The Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

THOMAS ANDREW Samoan Half Caste (from the album ‘Views in the Pacific Islands’) 1886 Registration number: O.037952 / Collection: Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa photographic style is evident in the intense, dreamlike atmosphere and dramatic use of bright light and colour. Additionally, there is an emphasis on the body, through her physical manipulation of photographic negatives, choreographing complex emotional and psychological responses to experience. Above all, the images inspire a sense of the intangible, the ineffable. Watching the carefully composed and eloquent movements of Shigeyuki (Yuki) Kihara’s hands as she interprets tsunami Galu Afi, which engulfed the islands of her native Samoa in 2009, in the video performance Siva in Motion 2012, this traumatic event comes hauntingly back to life. For this video, Kihara draws on the traditional practice of taualuga, choreographed hand movements practised only by chiefly Samoan women. Kihara’s siva (dance), with its poetic remembering of a recent event, comes to light from the depths of Samoan tradition, engaging audiences in the same way in which taualuga have always honoured events and individuals. Digitally rendered, Kihara’s Siva in Motion also references photographic practices of chronophotography, first developed in the late nineteenth century and used, along with photography, to scientifically record and ‘prove’ phenomenological understandings of racial difference, amongst other things. As a Samoan fa’afafine, or ‘third gender’ in the Western context, Kihara is profoundly alert to the brutal historical consequences of the European scientific ordering of peoples according to ‘type’. Dressed in the restrictive mourning costume as the fictious ‘Salome’, a late nineteenth-century Samoan woman, Kihara chooses to embody the severe physical effects of these scientific orderings by adopting their requirements to alter the body to fit new norms. Her hands, though, are unadorned and with them Kihara’s Salome eloquently recalls not only the momentous seas that lashed Samoan beaches in 2009, but the waves of change that hit these islands over a 90—91 WHERE DOWE COME FROM? WHAT ARE WE? WHERE ARE WE GOING?