Tāme Iti - Delaney Davidson Collaboration
As part of his residency at Massey University Delaney Davidson in collaboration with Tāme Iti presented two shows in Te Whanganui a Tara as an extension of Tāme Iti’s iconic work with the sentence “I Will Not Speak Māori”.
On September 5th Suite Gallery was host to an exhibition of limited edition Silkscreen prints aswell as photography.
And on September 13th the Engine Room at Massey hosted an exhibition of hand finished silk screen prints and sculpture.
From 28th August through til 18th September they mounted a nationwide poster campaign.
“I
Will
Not
Speak
Māori
You gotta write the 100 lines on the black board
And then you have to count it.
To make sure you have written 100
Yeah I must have done a few of those,
Could easily be 500
But I also had to pick up horse shit,
On a wheelbarrow
I stopped speaking after that
After picking up horse shit and doing a few hundred lines
I stopped. I’m not gonna do any more hundred lines
You know this happened at school
For Koro.
For Nanny,
And eveybody else round the motu
It didn’t just happen in Rūātoki”
Tāme Iti claims as his own this weaponised language that was once used against him and transforms it into a tool for learning, awareness and self growth. Taking the lines he was forced to write on the blackboard as punishment for speaking Te Reo at school, Tāme turns them into a tohu.
Following the kaupapa Tāme has been working with for the last 50 years, Delaney and Tāme collaborate to present I Will Not Speak Māori as a propaganda poster, bringing the message into monumental and corporate language, echoing Tāme’s work with Billy Apple.
Playing with the ideas of tapu and noa, the cliches of white and black and the sanctified idea of law, the artists infiltrate the very territory the message originally came from.
I Will Not Speak Māori is an invitation to consider attitudes that exist today and highlights the remaining reluctance to speak Reo Māori, or accept it as an official language of Aotearoa.
