In times of collective restlessness, is curation an act of sense-making? “The bald reality is sometimes very hard to take…art can shift something…say something political quite directly. It’s a great leveller; it offers a way through,” says Megan Tamati-Quennell, one of five curators for the Sharjah Biennial 16: to carry. In February 2025, the veteran Maori art curator met with STIR to discuss her work building institutional collections of modern and contemporary Maori and Indigenous art in Aotearoa / New Zealand and her curatorial focus for the Sharjah Biennial.

In her video conversation with STIR, Tamati-Quennell discussed the lexicon of terms that the five curators identified as an organising principle for their work. These ranged from spatial and temporal references to modes of being, doing and organising – like ‘terrain’, ‘radical pedagogy’, ‘collectivity’ or ‘song/ lament’. Her biennial proposition, ihi, emerged from artist and poet Jimmie Durham’s assertion that ‘humanity is not a completed project’, using its sense of possibility to explore ideas of impermanence and reflect on migration, belonging and identity. With prominent contributions by Maori, First Nations and Indigenous artists, Tamati-Quennell conceptualises ihi as a psychic force. This is borne out in works that carry a strong sense of place, like Samoan academic and researcher Albert L. Refiti’s ‘cosmograms’ in Vānimonimo (2024), where detailed ink drawings on notepaper are accompanied by casually scrawled fieldnotes enumerating the people, places and practices he encounters in the course of his work. Taiwanese artist Aluaiy Kaumakan’s giant tapestry, Vines in the Mountain (2020), fills the foyer of an old government building in the port quarter of Al Hamriyah. A tribe leader, Kaumakan, helped her community recover from a devastating typhoon in 2009 by offering group activities like weaving workshops. She imbues her practice with ritualistic significance, tapping into it as a source of ancestral connection and collectivity.

Tamati-Quennell has worked as a curator for nearly 35 years, transitioning from an earlier career in journalism. “Contemporary Maori art is quite young, although there were artists practising [since] the 1920s…their work was not collected,” she said. She built the modern and contemporary Māori and Indigenous art collection at Te Papa, informing how these communities are represented in institutional memory. When the National Art Gallery was built in 1936, it didn’t define a category for Maori art. “It's not really until the mid-1980s that Māori artists [were] allowed to be in the art gallery. Before that, they used to be…shown in school halls or on marae (meeting grounds for Maori communities). Their work was seen as…derivative and not really its own thing, whereas it’s quite vibrant,” she noted.

Acknowledging the subjectivity of her curatorial practice, Tamati-Quennell looks at the work of collection-building as a responsibility. Her practice, then, also becomes a way of populating archival absences. As she told STIR, “For me, it’s not just about collecting works and putting them in the collection, it's contextualising them and building an art history that perhaps didn't exist.”