Fiona Pardington at Biennale Arte 2026: The New Zealand Pavilion Between Extinction, Memory, and Vision

The Artist Behind the Mesmerizing New Zealand Pavilion at Biennale Arte 2026

With Taharaki Skyside, Fiona Pardington represents New Zealand at Biennale Arte 2026 with a project that brings photography, Māori culture, ecology, mourning, and a Dantean imagination into relation.

Link to the Italian version on Artribune

Speaking with Fiona Pardington (Devonport, 1961) means entering an artistic practice that brings together precision, memory, and symbolic intensity without ever resorting to easy effects. Her tone is open, almost confiding, yet her work reveals a body of research built over many years, capable of holding together photography, Māori culture, natural history, and a spiritual dimension. The project with which she will represent New Zealand at Biennale Arte 2026 emerges precisely from this balance: a rigorous method that turns the image into relation, memory, and testimony.

In Pardington’s work, the Biennale does not become the stage for an emphatic national statement, but rather an opportunity to propose another idea of the image: slower, more layered, and more closely tied to loss, memory, and transformation. In this sense, the New Zealand Pavilion takes on a particular significance. It does not aim for immediate effect, but for an experience in which natural history, Māori culture, and colonial memory enter into relation. This is where Pardington’s work finds its most distinctive force.

Interview with Artist Fiona Pardington

How did the invitation to the Biennale come about?

It came as a complete surprise. In the past, New Zealand sometimes invited artists to submit proposals, but this time, after a period of absence from Venice, a different model was adopted, developed together with a partner gallery and Christchurch Art Gallery. They had seen an earlier exhibition of mine, Te taha o te rangi, which in te reo Māori means “the horizon” or “the edge of the sky.” It was also a project connected to museum culture in New Zealand, a context my work often enters, including its less visible spaces. They saw that exhibition, which was later shown in Auckland and in Australia, and from there they decided to work with me. I was simply at home, taking the dog out, and when I came back in, I got the call from my gallerist. I truly was not expecting it.

What kind of experience will the public encounter on entering the New Zealand Pavilion in Venice?

I hope the public will have an experience that feels almost spiritual. There will be sound, and a very enveloping space, almost womb-like. The birds will seem to emerge from the walls like apparitions. They are not just birds: they are messengers, presences in transit, capable of transmitting something while also receiving something in return. The work is deeply rooted in Ngāi Tahu culture, but it also engages with ecology and extinction. I have been working with these themes for decades, long before they became central within the art world. I hope the public will sense beauty, spirituality, mourning, and a relationship between different worlds.

One of the strongest elements in the project centres on the takahē. What story does this particular specimen carry with it?

That bird was killed in 1851 in Fiordland and taken to the British Museum, where it was taxidermied. Whoever the taxidermist was, they did an extraordinary job, especially considering that they had never seen a takahē before. In fact, it was the second specimen ever collected. It is a subadult, so a young individual, and after more than a century it returned to New Zealand. It is now at Te Papa. Photographing it was an extraordinary experience. It had a very powerful presence, a real charisma. For a long time, the takahē was believed to be extinct, until it was rediscovered in Fiordland in the 1940s, and today the species has been recovering. The colours in my photograph do not exactly match the specimen as it appears now. I reworked them by studying living birds, in order to restore at least part of that chromatic vitality that time tends to erase, because after many decades museum specimens become dry, dusty, diminished. I can add feathers, soften their visual presence, repair the eyes. But for me, this is not only about a species. I am photographing an individual, almost a person, and in a sense its story as well.

The project also includes a strong ceremonial and sonic dimension connected to Māori culture. How important is that for you?

Very important. My Māori family members will come to Venice. My cousin Hana O’Regan has written for the book and composed karakia and waiata specifically for the project, that is, ritual invocations and traditional songs. We have also recorded Māori instruments, which will enter the exhibition as an integral part of the sonic experience. At the opening there will be performance, singing, and a real ceremonial presence. For me, this is a deeply moving aspect of the project: whenever I hear people singing, I always become emotional, so I imagine I will be there crying. We may also involve people connected to waka traditions, meaning the cultural heritage associated with ancestral canoes. In our culture, the way visitors are welcomed carries profound meaning. That is why the ceremonial dimension is not secondary. It is an essential part of the project.

As an Italian, I was struck by the reference to Dante and the southern hemisphere. How did that enter the project?

Two people were especially important in shaping this dimension of the work. One is my brother, who helped me work on colour. The other is my friend Andrew Paul Wood, who has been writing about my work for years. We became fascinated by Dante’s Purgatorio, especially Canto I, where he describes the sky of the southern hemisphere and those four stars invisible from the north. For us, in Aotearoa, that passage inevitably recalls the Southern Cross. Andrew wrote an essay for the book devoted to this theme. We were also interested in William Blake’s drawings imagining that constellation. All of this began to interweave. For me, Dante is a figure for whom I feel profound respect. I come to Italy, to Venice, as a visitor, and I wanted to pay tribute to him with respect. It was a way of saying to Italians: I enter your world with admiration, and I bring my birds with me as visitors too. In Māori culture, manuhiri, or guests, carry deep importance. For me, the reference to Dante became a way of honouring that relationship.

You define yourself as a photographer, but your work clearly has a broader artistic dimension. How do you experience that position today within the New Zealand context?

I am a photographer, but I am also an artist. When I was studying in the 1980s, deciding to be both a photographer and an artist was almost like signing my own death warrant. In art school, anyone working with photography was often treated as a failed painter or a failed sculptor. In truth, we were not really allowed to call ourselves artists. But I had access to an extraordinary library filled with major books on photography, and I loved both the history of photography and painting. I always felt that photography would become something different from what it was then in New Zealand. I trained as an analogue photographer, and that is where my professional roots lie, but conceptually I think like an artist. My work grows out of deep research and a complex material field. So yes, I absolutely consider myself an artist working through photography.

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