People of Colour Exhibition / Art Installation

In October 2020, artist-run gallery Mercy Pictures — at the time led by Jerome Ngan-Kee, Jonny Prasad and Teghan Burt, who met at Elam — opened their new, larger Karangahape Road space with the exhibition People of Colour. Spanning several rooms, the show featured more than 400 small canvases digitally printed with individual flags, featuring the Tino Rangatiratanga, Te Mana Motuhake o Tūhoe, Black Lives Matter and Black Panther flags alongside flags associated with far-right white supremacist movements. Commissioned to accompany the exhibition was a text by Nina Power, a UK-based writer and philosopher now known for her transphobic, alt-right views despite initially coming to prominence for her feminist writing and anti-racist work.

The exhibition became a flash point for the local arts community, provoking tense standoffs over white supremacy, free speech, and art-world complicity in the heightened context of the Covid-19 pandemic and its associated lockdowns, heightened anti-Asian violence, that year’s Black Lives Matter protests, and the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings.

Critic Jon Bywater described the show as “offensive and stupid”:

Circulating hate symbols with no attempt at creating safety? Check. Messing with cultural material not yours to mess with? Check.

As writer and gallerist Sarah Hopkinson recalled in The Spinoff:

This artwork was a trap, a not very well-disguised one. It seemed that bait had been laid for certain groups in Aotearoa’s artist community, in particular those practitioners who are engaged in the many forms of emancipatory politics. It was also clear to me that both the premise and specific details of the exhibition would goad certain individuals within those groups, with whom the members of Mercy Pictures have historic grievance. What was not apparent to me at the time – nor I assume, to the exhibition’s architects – was that in setting the trap, they might topple into it as well.

Eyecontact’s positive review of the show led to a number of high-profile critics removing their historical contributions to the review site in protest. Artists Quishile Charan, Jasmin Singh and Anevili wrote an open letter which received more than 1500 signatures. In it, they wrote:

Art is not apolitical. Art has a currency and a weight in the world. By remaining silent and allowing these things to happen the art world has normalised this colonial and white supremacist rhetoric. By refusing to comment on this, people within the art world are remaining complicit within white supremacy. We believe that by having the privilege of running a gallery you are in a position of power and have actively chosen to inflict this harm. This exhibition, in our opinion, is the perpetuation of centuries of violence and should not be mistaken as a meaningless act of exhibition-making and curating.

In response, Mercy Pictures claimed their show explored “the dangers of… tribal identities”, ran a campaign calling out other members of the visual arts sector who have platformed or used transgressive or offensive imagery in the past, and emphasised that they are “predominantly made up of queer people and people of colour”. Many critics at the time wrote about the “whiteness of People of Colour”, describing the collective as “quintessentially white. Their identity is white, their art, their values, their dress sense, their Instagram presence, their image that they communicate to the art world”. While this emphasises the extent to which these practitioners had aligned themselves with white supremacist ideology, few analyses at the time focused on the fact that the majority of the collective was led by practitioners of Asian descent.

Following the open letter, Jerome Ngan-Kee issued an apology on Instagram, saying:

I would like to sincerely apologise for the harm and re-traumatisation brought about by the exhibition I played a part in putting together ... I deeply regret the way Mercy Pictures has responded to criticism and the pain that this show has bought about. It was irresponsible of me to assume these symbols and our action in displaying could deny their meanings and histories to extended communities.

In response, the remaining members of Mercy Pictures emphasised this was from Ngan-Kee personally and locked him out of the gallery’s Instagram, stating in a now-deleted post, “We stand by the artwork; in large part because we are passionate about the freedom of artists.”

The exhibition was described by Hopkinson as “a long overdue moment of ideological rupture”. In particular, she reflected on institutional responsibility and the exhibition as an event that forced Pākehā practitioners to recognise their privilege in being able to intellectualise traumatic material.

Sensible and sincere apologies have been made, including by Mercy Pictures co-founder Jerome Ngan-Kee and by prominent members of the art community who have been implicated one way or another. Small working groups aimed at de-escalation and harm reduction have assembled. It was telling that among the people assembled at a recent hui – comprised of people who had reached out after Jerome published his apology – there was not a single white hetero cis-man. There were representatives from the two big art schools (women), and beyond that, young POC and queer folk, and a few more young women

[.…]

There are people whose job it is to care for artists; who are paid, in direct and roundabout ways, to advocate for the needs of the community. I am pointing to curators at the publicly-funded galleries, and the professors and tutors at the major teaching institutions, and the many people employed at Creative New Zealand, which has recently funded Mercy Pictures (albeit not for this particular exhibition project). These people and organisations have been, with a few exceptions, silent.

Since this exhibition, the collective has appeared to be largely inactive.

The Spinoff — False flag: The Mercy Pictures furore and the dangerous power of art

The Big Idea — Small gallery, big issue

RNZ — Group calls out art exhibition of neo-Nazi flags, white nationalism symbols

Pantograph Punch — A rose, is a flag, is a racist: The trouble with Mercy Pictures’ People of Colour

EyeContact — What Went down at Mercy Pictures