VENICE.- The Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa and Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū present Taharaki Skyside, the Aotearoa New Zealand Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale by artist Fiona Pardington (Ngāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Ngāti Kahungunu, Clan Cameron of Erracht) ONZM.

This powerful series of large-scale photographs turns Pardington's lens on taxidermied manu (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.

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 build on a tradition of ornithological illustration and painting that characterises eighteenth-century art and the natural sciences. Her confronting but tender portraits are reminiscent 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 manu 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 awaking the extinct through photographic artifice and recognising them as monuments of their own exploitation and 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.

In the sunrises and sunsets of Venice, Pardington recognises a visual echo of the skies of her home in the Hunter Hills near Waimate in Te Waipounamu. In collaboration with her brother, artist/designer Neil Pardington (Ngāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Ngāti Kahungunu, Clan Cameron of Erracht), 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.

This project reflects Creative New Zealand Toi Aotearoa’s continuing commitment to supporting a national pavilion at the Venice Biennale through 2028 and 2030.