After the absence of its national pavilion in 2024, New Zealand makes its return to Venice with Fiona Pardington’s Taharaki Skyside, a major solo presentation by one of the country’s most lauded photographers.
An artist of both Māori and Scottish descent, Pardington continues her photographic examination of objects that possess “mana” or power for Māori people. Inspired by a research trip to Antarctica, in 2024 Pardington produced Te taha o te rangi/The edge of the heavens, an exhibition of photographs of taxidermied birds from South Canterbury Museum Timaru’s collection for Auckland’s Starkwhite gallery.
For Venice, the artist turned her attention to New Zealand’s critically endangered and extinct bird species, producing 17 towering portraits of taxidermied birds, including the extinct whēkau or laughing owl and the kākāpō, a ground-dwelling parrot, of which only 235 species remain. Birds are “spiritual messengers” in Māori culture, explains Pardington: “They’re talking to the ancestors, they bring knowledge, they bring insight, they’re portentous.”
A self-described “animist”, Pardington is under no misconceptions about the devastating impact of introduced species on New Zealand’s natural environment. When she is not in the studio, she is eradicating Bennett’s wallabies, a kangaroo-like marsupial introduced for sport hunting in 1874, from her property.
• Istituto Provinciale per I’Infanzia Santa Maria della Pietà di Venezia, Riva degli Schiavoni, Castello 3702