The family of Austronesian languages encompasses a huge geographic spread that is spoken across Southeast Asia, Micronesia, Melanesia, Polynesia, and Madagascar. A family of languages is determined by a common ancestor language and enough shared particulars that give form to a dialect, such as its structures, semantics, and vocabularies. In the particular constellation of languages present in this exhibition, there is a common translation for ear—Malay’s telinga, Tagalog’s tainga, and taringa in Te Reo Māori. If language shapes how meaning is heard and made legible, this exhibition asks what conversations can be had when a root tongue is shared?

The tongue to them brings together artworks from Aotearoa, Malaysia, and the Philippines that articulate experiences of colonial impact from the vantage points of Oceania and Southeast Asia. These two regions have a particular experience of establishing the collective self in the face of a hostile other and contend with the continued ramifications this has for these respective locales. The exhibition title is taken from the poem Our Mother Tongue by Filipino nationalist and writer José Rizal, whose writing and ultimately execution by the Spanish colonial government is considered to have inspired the Philippine Revolution of the late 1890s. Although not directly involved in the planning or conduct of the revolution, Rizal is considered a national hero of the Philippines and speaks to the power of a people’s language as a tool for resistance and a symbol for freedom.

Encircling the left wing of the gallery is Malaysian artist Yee I-Lann’s TIKAR/MEJA (2019–2020). In this configuration it consists of 30 woven tikar, or mats, each depicting a single table. The tikar are woven by women of the historically nomadic and sea-based Bajau Sama Dilaut people, the traditional makers and knowledge holders of this craft. For Yee, the table represents the administrative violence of colonial control. It speaks to the authority of the pen in deals done and land carved across treaties and maps under the guise of gentlemanly negotiation. The tikar themselves counter this, retaining the open community platform of the mat. TIKAR/MEJA also assert the table’s status as foreigner—meja originates from the Portuguese mesa, which remains untranslated in the Philippines from its Spanish origins. Similarly it is a transliteration in Te Reo as tēpu.

The work of Martha Atienza and Darcell Apelu in this exhibition operate in a mode of satire and subversion as resistance against hostile forces. In Anito 1 (2011–2015) and Anito 2 (2017), Atienza documents a Christianised animist festival held on Bantayan Island where she lives. In the Ati-Atihan festival, the local community respond to often contentious current events in the form of parody. They dress up and perform reenactments relating to issues of climate change, Catholic imperatives, migratory labour, and President Rodrigo Duterte’s violent war on drugs. In Apelu’s Ingress/Egress (2025), she takes the form of a Pā waharoa or gateway and inverts its sense of welcome. In this work, her waharoa is built as an obstruction rather than a passageway, a reminder that a warm welcome has contingencies.

One linguistic trait that exists across almost all Austronesian languages is the distinct forms of we, you and them. In particular, there are usually at least two differentiations for we: an inclusive (listener included) and an exclusive (listener excluded). In Te Reo the inclusive and exclusive pronouns are tātou and mātou, respectively. These languages’ ability to immediately establish which collective is being spoken to and about lends itself to the acts of subversion in Atienza and Apelu’s works. If language has an ability to establish shared cultural understanding, then tone and nuance for native speaking audiences are able to more quickly pick up who’s in on the “joke” and who’s out.

Spatial orientation systems in Austronesian languages sit on two axes: a monsoon axis and a land-sea axis. Within a pepeha, alongside establishing one’s whakapapa and iwi, the speaker will also announce their maunga and awa. Pragmatically, a listener can make a close approximation of the speaker’s geographic coordinates within Aotearoa. Buck Nin and Heidi Brickell’s practices can be situated on this land-sea axis. Brickell’s installation Either Way Ka Mate (2023–2025) consists of rimurapa forms that can be interpreted as a hammerhead shark and a deep sea squid. This references the whakatauki “Ka mate wheke, kei mate ururoa”, which translates to “Die like a shark, lest you die like a squid” and seems to prioritise the tenacity of the shark over the floundering of a squid. Yet the wheke in Te Ao Māori, and through other parts of the Pacific, is a symbol of curiosity, exploration, and discovery.

Nin’s The Polluted Land (1993) is also included in the exhibition and will remain offsite at its home at the head office of Te Wānanga o Aotearoa Te Puna Manaaki in Te Awamutu. The four panel painting portrays a group of figures walking away from a smokey cityscape and into the arms of their tupuna, which speaks directly to its site’s history—that the land Te Wānanga o Aotearoa was built on was once a dump site and now hosts one of the largest tertiary education providers in Aotearoa. Nin was instrumental in the institution’s foundation and Māori art education at large and framed his work as bringing Māori and Pākeha worldviews together. This position speaks to Nin’s navigation of Te Ao Māori in Western systems, that of formal education and the art world of the time. Brickell is also motivated to resist binaries by bringing worlds together; embracing the characteristics of the shark and the squid to hold many wisdoms at once. In these practices, their land-sea directionalities don’t prescribe territories or prioritise one mode over another but rather orients them to the world at large.

Resisting power often demands collective action. Through the various and nuanced we, the artists in this exhibition seek to define the borders of who makes up these collectives. In bringing these practices and artworks into orientation with each other, a constellation of locales is connected by shared linguistic and cultural understanding. Can the proximity of language establish neighbourhoods based on dialogue rather than shared boundaries?