The Future is Death

“The Future is Death explores our place as migrant people in a colonised land,” says curator Leilani A Sio aka Panda. “It asks, as manuhiri in Aotearoa, to consider our role and responsibilities, to write our own future. The Future is Death presents work by five emerging Pasefika artists that reimagines a new existence for their people, to reveal their images of what will follow.”

The artists involved in the Tautai exhibition are Taupuruariki Brightwell, Leala Faleseuga, Huriana Kopeke-Te Aho, Rex Paget and Janice aka Hy-bee Ikiua Pasi-Taito. Leilani A Sio says the legacy and violence of colonisation has disguised ancestral connections due to the subterfuge of a conquer and divide mentality. “This has dulled our knowledge that our roots are intertwined, reaching back through magma and blood, space and time. Cycles of migration are in our DNA.”

“The Future is Death is an imagining of radical death, the death of patterns, conversations and behaviours that have kept us imprisoned in a dichotomy where Tangata Whenua and Tangata O Le Moana are pitted against each other, competing for scraps instead of reweaving cultural connections. To move forward is to acknowledge we have been prisoners in somebody else’s imagination, enslaved in their structures.”

The Future is Death – 21 September – 13 October, 2018 Toi Poneke Gallery.

Public programme

Saturday 29 Sep 1 – 4pm: Raw Fish Live panel discussion: The Bungas Have Landed!
Saturday 6 October 1pm: Artist/curator’s talk: Hiro’s Progeny with Taupuruariki Brightwell and Leilani A Sio