A hybrid made of both, 2025

Exhibited in Sharjah Biennial 16: to carry, The Clinic, Al Dhaid, Sharjah, curated by Zeynep Öz

A hybrid made of both is a multi-component installation by Ana Iti (Te Rarawa) that considers language and its dissemination. Four boxes of cast sand have been pressed with special letterforms, used in the historic Māori language newspaper Te Pīpīwharauroa He Kupu Whakamarama in the early twentieth century. While the Māori alphabet is made up of 15 letters from the Roman alphabet, these special characters were intended to convey phonetic sounds from the spoken Māori language in text. The letterforms  “are symbolic of the idea that Te Reo Māori could not be perfectly slotted into something already existing,” says Iti. A text written by Iti, painted on the wall in locally sourced clay, continues to explore the possibilities and limits of language and communication. Both artworks negotiate Iti’s own relationship to the Māori language, which she is learning as an adult, and each represent “ways to be close with my language outside of my ability at that time to learn it and speak it.”

Iti describes A dusty handrail on the track (2021) as “a blackout poem made from found phrases”. Each frame of the 11-minute-long video is the scanned page of a book with most of the text blanked out, so that only a single highlighted word and the sentence it belongs to are visible. The scans are taken from three books by female Māori authors: Keri Hulme’s Te Kaihou The Windeater (1986), J. C. Sturm’s House of the Talking Cat (1983) and June Mitchell’s Amokura (1978). These books, all early examples of fiction by Māori women to be published in English, and their authors have been important influences on Iti. “They are all exquisite practitioners in their form”, she says, “and though the words are in English their thoughts and the spirit of their work are Māori.” Iti has searched the three books for specific words: ‘looking,’ ‘path,’ ‘search,’ ‘track,’ ‘trying,’ ‘waiting,’ ‘undo,’ ‘progress’.“These words and the sentences built around them, combine to express a feeling of looking for something, an attempt to find the path that has been laid ahead.”

- Hanahiva Rose