Nina Tonga: creating space

For a moment in April 2024, Dr Nina Tonga is in three places at once: Hawai’i, Venice, Aotearoa.

Technically, she’s sitting at a computer at the University of Hawai’i in Mānoa, where she’s an assistant professor of art history, fostering the next generation of Pacific curators and academics. But – thanks to a message from Mataaho Collective suggesting she jump on the livestream – she’s at the Venice Biennale, witnessing the Māori art collective receive the Golden Lion for Best Participant in the International Exhibition.

The award, one of the most celebrated in the global art world, is for a momentous woven installation that Nina helped make a reality on another land, in another job, in another life. Called Takapau, the work was originally commissioned for the exhibition Mataaho Collective: Te Puni Aroaro, which Nina curated when she was curator of contemporary art at Te Papa.

Her lesson from the Venice experience was to trust her gut. It was her gut, she says, that told her Mataaho Collective “were creating a work that needed to be seen not only by Aotearoa but by the world”.

Curating such a major exhibition is a complex exercise. Part of a curator’s varied job includes building trust with the artists; researching history; getting and keeping the institution on board; and ensuring the artists’ processes are honoured. In this case, among other things, Nina and Te Papa supported a wānanga art-making process, and had a whole new wall in the gallery built.

“While I love exhibition making, I think how you get there matters. It matters so deeply,” says Nina.

‘Getting there’ involves building trust and honouring relationships – across life, not just projects. For example, Nina built relationships in Hawai’i when curating the 2019 Honolulu Biennial (today called the Hawai’i Triennial). Now, working in Mānoa, “feels like I’m returning to tend to those relationships again”.

From a family “very proud to be from the villages of Vaini and Kolofo’ou”, Nina visited Tonga several times in her childhood. She also played with dozens of cousins at her grandparents’ house in Mt Wellington, where her grandmother would turn the TV off and forbid English. Now Nina speaks Tongan as much as she can.

“There are ways of thinking I can’t quite translate [from Tongan]. English fails me so many times. So there’s some comfort in being able to process my thoughts in another language.”

Nina talks about “the places where you sleep well” – where she feels connected and at ease: Tonga, Hawai’i. While aware of “the realities of living on land illegally occupied by America”, she loves that “the Pacific, our place in it, is so embedded in Hawai’i. Culturally, linguistically, this notion of our connection to the Pacific at large isn’t a question there.”

Nina approaches curating Kānaka Maoli (Hawaiian) art in Hawai’i in similar ways to curating Māori art in Aotearoa.

“I think for everybody, it’s our role to be in service, particularly when we’re not on our own islands, to create space for Indigenous voices.”

Nina was the first Pacific person to be Te Papa Curator Contemporary Art, but after five years in that role (and nine years at Te Papa), she has returned to teaching.

One motivation, she says, was “creating space for somebody else” at Te Papa; another pulled her back into academia: lifting the number of Indigenous people working in the arts across the world.

It’s an urgent goal for Nina, who is the sole Pacific art historian in her department, as she was at Te Papa.

“I’m not interested in being ‘the one’ or ‘the first’. With each new role, the job becomes ensuring that I’m not the only one or the last.”

In this, Nina is following her own University of Auckland lecturers, “pillars in our community”, such as associate professors Caroline Vercoe (the main supervisor of Nina’s doctorate, completed in 2021) and Ngarino Ellis.

“When you see a Māori or Pacific lecturer in the front of your classroom, I cannot say how validating that is,” says Nina. “That’s quite special about the University of Auckland – the way they’ve really brought through Pacific and Māori academics who have also then gone on to teach others who are now in the field.”

Nina was drawn to study art history at Epsom Girls Grammar, as a graphics student interested in architecture history. She soon loved discovering how to decipher meaning by analysing colour, form and mark-making.

“It unlocked for me this ability to understand what I’m looking at, and I realised it could apply almost to everything … I was using my full vision in a way, and it opened up worlds.”

Ngarino was the first teacher Nina ever had who discussed Pacific art – a ngatu (tapa cloth) – in class. Now, coming full circle, Nina is writing about tapa-making collectives of Tongan women.

Usually such collectives “are given a name and on the rare occasion members are listed”, she explains, “but no one really talks about the journey”.

Again, Nina is honouring Māori and Pacific collectives and Pacific art processes in new ways – this time on the page, after recognition on the Venice stage.

Janet McAllister