When Fiona Pardington’s remarkable presentation Taharaki Skyside opens this May at the 2026 Venice Biennale, it will be the result of months of work by the artist and many others, including the team here at the Gallery.

Taharaki Skyside presents a series of large-scale photographs that build on the content of Pardington’s 2024 exhibition Te taha o te rangi. It was while developing that body of work that she first visited the South Canterbury Museum and photographed their collection of taxidermied native birds. These remarkable portraits engage with the tradition of memento mori, while bringing these dead manu – some of which have long been extinct as species – vividly to life. She resurrects their dignity and wildness, but also draws out a sense of their charisma and unique personalities. The works are a reminder of the integral significance of manu within te ao Māori, as sources of kai and materials as well as being intermediaries between human and divine worlds. For Pardington, birds hold a range of meanings – they can symbolise familial love and romantic attachment, foreshadow death or offer ecological warnings, and represent individual people in her life.

For Taharaki Skyside, Pardington has worked with museum collections again, this time from throughout Aotearoa and in Australia. While her work is deeply rooted in this country’s environment, culture and history, it also speaks to a much larger global conversation about loss. Her images underscore the devastating ecological costs of human impact, and draw attention to the role colonisation has played in the suppression of Indigenous knowledge systems. These are the experiences of cultures and ecosystems around the world, and Pardington’s work will no doubt resonate with many.

Some of the bird species explored in this body of work will be recognisable to international audiences, though they might be presented in unexpected or unfamiliar ways. Even bird-savvy people from Aotearoa might be surprised!

Fiona Pardington (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Ngāti Kahungunu, Clan Cameron of Erracht) ONZM is an internationally acclaimed Aotearoa New Zealand photographer whose work engages deeply with museum collections and the environment, culture, and histories of Aotearoa, while also carrying vital resonance and relevance in a global context. Her practice draws together local and international histories, creating connections across time and place. In this presentation, she forges a metaphorical link between Aotearoa and Venice through the idea of a shared horizon, viewed from opposite ends of the world. The work interlaces cultural references including Dante, the Southern Cross and the notion of an intermediary realm between the divine and the mortal to evoke a richly layered imaginative space.