARoa, 2022
Augmented Reality, digital/interactive experience accessed through Instagram using the QR code.
Kereama Taepa’s practice is centred on the overlap between traditional Māori art forms and knowledge with digital technologies and spaces. Working with media such as 3D printing and Virtual Reality, he fashions the digital landscape as an indigenous one, challenging the idea of the web being an anonymous space and history being erasable at the click of a button.
By scanning a QR code displayed at the entry to the ticketing marquee, visitors will be able to access Taepa’s latest work, WahARoa, a ‘carved’ gateway rendered using Augmented Reality. This follows the tikanga of a pōwhiri.
The work recreates the crucial moment of encounter at the threshold of the marae, where visitor and host alike acknowledge one another’s mana, exchange intentions, and call upon atua to witness the meeting.
WahARoa embodies a kaupapa of honouring and fostering connections between past, present, and future, and the physical and spiritual worlds, using familiar digital technologies to encourage visitors’ consideration of these things as they arrive at the island to start walking the sculpture trail.
