Fresh Gallery Otara is a small but feisty community gallery in Manukau City, where the Pacific Island demographic is the highest in Auckland, the largest Polynesian city in the world. Spearheaded by Ema Tavola, Manukau City Council Pacific Arts Coordinator and curator of Native Coconut, Fresh is targeted specifically to cater for the local community.
To celebrate Matariki, the Māori New Year, Tavola corralled artists of dual Māori and Pacific Island heritage. Choosing artists who walk in two worlds, she sought to bridge the gaps that exist between indigenous and migrant communities, and the three selected artists created a visual dialogue around these issues.
Matariki is a star-gazing festival which is about the return of the Pleiades to the horizon after an hiatus. And stars feature in the video work of Leilani Kake (Cook Islands/Nga Puhi, Tainui) and in the painting of Margaret Aull (Fiji/Te Rarawa, Tuwharetoa). Aull’s Tino Rangatiratanga and Coups (2010) addresses both the Māori struggle for sovereignty, and the endless coups in Fiji, in a broken composition that is part flag, part museum display case, with fragmented artifacts subjected to colonial categorisation and branding.
Cerisse Palalagi’s Walk it Owt (2010) is a large painting on thick paper referencing barkcloth/tapa or in this case, hiapo, as Palalagi’s affiliations are Niuean, with Te Arawa and Ngaiterangi on her Māori side. Niuean painter John Pule popularised the contemporary riff on hiapo in the early 1990s, and was recently the subject of a survey exhibition at City Gallery, Wellington. To compliment Pule’s canonical status, Palalagi represents the next generation of Niuean art in her concurrent solo show ‘Motunei’ at City Gallery. Walk it Owt is more of the same: big