The migration

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

This work, typical of a number of social realist paintings by Robyn Kahukiwa from the 1970s, is a probing commentary on Polynesian urban drift. Around the middle of the twentieth century, many Māori and later Pacific families sought employment in urban centres like Porirua, where the artist lived and taught art at Mana College. In The migration Kahukiwa appears as both the observer of, and the spokesperson for, local Māori and Pacific blue-collar workers and their families. She had a practical understanding of issues confronting Polynesian migrants and their children, whom she taught: alienation, cultural loss, poverty, mental exhaustion and a growing identity crisis. These are the themes she explores in this painting.

While Pacific peoples had to uproot from other countries to resettle in New Zealand, Māori urban drift involved the possibility of ngā tangata whenua, the people of the land, becoming alienated within their own country — Aotearoa. The title of Kahukiwa’s painting asks how such a predicament might be possible. To convey her sense of indignation, the artist depicts her new ‘arrivals’ in a highly theatrical, confrontational manner. She pushes the heavily pregnant mother — carrying another mouth to feed — out at the viewer. The tipped-up room appears to be borrowed from Vincent van Gogh’s 1888 paintings of his bedroom in Arles, France.

Figures, furniture, odd angles and a singular perspectival system guide the eye past various props crowded into the tiny domestic space and out into a surreal, timeless landscape. The gesture of the father is eloquent: with his back turned, head bowed and hands on his neck, we feel for his struggle as the sole breadwinner. The people immediately behind him, outside the doll’s-house view of the interior, stand motionless and disconnected. They cast long shadows on an empty landscape. Are they witnesses to the difficulties this family is undergoing or are they other new migrants leaving their homelands and about to face the same predicament? With the gaze of the pregnant woman directly engaging us, Kahukiwa refuses to allow the viewer to ignore the harrowing social, cultural and economic dilemma depicted here.

Rangihīroa Panoho