Huataki – Pt 2

Kylie King-Hazel
Oil on aluminium 
2026
303 x 374 mm

Image credit artworks @z3d.nz

Artist statement:  Genesis is not gentle; it gives way to discomfort and tension—the nature of birth. The birth of works that do not sit neutrally, but instead become sites of self-interrogation rather than authority.
They are the genesis—the huataki—of not looking away, as a Pākehā artist.
The rise of discomfort. The act of examining loaded histories and the questions that arise from responsibility.
Two works, two female subjects: one young, one old, both wrapped in the New Zealand flag. An emblem of colonisation, pressed upon Indigenous bodies—it becomes a symbol of imposed and foreign identity.  Both pieces hold an acknowledgment of the alien and violating form draped over you and I recognise the dissonance it holds against the beauty and integrity of your way of being in this world.
This flag, a marker of nationalism, patriotism, belief, power, and prejudice, asks us to consider what is inherited, what is imposed, and what is misunderstood.
These works ask Pākehā to look directly at this inheritance—our complicity and our misunderstandings within systems we so easily stand inside. More specifically, the question is turned toward myself and my position: am I responding, or am I still caught within? These works have become acts of vulnerability and exposure.
They hold the risk of naivety, of error, of misstep—the tension between intention and impact. Accountability is not avoided, but held open and sat within.
They do not ask for agreement, only that we linger long enough for the question to remain within us. 

This artwork is presented as part of BETWEEN US, a group exhibition at Depot Artspace bringing together 28 contemporary artists exploring figurative art and portraiture. View the full exhibition here.