AUT - Vasa
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Vasa
VASA
A collaborative project of Lemi Ponifasio and Albert Refiti.
March 23 - April 14, 2006
Gallery two
The exhibition VASA pulls together elements of Pacific performance to illuminate certain philosophies of the body in Oceania.
To be located in and around the Pacific is to confront the undifferentiated abyss that is the ocean. Of all grounds it is the most insubstantial because it has no particular identity, no fixed position(s), and if anything the sea severs the will to identity and tends to multiply and confuse the specificity of location - the oceanscape always pushes you hither and thither and one literally floats on it. Polynesians designate the ocean as the va or wa an opening, a gap or in-between place that dislocate/disconnect people and things, not in a negative way but as a reality that provides a way to bon them 'positively'. By contrast islands, or motu, which literally translates as 'to sever' or 'broken' (the other possible meaning is 'to stand on' or 'to erect on';) are the product of identification. Fished out of the sea (Maori) and thrown from heaven (Samoa) it is where land or whenua is fought over and contested. So if the sea is the designated ground of Polynesia, then island is form, the determined object of placement and identity.
The exhibition presents these notions in the context of a performative collaboration between Lemi Ponifasio who is a composer and choreographer for MAU Dance Company and Albert Refiti who is a Pacific art and design theorist at Auckland University of Technology.