Pati Solomona Tyrell – Fāgogo

Saturday 17 March – 14 April

Blue Oyster Art Project Space

Dunedin

In Pati Solomona Tyrell’s practice, fāgogo is situated as a restorative practice, shared with other artists and collaborators from the Pasifika LGBTQI space in Aotearoa. In the film that gives this exhibition its title, the research, writing, choreography, styling and garment construction is all collaborative and honours the tradition of fāgogo by sharing the responsibility of telling this story and allowing artists to respond to their own cultural heritage, unpacking the colonial gaze placed on queer brown bodies to return gender and sexually diverse identities back to their oracle status.

This exhibition, Fāgogo, by Pati Solomna Tyrell, is the second iteration of his debut solo exhibition, originally hosted at ST PAUL St Gallery, AUT University, in 2017. The works endeavor to draw out threads of this conversation by presenting many of Tyrell’s other narratives, such as his extensive documentation of the community over five years as the principal photographer for the FAFSWAG Arts Collective.