Carmel Aroha Salmanzadeh, turuturu, 2025, mdf, black acrylic paint

Turuturu can mean ‘upright’, ‘post’ or ‘pole’. In this work, referencing the resemblance of a pou tokomanawa – central post supporting the ridge pole of the wharenui. Turuturu, in this case, in honour of my grandmother. The name turuturu was given to her by her great-grandmother, her namesake. She was often, if not mostly, called ‘ Turu’ or ‘Turuturu’ by her neighbours, friends, church community and by her whānau. The significance of her name carried throughout generations - with her being the last generation to be born into the reo - in a way, felt like a resistance to conformity. The three figures in this work represent the effort of three generations to bring the reo back into our lives.

Language loss at the magnitude experienced by indigenous people as a result of colonial violence, along with the loss of knowledge and of other central facets of cultural identity, the journey of reclamation in all its joys, is a weighty burden, and the intense responsibility to gather, retain and try and live as authentically as you can, so as not to burden the next generation with the same trembling, fumbling and exhausting insecurity.

This need to know the answers and to have a full picture of things has followed me for most of my life and has become a fundamental source of ideas and inspiration as much as it is a source of pain and longing; it has become a gift of sorts, or rather a framework throughout my making and conceptualising processes.

I have mainly worked with moving image and painting to create ‘scenes’ in which my ancestors and descendants live in prosperity and joy. My work is concerned with indigenous futurity and diasporic dissonance, using family stories to shrink gaps of disconnection. Through a natural or manufactured process of decontextualisation, I can recontextualise a sense of belonging using family stories, histories, objects, and rituals.This work explores absence and decontextualisation. I understand absence as something that could have been but is not; something vital yet inaccessible. It is the impression left behind that can no longer be fully reached. Absence denotes the knowledge that something meant to be here is missing, and that its absence has a presence of its own. It occupies space. Even in its invisibility, it remains essential.

In this work, the presence of absence is the pou tokomanawa decontextualised. The MDF sheets that form its three-dimensional shape have a smooth surface, without their own natural identifiers like grains and knots – without its own distinctive identity, it is manufactured into something durable and functional. Presenting as a sort of silhouette of a pou tokomanawa outside the context of the wharenui, lacking features for identification, where traditionally the pou would be tūpuna (ancestor), it still possesses functionality. It still provides stability and support. It holds tension from floor to ceiling, connecting Rangi and Papa. But beyond the facade of functionality, it doesn’t possess the capacity to be known – it lacks identifiable features; therefore, it is not identifiable, and it may be unknown who it relates to, or if its purpose is to relate at all. My feeling is that it takes after the kind of absence that has presence because it possesses something vital, whether that is something internal or simply structural.