6 minute read
Angela Tiatia: The Dark Current
from Sullivan+Strumpf Contemporary Art Gallery Sydney & Melbourne, Australia & Singapore – Jan-Mar 2024
Words Léuli EshrāghiPortrait Benjamin Shirley
As with the tentacles of a giant feʻe, octopus, the deep-time kin constellations spanning the many shores of the Great Ocean, relate and bind each of our peoples, associated more-than-human relations and homelands to one another, as integral parts of a living entity. The Great Ocean is a translation of many but not all Indigenous language concepts of the third of the planet’s surface that newcomers call Pacific. It is in fact, the same planetary ocean connected around the continents which can be understood as islands in an archipelago. Taranaki Māori scholar and museum director Te Rangi Hīroa is widely recognised today as having in the first half of the 20th century preserved complex understandings of the interrelated histories of Indigenous peoples in the western half of the Great Ocean, widely termed with the racist and flattening term Polynesia. Following in the routes well-paddled by our ancestors, Angela Tiatia returns in both The Pearl (2022) and The Dark Current (2023) to sacred mālumālu, temples, particularly the Taputapuātea marae complex on Raʻiātea island which hosted cosmopolitan ceremonial-political gatherings for many centuries.
To gain a deeper understanding of Tiatia’s practice in siapo viliata, what I call animated barkcloth or digital imprinted screens, it is important to centre our Sāmoan art histories, and those of related Indigenous peoples of the Great Ocean. The artist has shared that the penina, pearl, present across the trilogy, has a dual genealogy, both the penina of Greek classical goddess Venus, and the penina of our oceanic god born in a clam shell called many names: ʻOro (Tahitian), Ono (Marquesan), Rongo (Mangarevan), and Lono-nui-noho-i-kawai (Hawaiian) among others. The Dark Current is described as a visual poem, which can be understood as an honouring of kinships and spiritual solidarities that criss-cross the northeastern and southwestern archipelagos. The deeply related cousin cultures of the central triangle—Sāmoa, Viti, Tonga—as well as the next ring of related cousin cultures, Rotuma, ʻUvea, Futuna, Alofi, Niue, Tokelau, are represented in the dancers’ ancestral homelands in the middle sequence, similar to the numerous national delegations which will gather at the Festival of Pacific Arts in Honolulu in June 2024.
Like many of our neighbouring as well as distant kin Indigenous cultures in the Great Ocean, Sāmoan culture reveres oval architecture, genealogical binds, and lunar cycles. In The Dark Current, the perspective is resolutely pluralist and the tone warm. This work moves through three related time-space moments that are not necessarily linear in a Western sense. Instead, apply the lens of Sāmoan scholar Lana Lopesi’s compelling work on our precolonial sacred menstrual matriarchy, and on the Moana cosmopolitan imaginary enacted through suʻifefiloi, cultural remixing, present over thousands of years and now accentuated in this digitally-led era. Over the months of December 2023 and January 2024, I am witness from afar to multiple saofaʻi, chiefly investiture ceremonies, across the Sāmoan archipelago. Friends new and less new, living and working in Montreal, Port Vila, Sydney or Brisbane, are among the Sāmoan women theorists and practitioners who have been invested as matai responsible for the sovereign balance of life in specific vā, relational spaces.
One of these women is my mother, Afitu Soné, who, after more than 30 years living in vibrant small-town communities across the eastern seaboard of Australia, returned home 10 years ago this month to care for our ailing artist grandmother Manō Nātia. With the first sequence of penina in the eye tableau vivant on a pink mat floating and then submerged in dark waters, The Dark Current places glamour, beauty and strength in the cultural memory of generations of Indigenous women of the Great Ocean who moved to the British-, United Statesand French-settled colonies of the so-called Pacific Rim. These are generations of our mothers, aunties, cousins, grandmothers, greataunts and great-grandmothers who worked in feminine-connoted fields allowed to them by diasporic English- and French-speaking cultures. It is important to contrast what we remember of our ancestral teachings of interconnectedness based in matriarchy and good behaviour with all living beings and spaces, with the continuous, extractive consumption of bodies, genders, sexualities, strengths, softnesses, families and communities.
The Dark Current directly addresses our sordid, imposed history of visual and material sexualisation across the Great Ocean, to demonstrate resistance and refusal as sovereign embodied moves towards futures where we are collectively well. This work “...takes a new direction in unravelling these complex visual and racial politics (...) seduc[ing] the viewer with its highly polished beauty but reveal[ing] the artifice of such idealised fantasy. With the artist behind the camera, rather than in front of it, the film is also a statement of self-determination.” (Castagnini, acmi, page 3) As highlighted by acmi curator Laura Castagnini, the breaking of the fourth wall where the group choreography and the supporting crew are depicted in an extended overhead shot is a very effective way of inviting audiences into the mechanics and ethics behind montage. The moving image is not neutral, particularly for Indigenous bodies of the Great Ocean whose likenesses, as our homelands, have been places to trash, play or get rich for Eurasian empires for hundreds of years.
Throughout The Dark Current, it is striking to remember the significant misogyny, racism, hardship and abiding humour of Sāmoan matriarchs including both our mothers Lusi and Afitu Soné, as well as my grandmother Manō Nātia who worked in South Auckland factories in the 1960s before returning home to work as an artist in customary artforms. The closing sequence is a compelling example of siapo viliata demonstrating actualised futurities—tomorrow and morning are the same word in our language—which Indigenous women of the Great Ocean craft together. These are distinct to the linear death-drive of Eurasian empires and their extractive systems that destroy both the image and everything which is referenced. Instead sacred foods, flowers, shells and luscious pink costumes contrast with industrial debris flowing over new temple platforms. The precolonial percussive sound composition adds to the videogame aesthetic which here empowers team members and dancers in writing their relations and stakes to futurities of collective ceremony across this majority water planet. ■
