March 2024 / March to May 2025
George Nuku is one of New Zealand’s leading contemporary artists. As a sculptor, he works with stone, bone, wood, shells, Styrofoam, and plexiglass. In his works, he continually questions the relationships between humans, nature, and culture, using millennia-old traditional elements of Māori culture to contrast them with contemporary themes such as decolonisation, repatriation, and reconciliation. His works are exhibited internationally, for example at the British Museum in London, the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology in the UK, and the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. His most recent major solo exhibition was “Oceans. Collections. Reflections” in 2022 at the Weltmuseum Wien.
During a first research fellowship in March 2024, George Nuku explored the Oceania collections of the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin as a starting point for a curatorial collaboration with the Museum’s Department of Oceania and the Department of Contemporary Art. In the framework of his second fellowship, he produced a three-part artistic installation, which will be presented as an intervention in the Oceania exhibition at the Ethnologisches Museum in May 2025. Committed to cultural education, the artist also uses his second fellowship to organise an upcycling art workshop with Berlin residents to create sea animals made from recycled material, to create a living underwater world. George Nuku on this:
In my artwork, I want to focus on the relationship between humans and the sea, and the impact of climate change. In both rooms – “Polynesia” and the “Boat Room” – I take up the theme of the exhibition and refer to the exhibits on display there. My idea is to explore the inter-relationships between the past and the future, between new and ancient artworks, between a descendant of the origin families and the museum stewards of these ancestral treasures – residing within this institution, they are brought to the light of the present.
George Nuku’s works range from delicate jade and pearl amulets to life-size stone and plexiglass sculptures, inspired by Polynesian demi-gods and Māori cultural heroes. He incorporates the tradition of his people, handed down for thousands of years, into an art form that promises to prolong life and enhance survival.
This fellowship is supported by Künstlerhaus Bethanien, which provides a studio for artistic and scientific research.