lost content
Jasmine Te Hira, Lost Content, 2013, video stills. Images via CIRCUIT Artist Moving Image Aotearoa New Zealand.
Lost Content is a video work comprising four split screens that show the artist’s arm wearing a bracelet made of ice. Throughout the film, the bracelet gradually melts, revealing pieces of hair, nails and pearls that drop away from her skin. It nods toward Jasmine’s whakapapa which spans New Zealand Māori, Cook Islands and English heritage. It’s inspired by Victorian mourning jewellery which frequently incorporates the hair of the deceased. These pieces were believed to contain an essence of the person and were designed to be worn close to the skin in remembrance.
However, in Lost Content, the essence cannot be contained — it drops away as the ice liquefies. Moreover, it’s equally inspired by the code of tapu within te ao Māori. After death, the body, the site and the person’s possessions are cleansed by a tohunga and during this process, freshwater is sprinkled on the body to neutralise tapu. The adornment in Lost Content is an embodiment of this process — the ice neutralises the tapu of the remains obscured inside, distilling and purifying.
Jasmine Te Hira, Lost Content, 2013, video stills. Images via CIRCUIT Artist Moving Image Aotearoa New Zealand.
Made as she was mourning the death of a family member, Jasmine’s work also bears a personal significance to her own water birth. In creating Lost Content, Jasmine exerts ownership over her personal mourning. It pulls taught the tensions between water, land and possession. With indigenous knowledge at its core, this work gestures toward the broader experience of intergenerational trauma. It is simultaneously personal and collective, intangible and material, holding on and letting go — an embodiment of grief passing through the body.
Lost Content speaks of grief all at once in gentle whispers that are punctuated by a disarming and silent agony. It speaks of the ways in which we wear and experience the grief of losing a loved one — cold, slippery, intangible, imprinting a piercing mark upon the wearer.
Watch the work here.
