Ngahina Hohaia (Taranaki Iwi, Te Ati Awa, Ngāti Mutunga, Ngāti Ruanui, Aotearoa New Zealand) – Manawa Whenua, 2026

Manawa Whenua takes its title from a Māori cultural concept describing an unfailing underground spring, the source of whakapapa, the genealogical ties linking people, ancestors and place. The central imagery is of the restorative waters that flow from the artist’s ancestral mountain Taranaki, a place of profound cultural and spiritual significance for her tribes. The installation layers white feather plumes gathered from albatross, the largest of all seabirds, renowned for their ability to endure extreme conditions and traverse the expanse of oceans before returning to land to nest and nurture their young. Manawa Whenua offers a visual manifestation of a proverb for inter-generational strength and reassurance that can be found in a well-spring, as a site of continuity and resistance that will always rise despite forces that seek to suppress it.

Legacies of resistance and collective memory shape Ngahina Hohaia’s practice. A Māori artist from a lineage of activists, she draws on inherited knowledge systems and tools for survival to create large-scale fibre and multi-sensory installations. Her works testify as material witnesses to the persistence of colonial violence and are conceived as means to restore territories, both physical and as spaces of knowledge. They function simultaneously as memorial forms and acts of renewal.