Presented by the Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa | Creative New Zealand and Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, the Aotearoa New Zealand Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia will feature Taharaki Skyside, Fiona Pardington’s powerful new series of large-scale photographs.
Pardington (Ngāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Ngāti Kahungunu, Clan Cameron of Erracht) turns her lens on taxidermied birds held in museum collections across Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia: specimens shaped by the intertwined histories of colonial collecting, scientific classification and cultural loss. Focusing on species endemic to Aotearoa New Zealand, and working through Dante’s poetic vision of the Southern Hemisphere as the location of Purgatory, her portraits honour the deep spiritual and cultural significance of these manu (birds) to Māori, while confronting the legacies that placed many of them in vitrines rather than in the wild. Some, like the huia and whēkau (laughing owl), are long extinct; many others remain critically vulnerable. Pardington’s eye and lens reveal details that will surprise even New Zealand audiences and underscore the fragile, irreplaceable biodiversity at the heart of Pardington’s practice.
Birds can symbolise familial love, romantic attachment, ecological warnings, they can be intimations of mortality, and in my work they can also represent individual people in my life. The ideas I am conjuring remind us of the integral significance of manu within te ao Māori – as sources of food and materials, and intermediaries between human and divine worlds.”
Fiona Pardington (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Ngāti Kahungunu, Clan Cameron of Erracht) ONZM
Fiona Pardington. Photography by Meek Zuiderwyk
Taharaki Skyside continues Fiona Pardington’s acclaimed practice of working with museum archives, begun more than 20 years ago, and builds on her 2024 exhibition Te taha o te rangi / The edge of the heavens. This latest series speaks of manu both as kin and as significant beings within Māori culture. Pre-human Aotearoa New Zealand was an abundant birdland, and birds feature strongly in Māori creation narratives. They appear in Māori rock art in Te Waipounamu, the South Island, which are among the earliest artworks made in the country.
Carefully staged, lit and shot, the photographs capture not just the birds’ iridescent plumage and morphology, but the essence of their spirit. Pardington’s vivid portraits contemplate the horizon – where mortality meets transcendence – and the ways in which manu traverse this physical and metaphysical threshold. They are spiritual messengers operating between the worlds of the living and the dead
Taharaki Skyside extends Pardington’s interrogation of the frameworks of museology – the settings, classifications and disciplinary apparatus, including the ethnographic containment of cultures and people, and the ways these institutions can deaden cultural agency and practice. Pardington’s portraits are both part of, and in response to, a tradition of ornithological illustration and bird painting that characterises eighteenth-century art illustration and the natural sciences. Her confronting but tender portraits are reminiscent of the illustrations of John James Audubon (1785–1851) who, in an approach not dissimilar to Pardington’s, prioritised a lifetime of close encounters with birds as a path for the artist “to get closer to the truth”.
Many of the birds in Pardington’s series are under threat, while others – like the huia – are already lost, drawing the ecological shadow we all live under sharply into view. These portraits shift between reanimating the extinct through photographic artifice and recognising them as monuments of their own decline. Each portrait offers the opportunity for an intense personal encounter, opening the space to contemplate one’s own role in the future of the environment.
During her first visit to Venice in 2024, Pardington recognised a visual echo, seeing something of the skies of the Hunter Hills near Waimate in Te Waipounamu where she lives, in the sunsets and sunrises of Venice. In collaboration with her brother, artist / designer Neil Pardington, creative director for Taharaki Skyside, these colours are incorporated into the frames of her photographs, uniting the islands of Aotearoa New Zealand with the archipelago of Venice, a hemisphere away.
Creative New Zealand’s delivery partner for 2026 is Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, and Taharaki Skyside is curated by Felicity Milburn and Chloe Cull.
Aotearoa New Zealand Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia runs from 9th May to 22nd November 2026 at Pietà Venezia, Castello 3701, Venezia. Find more information here.
