Angela Tiatia's 'The Dark Current' and Pasifika Femininity

“In our Pasifika culture when you’re a young person and you voice to your family that you want to be an artist, there’s often this suspicion, fear or worry about making an impact or even a career from being an artist. It takes a lot of having to bury those dreams and expectations that others have for your life and push past that to look deep within and ask “what do I want for my life?”

She is the Samoan supernova of the Australian art world, splashing narratives of brown women up front and personal across giant sized screens in some of the most acclaimed art spaces across the ditch.

The proud Savaiian has been on an extraordinary journey with her video making art practice, and has also had extraordinary success in the palagi art world.

Angela’s latest work ‘Dark Current’ continues to pack a punch, putting forward subversive ideas behind the beauty of the Island experience. ‘The Dark Current’ is a visual ode to Pasifika femininity, power and possibility. 

In 2022 Angela Tiatia was the last recipient of the Ian Potter Moving Image Commision, that led her to produce ‘The Dark Current’. The highly competitive $100,000 award requires artists to pitch their ideas to a panel of judges.

Angela proposed a three part video work that would acknowledge the past, present and future through a Pasifika lens. 

Successful in her application, Angela would go on to create the ambitious 17 minute long video that is a lucious weaving of striking visuals, choreographed movement, 3D animation and sound design.

‘The Dark Current’, which first premiered in Melbourne last September 2023, takes viewers on a vivid, dream-like journey exploring themes of colonialism, femininity and our relationship with virtual and physical realms.

Constructed into three segments, ‘The Dark Current’ speaks to the past, present and future.  

The first section of the video watches a tranquil woman with a pearl in her eye, laying down on a carpet that is suddenly inundated with water from below. As the water rises around her, the woman’s face remains serene despite the impending threat of drowning. 

“I wanted to acknowledge the past and my mother and her generation of Pacific Island women who traveled from the pacific in the 1960’s in that first massive migration wave....I love to bring the element of water into all of my works. There is so much meaning behind water for me” 

The second section addresses the present moment in reference to unraveling knowledge systems as Pasifika people and reclaiming power and identity through deep understanding of our ancestors and their experiences.

This section presents imagery of Marae Taputapuatea on Raiatea Island, a site that was visited by members of various pacific islands each year. 

The gathering was an occasion to share knowledge, celebrate and pay homage to their gods and ancestors. 

“I thought it was really important to unravel and put out there that this is our shared history, that we’ve always been a big massive Pasifika family." The second section also includes an eerie dance sequence atop bright pink water, and a vignette of Angela holding a burning image of herself.

Finally, the third section closes the work with 3D animation depicting a dystopian, hyperrealist fantasy world with palm trees, planets and melting ice structures.

Dancers are superimposed into the ice world, bringing it to life. Angela’s proposed future speaks to Pacific peoples being in charge of our histories, present and future.

The reception to ‘The Dark Current’ has been great, says Angela. “It’s been quite a massive shift from my earlier days when it was just me and the camera.” 

From exploring photography on her own with just a camera and herself as the subject, Angela Tiatia’s journey through the years has seen her arts practice broaden into a much larger collaborative operation.

We caught up with Angela nearly 8 years ago when her arts practice looked a little different. As time has passed, Angela has slowly removed herself from her work to stand behind the camera instead of standing in frame. 

“I would weigh the camera down with weights, set it up and perform in quite an intimate way. It’s quite different to the way I've been working in recent years or today, where there's big film crews, there's a lot of people involved in the cast and there's a lot of planning and prep. Back in those days I could just think up an idea and do it straight away. So there was this nice immediacy and spontaneity.”

By comparison, the communal element to working in collaboration with others in her more recent works reminds Angela of the strength that Pasifika culture carries when banding together, leading by example, listening to each other and ensuring that everyone shines.

Even though we can see the collective shift in the way indigenous folks and women have begun to take up more space in the creative sphere, there is still much work to do. Angela notes that this can become more apparent when being responsible for larger scale works like ‘The Dark Current’. 

“There’s that disconnect, where a quiet, brown female could command a big set and make a big work. I really like that aspect of bringing down those barriers of what a director could look like." Angela chats more specifically about disrupting space with her hair in our Adorn doco here. 

Tiatia’s work will inherently always be infused with themes of race, identity, colonialism and gender. Her undeniable presence in a space that can seem inaccessible, should serve as evidence that your creative dreams are worthy of pursuit.

Winning the Ian Potter Moving Image award was not achieved without a lifetime of commitment to the arts and to Pacific culture.

“I would hope that my work would give Pasifika people a starting point to look deep within their culture to learn more about our history prior to colonization. I would hope that it would provide the Pasifika audience an avenue into dreaming a different future for themselves.” 

The Dark Current will be showing at Angela’s solo exhibition at Sullivan + Strumpf in Sydney from 14th March to 20th April.

-
By Timēna Apa
Public Interest Journalism funded by NZ on Air