Meet Pelenakeke Brown
Twenty-two of Aotearoa’s best ascendant artists and collectives are showing work at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki right now in Aotearoa Contemporary, an exhibition celebrating a new guard of creatives and ideas.
The Art Paper × Aotearoa Contemporary presents conversations with the artists, exploring the work they're showing and what they’re drawing inspiration from. Here we speak to artist PELENAKEKE BROWN about her work, Raking Scissor Grip.
Photography: Felix Jack
Pelenakeke Brown, Raking Scissor Grip. Performance view, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Aotearoa Contemporary, 6 July–20 October 2024. Commissioned by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Photo: Felix Jack
You often cite crip time and vā as your core conceptual frameworks. How do you define those terms within your work?
For me, the vā means relationality between people, objects and their environments. That relationships can shift and change as the context changes. Crip time is about bending time to your body, relating differently and navigating the world in different ways. I love that these concepts overlap for me and I like to find places where I can find these two ideas occurring concurrently. I also like to push what might be seen as a poem, a visual work or even a choreographic score/performance.
Many years ago, I heard academic Carrie Sandahl speak about the inherent multidisciplinary practice of disabled artists; as their bodies change their work might shift discipline, and they are often award-winning in multiple disciplines. This resonated with me as my work crosses disciplines depending on the context of the project and how I’m feeling and that approach reflects working within the vā as well as crip time. Making work that could fit multiple categories feels like a ‘crip’ approach to making.
I’ve explored these ideas with the computer keyboard, poetry, audio description, performance and even when directing works or thinking about how people experience works. Regardless of form my work is always interrogating these two ideas and I always begin with them when beginning a new project.
The French film director Julia Ducournau calls dance a technology of “body empathy,” in that seeing someone else dance often triggers this instinctive desire to move your body too, with that person. I wonder if this resonates with you and your thinking about the connections between creative community and mutual aid.
Oh definitely, thanks for introducing these ideas and I love that, the suggestion of an ‘instinctive desire to move’. For me, I am a reluctant performer or ‘dance’ artist, but as a disabled person if I wasn’t making a performance work I might not move my body and it is so important. So, having dance and performance as part of my practice is a form of reminding myself to look after myself. I love too, thinking about dance in unexpected ways, or finding words that I think are also dance terms like, linger. I guess for me performing itself is a pretty selfish thing to do, but I’m interested in different states of movement, or as Kayla Hamilton calls it “non-dance.” There’s also something really intimate about making work together with someone.
When I think about mutual aid within creative community I think about working in accessible ways (making a work across a extended period of time, not having long days, starting late, covering artists transport costs, paying disabled artists a higher wage to account for their higher disability costs, offering transport for audience members, and even making the work accessible and beautiful).
I’ve been working on a show called Siblings since 2022, I was asked at first to be the access consultant and now I am working as one of the directors. Our cast are members from the disabled community who do not have a lot of experience in the arts, but we are creating a work that is accessible in the process as well as accessible for the audience. I love thinking about exercises or ideas that will resonate or creating games that don’t focus on sight for those in our cast who have low vision, or creating scripts from the talanoa that we hold about ideas around agency, and power etc. Our cast are incredibly poetic when we discuss these ideas, rather than asking them to write them down. All of that I love. This week we talked about public vs private and helping—that how we are in public is completely different to how we are at home and how politeness really shows up as a mask in our public lives. How the urge to help can be a beautiful thing as well as a way to be self-serving and hold power. Mutual aid works when there are authentic relationships and asking for help is seen not as a weakness but as a reciprocal mutual relationship.
The work you are presenting in Aotearoa Contemporary is the latest of several using black out strategies in respect to your medical records. You began ‘Excavātion’ in 2018, which consists of both choreography interpreting letters sent between different doctors about you, and the letters themselves, blacked out except for those words that related directly to the body and, tacitly, to dance. I loved that the tools you offered for ‘excavātion’ in this work were forks and spoons. Can you talk a little about these instruments, and their relation to the audio aspect of the work?
When I was approached to contribute this work to the exhibition I wanted to re-imagine this work in the context of my art practice in 2024. The original work had been about blacking out/redaction, and I thought the opposite to this was to reveal. I had seen artist Autumn Knight use this strategy in her work Lottery Ticket (2023), of paint that was then scratched off; her objective was to ask the audience to take on the labour to create the work. This time, I wanted them to do the task of revealing the poems underneath, and for eventually everything to be scratched off. I thought about how we often use keys and coins to scratch, which isn’t accessible to everyone. I wanted any audience member, regardless of hand function or height, to be able to engage with the works. So, I selected assistive tools, spoons and forks with thick grip handles, as well as tools to help lift mattresses, a peeler that can be used with the ring finger. Some of these tools are quite beautiful even though they have such an everyday function. The auditory part was just a lucky component that occurred through the act. I hadn’t planned it, I was more focused on offering tools that anyone visiting could engage with the work. I love, too, how when the work is scratched off the paint chips that fall on the floor are beautiful and a marker of time. But there is definitely something satisfying about scratching the works, and hearing the sound that it makes. I guess its a reminder about how we are always marking time and the sound adds to the act.
Some of the first things that had been scratched into the participatory wall work by the audience were the rallying calls ‘Toitū te Tiriti’ and ‘Free Palestine’ which brought to mind Te Waka Hōrua’s action at Te Papa last year, and the politics of censorship and conjecture that it thrust to the fore. How do you think about your own acts of censorship, of amending the official record?
Pelenakeke Brown, Raking Scissor Grip. Performance view, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Aotearoa Contemporary, 6 July–20 October 2024. Commissioned by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Courtesy of the artist
I loved seeing those messages, too. When I was first reading my medical file in 2016 it was when Trump was President and I was living in the US at the time. At first reading, I was affected by the medical racism my mother experienced and learning more about my medical history. But, the more I read and digested my file, I was struck by the intimacy that it documented. My file held a record of my personal relationships from birth until adulthood, some that I was unaware of. For example, I found out that my mum was undocumented at the time of my birth and that there were many files from immigration, including a letter to immigration court that said she shouldn’t be deported because, as I was a citizen, they couldn’t seperate us. At this time in the US, there were many stories in the media of disabled children being separated from their undocumented parents. So for me, I came away learning so much more about the relationships in my history that I had been unaware of, and many issues that were happening during Trump’s presidency around anti-immigration—that this was also my history. My file documented the loss of my language. When I was first seen, they note that I only speak in Sāmoan. It recorded, too, all my name changes; I had my mum’s maiden name, Lela’ulu, when I was born, which was later changed to Brown. The doctors would often make a note of my humour and as a adult reading my file those throw away personal observations from the doctors were really informative and telling. So, the official record actually was really intimate in my case, or that’s what I resonated with.
After digesting the record itself I wanted to engage with it, and the strategy of creating black out poems worked. It was 2019 and at the time I was trying to make a new performance work so I started by selecting words related to the body and blacking out the rest. And what emerged were these really poetic works that I also used as choreographic scores. For example, ‘raking scissor grip’ is one of the phrases that a doctor had written. So again, I loved how I could find this new reading of this text, highlighting the relational words, and call attention to the intimacy, defiance and humour that was already documented within my file. It became this important way of changing the archive for me as I found this new narrative of resistance within the black out poems that felt like a powerful way to re-write my archive and find a different story than what they had documented.
We are asking all of the Aotearoa Contemporary artists this question, but I’m especially interested in how you interpret it through the lenses of crip time and vā: what does ‘contemporary’ mean to you?
I love thinking about time and relationships, and often thinking about the overlaps between ideas and even time. So for me contemporary means (at this specific moment, anyway) the current iteration of that work or idea. That works that might be classed as contemporary have gone through many iterations, and that I’m interested in the slow development of time, work, ideas and, of course, relationships.
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Pelenakeke Brown (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores the intersections between disability theory and Sāmoan concepts. Her practice spans visual art, text, and performance. She is from Aotearoa and is an Sāmoan/Pakehā crip artist.
Aotearoa Contemporary is on at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki from 6 July–20 October 2024. Entry is free.
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