Australia’s current interest in the Pacific is being played out in various arenas, not least the visual arts. ‘Tatau’, an exhibition at Queensland University Art Museum (UAM) is one of many arts projects dedicated to exploring and understanding the complexities of Pacific Island culture. According to UAM director Ross Searle, ‘Visitors to ‘Tatau’ have been very vocal. The photographs have provoked stronger reactions than many exhibitions we’ve held before’.1
Tatau includes Measina Samoa: Stories of the Malu, a film by Lisa Taouma, and Pe’a, photographs by Mark Adams which describe the practice of Samoan tatau in contemporary Auckland.2 Specifically the photographs picture the drawing of the pe’a, where a body of arched designs is applied around the thighs, buttocks, and lower back with a comb-like tool that is dipped in pigment and hammered repeatedly across the skin. It is a drawn-out, painstaking process and Adams has not censored the brutality of the practice. In traditional communities it is a rite of initiation, expressing deference to elders as well as the maturity, knowledge, and empowerment of youth. In contemporary societies, the pe’a, and more broadly the Samoan tatau, might be considered as demonstrating ethnic pride through the commitment of the body to a traditional art.
Many of Adams’s photographs feature Paulo Sulu’ape, a Samoan trained in the tradition of tatau, practicing his art in New Zealand. It is the photographs of the Samoan tatau on ‘European skin’ that spark some of the most heated discussions surrounding the exhibition. The images have become some of the most hotly contested photographic imagery in recent exhibitions in Australia and New Zealand. With... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline