Role playing & humour functions as a tool for video art

Sun 28 Apr 2024

For nearly two decades, Salote Tawale has upended viewers’ and critics’ expectations of who she is and what she is likely to do next. Significantly, she refuses for her art practice to be categorised as a symbol of ‘Pacific-ness’ or her place of birth – Fiji. You can watch Tawale’s work in the exhibition ‘sis: Pacific Art 1980–2023’ at the Gallery of Modern Art until 25 August 2024

‘I think role playing and humour functions as a tool for my art in the same way it does in my life. It can be used as a coping mechanism. It can break the tension. I’m hoping that when people come and view these works that they do have a chuckle and think about what’s so funny, because within that entangled is the concepts of the work.’ – Salote Tawale

‘sis’ is a term of familiarity and endearment used throughout the Pacific, and the exhibition ‘sis’ honours and celebrates the work and stories of women artists from across the Pacific. ‘sis’ offers a deeper understanding of the contribution that our Pacific sisters make to the art of the region by redressing past wrongs and engaging in new conversations about the world and our place in it.

Watch | Salote Tawale discusses her involvement in the exhibition ‘sis’

Salote Tawale’s video work installed in ‘sis’

Tawale has explored various modes of self-performance, including the use of animation and green-screen technologies to inhabit different archetypes from popular culture. She decided to concentrate on self-portraiture to bring about awareness and a deeper understanding of the multiplicity of the Pacific diaspora experience. Although Tawale’s work often references mainstream popular culture, her process of image-making humorously exposes archetypes to make room for inclusivity. Tawale’s work therefore recognises and appreciates the myriad ways in which individuals from marginalised groups creatively resist and transcend their circumstances.

Tawale’s recent video works often feature family members and are recorded on visits home to Fiji. Character and setting are carefully considered and focus on communicating the contemporary and often do-it-yourself nature of Fijian village architecture. Like in her earlier video works, Tawale views these structures – imaginatively created from a mix of local and imported materials – as types of self-portraits.

‘Person peel’ & ‘The Peel’

In Person peel 2002 (illustrated), Tawale overlays her own image with features that reference well known archetypes from Western popular culture. As each transformation is complete the artist peels it away, as if it was an image constructed on a child’s magic slate toy, to subsequently inscribe the features of a new identity which may provide a better fit. The compulsion to be constantly redrawing and reconfiguring the self alludes to the lack of visual archetypes within the dominant popular culture in Australia that speak of contemporary Pacific Islander subject positions and identity.

The discomfort created by the absence of positive contemporary Pasifika visual role models is further explored in The Peel 2004 (illustrated). The audience is presented with an image of the artist peeling back her own face, a see-through skin-like layer which has been applied over the artists face is slowly peeled off. The video plays on the uneasy physical sensations that these slightly obsessive actions of ‘self-discovery’ may evoke in their viewer.

These early performance videos focus on ideas of self-portraiture and, in particular, the artist’s face as a site of identity construction.

Salote Tawale ‘Person peel’ 2002

Salote Tawale ‘The Peel’ 2004

‘I get so emotional (karaoke version)’

I get so emotional 2006 (illustrated) finds Tawale performing as various musical stereotypes while singing the lyrics of Whitney Houston’s ‘I get so emotional’. Tawale unravels the fantasy Houston represents — of ‘making it’ as an icon of contemporary black, female identity — through her humorous cover of this song, playing out the complex shifts in character and circumstance that this requires. Speaking of the important role that pop music plays in her work, Tawale says: A pop song is so in line with how you feel about something but also at the same time a total fantasy.

Salote Tawale ‘I get so emotional (karaoke version)’ 2006

‘Skull video’

The installation Sometimes you make me nervous, but then I know we are supposed to sit together for a long time 2015 (illustrated) deconstructs and reassembles motifs from conventional still lifes — such as the skull, fresh fruit and cut flowers — to reveal the layers of migrant and colonial heritage that inform our contemporary identities. The accompanying flower arrangement that rotates through a cycle of renewal and decay is based on Fijian funeral flowers, bringing further attention to the underlying sense of grief and mourning that Tawale transforms into a celebratory affirmation of her being-in-the-world.

Salote Tawale ‘Skull video (from ‘Sometimes you make me nervous’)’ 2015