Whenua Kore

Whenua Kore

  • Artist

    Robert Jahnke

  • Production Date

    2019

  • Medium

    lacquer, mild steel, powder coated aluminium, neon, mirror pane, mirror, laminated glass, toughened glass, electrical components

  • Size

    250 x 1535 x 1535 mm

  • Credit

    Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, purchased 2019

  • Accession Number

    C2020/1/1

  • Accession Date

    16 Mar 2020

  • Department

    New Zealand Art

  • Classification

    Object

  • Collection

    Chartwell

  • Chartwell Notes

    Images Courtesy of the artist & PAULNACHE, Gisborne


    Print archive: The void and its parody: Thinking alongside Robert Jahnke’s Whenua kore, by Carl Mika

  • Description

    I roto i te *Whenua Kore*, 2019 ka whakamahia te rama haukura me te whakaata ara-kotahi ki te miramira i te nui whakaharahara, i te mutunga kore, o te wā, o te wāhi. Ka huri haere i taua mahi, ka takahuri, ka pīoioi, ka whātorotoro ānō nei he noke e takaokeoke ana ki te poka tōrere. E ai ki te Māori, ko tā te wā he whakatuwhera i te ao mutunga kore e tūhura ai i te hononga o te tangata ki tōna tauoranga, ki tōna hinengaro. Kei konei e kitea ana te wā hei tītohu huri haere e noho ai te ‘tīmatanga’ me te ‘mutunga’ hei kaupapa hāngai kei roto i te angawā. I roto i tēnei mahi toi, kei te tirohia ēnei kaupapa e Robert Jahnke, ka tīmata te kōrero mō te whakaaro o te Māori e pā ana ki te wā.

    *Whenua Kore*, 2019 incorporates neon light and one-way mirrored glass to emphasise the expansive and endless nature of time and space. When you move around the work, its circular neon rings bend, sway and stretch like a worm hole into the abyss. For Māori, time presents a world of possibility that is continually revealing our relationship to wider concepts about existence and consciousness. Here, time can be understood as a cyclic phenomenon where ‘beginning’ and ‘end’ are related ideas within a time-scape. Exploring these concepts, Robert Jahnke presents an open-ended conversation on Māori notions of time.

Exhibition history

More work by Robert Jahnke