He Heru. A Comb - An Ornament for the Most Sacred Part of the Body

An Ornament for the Most Sacred Part of the Body

From a seemingly simple comb, the award-winning novelist and playwright Whiti Hereaka creates a mirror work of reverence and beauty. It is a text in nine sections, "a part for each tooth, and a part for each space between them". The parts tell stories of love, loss, longing, including tales of whales from whose bones objects were made, of a carver creating a comb, of Mori gods and the power of women, of colonial whalers fishing their prey almost to extinction in the South Pacific, of a writer who cuts her hair and moves across worlds weaving connections.

In her text Whiti Hereaka unfurls a stunning cosmology around the heru, combing with it through time and space to make "stories of ocean blue, blood red, bone white", thus shattering the silence left by the museum description "Zugang ungeklärt" (access unclear).