Is & ihi – Israel Randell on curating IHI

IHI features the work of three emerging New Zealand artists, Axel Iva, Te Ara Minhinnick and Ming Ranginui, all playing with ideas of transitions and transformation. Co-curator Israel Randell explains the background to the show.

Is, you developed IHI with Pātaka lead curator, Ioana Gordon-Smith. Is it difficult to co-curate an exhibition?

Ioana and I came together to curate something new and fresh, and we’ve been running on vibes and lofty ideas, coupled with lots of support from the team at Pātaka to realise our ideas. It’s ebbed and flowed from there. Ioana is onsite at Pātaka, so she has had to handle a lot of the nitty-gritty details.

It’s been a fluid, and successful, co-curatorial process.

The concept of ihi is used in the exhibition to describe the magnetism enacted through the artists' work. It's more commonly explained as an internal force or ‘X-factor’. How did you decide to base the exhibition around it?

I always begin my projects with the artists, not the concept, and the starting point for this exhibition was these three emerging artists, Axel Iva, Te Ara Minhinnick and Ming Ranginui, who Ioana and I were intrigued and excited by. So, we based the exhibition around them – they are the exhibition.

The concept of ihi came to us once our ideas for the show were further developed. Ihi talks about the magnetic force that is cultivated within. So, it can describe an inner force, a type of internal magnetism that emerges from an individual and drives them.

For this show, we expanded on that to acknowledge the ways the artists use ihi in their artworks to draw us in. We also ask: what happens when you put these materials together and these artists in conversation with each other? How does the meaning of an object change when its environment or location moves? How do materials and forms change through space or time? In the exhibition, materials appear in unexpected places, and familiar forms appear altered, reshaped by new contexts.

The concept of ihi emerges in subtle ways, through how the works are positioned and an attention to detail.