He Heru. A Comb
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| 8 EUR, reduced 4 EUR |
| Please book your ticket in advance online or at the box office in the Foyer. |
| English with translation into German |
| Duration: 150 min |
| English, German |
| Mechanical Arena in the Foyer |
| Part of: Objects talk back |
From a seemingly simple comb, Whiti Hereaka creates a mirror work of reverence and beauty. 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 Māori 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.
Whiti Hereaka is an award-winning novelist and playwright of Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Te Arawa, Tūhourangi, Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Tumatawera, Tainui and Pākehā descent, based in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. In her new text for Humboldt Forum she 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 ungeklӓrt”.
The event starts at 18:30 with a short tour to room 218 to see the Heru (comb) in the original. The meeting point is the Mechanical Arena in the foyer. The reading with Whiti Hereaka will also begin there at around 19:00.
After the event, Whiti Hereaka’s books will be on sale. They will be signed by the author.
More Informations about Heru (Comb) are available at Collections Online.
Whiti Hereaka is a novelist and playwright of Māori and Pākehā descent. Her iwi affiliations are Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Te Arawa, Ngāti Whakaue, Tuhourangi, Ngāti Tumatawera, Tainui.
She is the author of four novels: The Graphologist’s Apprentice, Bugs, Legacy and Kurangaituku. Legacy won the New Zealand Children’s and Young Adult Book Award for YA fiction in 2019 and Kurangaituku was awarded the 2022 Jann Medlicott Acorn Award for fiction in the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and was long listed for the Dublin Literary Award 2023.
She is also co-editor, with Witi Ihimaera, of an anthology of Māori myths — Pūrākau — published in 2019. She has had short stories published in Room to Write, A Kind of Shelter – Whakaruru-taha, Te Awa o Kupu and Hiwa, Contemporary Māori Short Stories.
Her latest work, You Are Here, a collaboration with artist Peata Larkin, will be published by Massey University Press in March 2025 as part of their Kōrero series.
Priya Basil
Priya Basil is an author, and curator of the Humboldt Forum project Objects Talk Back. In her book Be My Guest/Gastfreundschaft (2019), she combines memoir, philosophy, food and politics in a reflection on hospitality in the broadest sense. Her most recent book Im Wir und Jetzt: Feministin Werden (2021) combines politics with the personal, as does her film essay on memory-culture and belonging, Locked In and Out (2020), which can be seen online.
She is co-founder and board member of WIR MACHEN DAS, an NGO that works with refugees and migrants for a more inclusive society. Priya is also a member of the advisory board of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. She has conceptualized and curated projects for various institutions including the Goethe Institut and International Literature Festival Berlin. From 2021 to 2023 Priya was International Writer in Residence for Mindscapes, a project of the Wellcome Trust UK, devoted to transforming how we understand, talk about and treat mental health. As part of this Priya undertook a research journey which spanned six continents to learn about different understandings of well being and practices of healing. In 2024, Priya is Writer in Residence with Wellcome’s new Climate and Health project. She is working on a new book which draws on her research and travels.