[ISEA2006] Artists Statement: Rachael Rakena, Fez Fa’anana & Brian Fuatu — Containers within Containers: Carriers of Bodies and Histories, Knowledge and Culture

Artists Statement

Theme: Pacific Rim. Venue: Container Culture: Auckland Container. Venue: South Hall. Curator: Deborah Lawler-Dormer

New Zealand/Aotearoa is an Oceanic/Pacific country settled by Eastern Polynesians 700-1,000 years ago. Innova-tive voyagers, Maori migrated in waka (canoes). Contemporary Maori iwi (tribes) trace their genealogy back to the waka from which iwi were named. They pass knowledge and genealogy through traditions of oratory (zvhaiko-rero) and art practices including waiata (song), whare whakairo (carved meeting-house), tukutuku (woven wall panels in the meetinghouse) and the building of waka. Also passed on is the innovative spirit of their ancestors.
Rachael Rakena is a Maori artist of Ngai Tahu tribal descent. She uses digital technologies in installations that voyage far from the materiality of traditional Maori arts while resonating with Maori values of innovation in this new century. Like the voyaging, navigating and genealogy-sustaining practices of her forbears, Rakena’s digital technologies establish concepts of “continuum, immersion, movement, space” as being particularly relevant to cultural processes of “connecting and belonging.” The artist has devised the term Toi Rerehiko for digital art. She says:
The word rerehiko plays on rorohiko, the Maori word for computer, which translated literally means “electric brain.” The word rerehiko has recently been used to mean “electronic.” Toi rere hiko could be used to describe moving image arts or at least art that employs movement with electricity and flashes of light. That which flies, settling momentarily, but leaving no object.
For the past 11 years, Rachael Rakena has been part of KTW, an urban tribal group from Dunedin (Te Whanau o Kai Tahu ki Araiteuru). The KTW collective maintains regular physical and virtual gatherings and networks and often operates collaboratively. In 2002, Rakena invited KTW to collaborate with her in Rerehiko as artists, authors and performers.
Rerehiko displays complex references to community debate through e-mail and contemporary kapa haka (traditional Maori performing dance). The work expresses the group’s identity in a fluid cyberspace where relationships are virtual rather than geophysical and where contemporary technologies can nurture communities that continue to be imbued with cosmological and genealogical narratives. The narrative and communication medium of sea/water is a metaphor both for Space in Sydney, 2003. The three collaborating artists had never met before, though all were of Polynesian heritage with links to the Pacific Islands and New Zealand. Equally significant were our “uncommonalities” – the geographic and cultural positions we inhabit as indigenous people of the Pacific, as migrants or non-migrants.
Concurrent with this residency, Australia was dealing with immigration issues. Boat people landing on beaches in Australia had been sent away unprocessed as refugees, contrary to international law. An overnight change to Australia’s international border legislation, giving the government protection from responsibility for these displaced people, was being heavily debated by the Australian public.
There are 26,000 Maori and 43,000 Pacific Islanders living in Sydney. Cultural alienation, dislocation and displacement experienced by immigrants are themes of this work, alongside their vision of a brighter future, their courage in migrating, and the survival of their cultures and communities.

  • Rachael Rakena studied at Otago Polytechnic School of Art in Dunedin. She lives and works in Palmerston North, where she also lectures in Maori visual arts. at Massey University. Her work has been included in numerous major group exhibitions, including at the Adam Art Gallery (Wellington, 2005-2006), the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (2006), Ivan Dougherty Gallery (Sydney, 2005), Frankfurter Welle (Frankfurt, 2004) and the Adelaide Arts Festival (2004). In 2006 her work will be shown in exhibitions in Cambridge, U.K.; Wellington and Christchurch, New Zealand; Melbourne and Sydney, Australia; Warsaw, Poland; and Vilnius, Lithuania. Rakena uses a diversity of approaches from digital stills and video to installation and performance in order to explore ideas about iwi (clan-based) identity, and the subject’s dis/embodiment in both digital and water spaces. Many of her works are collaborative and have included such performers as opera soprano Deborah Wai. Kapohe, Maori musical-instrument expert Richard Nunns and dancer / choreographers Louise Bryant and Merenia Gray.
  • Fez Fa’anana is a New Zealand–born, Brisbane-based dance artist of Samoan heritage. Until its recent demise he was a member of the dance ensemble Polytoxic, founded in 2000 by Fa’anana with Lisa Fa’alafi. Polytoxic created diverse performance works drawing from Polynesian, contemporary and street dance styles and physical theater. All three members are professional dance artists who have performed in numerous contexts including independent dance and theater seasons, children’s performances, gallery openings, fashion launches, festivals and commercial film. Most recently Polytoxic toured for the Queensland Art Gallery’s OzGold Exhibition. Fa’anana works collabo-ratively with visual and performance artist Luke Roberts, performing at the MCA for the 2002 Sydney Biennale and at the Luke Roberts Studios, as well as performing for companies including KITE Theatre and Abigails Entertainment.
  • Brian Fuata is a New Zealand–born, Sydney-based Samoan performer, writer and theater-maker: He was a performer and co-devisor of the Museum of Fetishized Identities (Performance Space, 2001), directed by the internationally recognized performance artists Guillermo Gomez Penaand Juan Ybarra, as well as the New Museum of Fetishized Identities (Performance Space, 2003). He wrote and performed the solo work Fa’fafine, commissioned by Urban Theatre Projects at Performance Space for Pacific Wave 2001. He has created and performed short works in Unbecomings (2000 and 2001, co-produced by Performance Space, Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, and PACT Youth Theatre), which, won the Mardi Gras Festival Award 2000, and Kiss My Fist (2002). Other credits include Letters about Objects Explaining Everything in Company B Belvoir’s B Sharp program (2000) and PACrs Replicant Hotel (1999 and 2000, performer and co-devisor).
  • Deborah Lawler-Dormer is the executive director of the Moving Image Centre (New Zealand’s only contemporary creative media arts center), a position she has held since 1995. The Moving Image Centre has recently relocated into a performing-arts venue and will be opening an additional exhibition and production venue in 2007. Lawler-Dormer has programmed, curated, staged and managed numerous film, video and digital media .shows. She has traveled internationally to Europe, the U.S.A., the Middle East and Australia to stage projects involving digital and video art practice. She has held previous curatorial and technology specialist positions at City Gallery, Wellington, Te Papa Tongarewa and Auckland City Art Gallery. Lawler-Dormer is ‘sometimes’ a video-installation artist and holds a First Class Honours Masters in art history from the University of Auckland.

Support from Te Waka Toi and Screen Innovation Production Funding, Creative New Zealand, the Arts Council of New Zealand and New Zealand Film Commission