Rangi Kipa (Te Āti Awa, Taranaki, Ngāti Mutunga, Ngāti Tama) – Māripi, 2024

Rangi Kipa’s installation brings together ritual objects carved from whale teeth and bone, tracing twenty years of practice at the ocean foreshore. In Māori customary practice, stranded whales are understood as gifts from Tangaroa, the Māori deity of the ocean, and their material is reserved for powerful signs of leadership. Successive legal regimes disrupted these relationships, restricting customary access to whales and the use of their remains. Māori advocates worked to ensure that stranded whales could be received and cared for according to tikanga, Māori customary law and practice, enabling practices long placed under pressure to be renewed. Yet possession and international movement of whale material remain tightly regulated. Bringing these works to Lyon therefore required Kipa to negotiate legal frameworks across borders, exposing the continuing tension between state regulation and Māori responsibilities to the environment.

Rangi Kipa is a contemporary Māori artist. He has been instrumental in the renewal of Māori cultural practices and visual languages suppressed by British colonisation in Aotearoa New Zealand.