Performance video explores Pacific identity

Sun 26 May 2024

In Heels and Walking the wall Angela Tiatia explores the stereotyping of Pacific female bodies. When Tiatia moved in the early 2000s to Australia from Auckland, with its vibrant contemporary Pacific art scene, she became part of a relatively smaller group of contemporary artists with Pacific heritage. The video works she developed around this time engaged directly with experiences of physical endurance, voyeurism and of being on the outside, as well as the effort required to assert a contemporary Pacific identity in Australia. The works also continued the artist’s exploration of structures and exchanges of power, particularly in relation to the female Pacific body.

Watch | Angela Tiatia discusses her work

Walking the wall (from ‘An Inventory of Gestures’ series) 2014 (illustrated) is a performance video in which Tiatia, clad in a black body suit and a pair of black stiletto heels, embarks on the project of walking the wall until it is no longer physically possible. The artist’s legs are marked with a beautiful malu (tattoo) that identifies her genealogical ties, a vision which both stridently asserts her Samoan identity and recalls a Western fascination with the tattooed, semi-clad Pacific Islander body. Ideas of female sexual availability symbolised by the stilettos are confronted through the artist’s adoption of the physical position involved in the male sexual act that is referred to as ‘walking the wall’. Wearing high heels, a conventional extension of her female gender, makes the position difficult for the artist to maintain and so the act cannot be realised.

Angela Tiatia ‘Walking the wall’ (stills) 2014

Heels 2014 (illustrated), in which a cropped frame captures the artist’s naked legs walking seductively across the screen, once again explores high heels as visual cultural markers of femininity and sexual availability. Stepping out of her heels, Tiatia does not return to a more comfortable, flat-footed posture; rather, she remains on her toes, attempting to hold her tiptoed position for as long as possible. An exploration of the ways in which we adopt and perpetuate regimes of power, the work also references the performance of Siva Samoa, in which the dancer will, at a certain point, rise to their toes to hold that position for as long as possible. A long-term practitioner of Siva Samoa as a relaxation technique, Tiatia reflects on the cultural specificity of various cultural markers and the ways in which they can be subverted.

Interdisciplinary in nature, Angela Tiatia’s practice exhibits considerable breadth and depth of experimentation and conceptual thinking. Tiatia treats the potent themes of cultural and sexual identity with a sense of freshness and warmth that enables her performative actions to engage diverse audiences.

Angela Tiatia ‘Heels’ (still) 2014

Ruth McDougall is Curator, Pacific Art, QAGOMA
This is an edited extract from the exhibition publication sis: Pacific Art 1980-2023 available at QAGOMA Stores and online.
‘sis: Pacific Art 1980–2023’ / Marica Sourris and James C. Sourris AM Galleries (3.3 & 3.4), GOMA / 26 August – 8 September 2024.