Overview
Exhibiting Ourselves explored how New Zealanders have projected a sense of national identity to the rest of the world through major international trade expos.
This exhibition picked up on the dramatic design contrasts seen in the 1851 Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, London; the 1906 Christchurch Exhibition; the 1940 Dominion Exhibition in Wellington; and the 1992 World Expo in Seville, Spain. Each display had a sense of the bold architectural statements and images from its own particular era. The steel and glass, red velvet and gold of Crystal Palace; the Edwardian archways, pastel colours, and photomurals of Christchurch; the Art Deco curves, neon, and electricity age of Wellington; and the art rock and yacht-sailing imagery of Seville.
The magic of the real and the replica lived in Exhibiting Ourselves. From the remarkable 1851 display of a Maori war pā, modelled by a survivor of the ill-fated attack on Ohaeawai, to the hugely popular replica crown jewels of 1940. The jewels were a powerful symbol of New Zealanders’ love of royalty and all things British.
Queen Victoria exclaimed that Crystal Palace was ‘one of the wonders of the world’. Indeed, many considered it to be a marvellous engineering feat, made from untested materials on a building four times the size of St Paul’s Cathedral. More than six million people visited the exhibition, one where raw and unprocessed New Zealand products and images of its unspoilt imagery sharply contrasted with the surrounding industrial environment.
1906 – these were times of economic and social confidence and certainty. Images of New Zealand’s Premier Richard ‘King Dick’ Seddon and his elaborate royal court regalia featured in Exhibiting Ourselves, together with beautiful Pacific objects. Displays relating to workers’ housing and sweated labour contrasted with male pastimes such as rifle shooting, sports contests, and military manoeuvres. Women were largely depicted as moral and social guardians.
This was an exhibition about national confidence and expression, a natural progression from the two complementary exhibitions: Passports, which examines why, how, and when people came to New Zealand, and On the Sheep’s Back, which portrayed how New Zealanders’ lives were influenced by the wool industry.