Pono is a survey exhibition by renowned artist Hariata Ropata Tangahoe (Hapū O Kaitangata ki tuku rākau Waikanae no Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Toa/Te Arawa, Tūwharetoa, Celtic, Italian), that spans different phases and aspects of her longstanding artistic practice.  Ropata Tanghaoe approaches her work less as a record of the past than as a way of bringing relationships into the present. Whakapapa is the starting point, but the work does not stop at genealogy. Oral histories, inherited stories, memory, dreams and intuition are allowed to overlap. The portrait becomes a place where a person can be remembered, imagined and encountered again.

Pono brings together these strands through a collection of paintings and sculptural works that explore the ways identity, connection and memory are carried across generations. Moving between the figurative and the material, Ropata Tangahoe considers how we understand those who came before us, and how their presence continues to shape our relationships with ourselves, our whānau and the world around us.