Creation Stories foregrounds different versions of known and lesser known narratives in the Pacific with a focus on dialogues between Europe, the USA, Samoa and Aotearoa. By spanning several centuries, cultures and genealogies, the exhibition draws on the artists’ own ancestries and their connections to these regions—in the 1920s Denny’s great-grandfather was Chief Justice in Sāmoa while Müller’s great-grandfather was involved in significant commercial activity with Swiss and German colonial enterprises in Papua New Guinea, Sāmoa and Tonga after leaving Switzerland.
With the aid of multidisciplinary research, artistic collaboration and artworks by leading Aotearoa and international artists, Creation Stories interprets narratives of beginnings and interconnections with the exhibition itself becoming a social graph of shared spaces, representation and entanglement. Denny and Müller invite visitors to consider their place within these shared spaces, of intertwining histories with people and cultures and the role we all play as part of a network of connections that stem from our place in Aotearoa and the Pacific.