Heavenly Creatures

March 1 – April 7
Verge Gallery
Sydney

Louisa Afoa, Natasha Matila-Smith and Molly Rangiwai-McHale will be exhibiting ‘Heavenly Creatures’ at Verge Gallery in Sydney. 

In her thorough critique of Western paradigms and systems in Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999), Professor Linda Tuhiwai Smith wrote “The reach of imperalism into ‘our heads’ challenges those who belong to colonized communities to understand how this occurred, partly because we perceive a need to decolonize our minds, to recover ourselves, to claim a space in which to develop a sense of authentic humanity.” Further expanding on this, Bell Hooks wrote “if any female feels she need anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency.”

What the artists hope to explore through this exhibition will be ideas about bodily and cultural autonomy and sovereignty and opening communications with other young indigenous people of colour. We are specifically dealing with the self-representation of three multiracial women from Aotearoa/New Zealand and our personal experiences, rather than what we represent as a body of peoples, for no two experiences of cultural heritage are identical.