About the Artist: Latai Taumoepeau

Abstract

About the Artist: Latai Taumoepeau Katerina Teaiwa Latai Taumoepeau makes live art, drawing from her homeland, the Kingdom of Tonga, and her birthplace, Sydney, land of the Eora Nation. Her body-centered faivā (performance practice) emerges from Tongan philosophies of relational space and time, integrating ancient and everyday temporal practice to illustrate the impact of environmental and social crisis in Oceania. Through her engagement with the sociopolitical landscape of Australia, spotlighting issues related to race, class, and the female body politic, she seeks to bring minority community voices and experiences into the foreground. Taumoepeau has presented and performed works at various events and venues in Melbourne, Queensland, and Sydney, as well as at festivals and galleries in Berlin, Hong Kong, and London. Since 2016, she has been working with Arts House in Melbourne on Refuge, an annual artist-led community preparedness program held in collaboration with Emergency Management Victoria and other community stakeholders (see also Mangioni, this issue). She is also involved in climate change advocacy for Pacific Island nations through various community engagement projects and regional campaigns. In addition to her artistic practice, Taumoepeau has worked for Playwriting Australia, where she facilitated an introductory playwriting program for communities and schools with culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, and for Radio Skid Row, a community radio station in Sydney, where she engaged communities underrepresented in mainstream media in creative digital media projects. She has also received numerous awards, including the Prague Quadrennial Award for Excellence in Performance Design for Repatriate (2019), which is featured in this issue. Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by Stelios Papadakis In the near future, Latai hopes to return to her ancestral home and continue the ultimate faivā of sea voyaging and celestial navigation. [End Page vii] After selecting this issue’s featured artist, I was thrilled to learn that the journal had also accepted Talei Luscia Mangioni’s peer-reviewed article “Confronting Australian Apathy: Latai Taumoepeau and the Politics of Performance in Pacific Climate Stewardship” (this issue, 32–62), which analyzes Taumoepeau’s artistry in more detail. [End Page viii] Click for larger view View full resolution The Last Resort, by Latai Taumoepeau, 2020. Performance, Biennale of Sydney, Cockatoo Island. Photo by Zan Wimberley. In this endurance performance installation, part of the series Stitching (Up) the Sea, Taumoepeau and her co-performer and relative Taliu Aloua channeled ceremonial Tongan practices while wearing brick sandals and worn-out hotel bathrobes emblazoned with the words “The Last Resort.” They proceeded to smash glass bottles and other refuse sourced from Sydney nightclubs. In an October 2020 dialogue with fellow artist Taloi Havini, Taumoepeau explained that her goal in the work, a commentary on the impact of climate change on the Pacific and its dangers to both human and marine life, was “to expose the relationship, the genealogy, between glass and islands and sand . . . that led to the ‘resort life’” (“The Last Resort: A Conversation,” e-flux 112 [October 2020]). Click for larger view View full resolution Ocean Island, Mine!, by Latai Taumoepeau, 2015. Performance, Carriageworks, Sydney. Photo by Sanja Simic. In Ocean Island, Mine!, also performed as part of AusDance’s Australian Dance Week, held 29 April–6 May 2017, Latai Taumoepeau relocated a 500-kilogram pile of ice from one end of the performance space to the other, scooping it up with a shovel and steadily carrying it bit by bit from point a to point b. As the performance description explains, with specific reference to phosphate mining in Banaba, “Back and forth, she works the open-cut mines of the past into the future of climate change; excavating the solid white rock into invisibility” (https://newacton.com.au/events/ocean-island-mine-by-latai-taumoepeau/). For more on this work, which is part of a genealogy of durational performance reflections from Taumoepeau’s suite Stitching (Up) the Sea, see Mangioni, this issue. Click for larger view View full resolution i-Land X-isle, by Latai Taumoepeau, 2013. Performance, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney. Photo by Zan Wimberley. In i-Land X-isle, Taumoepeau suspended herself under a block of melting ice to draw attention to the impact of climate change on...