Kāinga a roto Home within – Sonja van Kerkhoff*Sen McGlinn*Toroa Pohatu
Kāinga a roto Home within, 2010 Sonja van Kerkhoff, Sen McGlinn and Toroa Pohatu, Installation with five monitors, video and audio
Artist statement
A system, even an integrated system, is not a seamless continuum: what makes it a system is that it consists of distinct interrelated parts. A culture – a symbol system – is one integrated system. The human person too is an integrated system (memory, hopes, relationships, reason and spirituality), and so is an individual biography. A person, seen as a system, is the microcosm to the natural world’s macrocosm, which contains elemental systems – of water, wind and earth, and of the biosphere.
Kāinga a roto (Home Within) is an art-system, consisting of five distinct videos, soundscapes, music, lighting and shadows, and a physical space where visitors sit or lie close to the ground. This art-system is used to represent the complex system of a particular biography influenced by New Zealand Colonial and Māori cultural values.
