LAYOVER

Artspace Aotearoa, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, March 15 - May 29, 2018

Artists: Edith Amituanai, BC Collective (Cora-Allan Wickliffe and Daniel Twiss) with Louisa Afoa

A layover, as the middle point of journey, can act as a moment of respite. It can also encompass a delayed arrival, a change in direction, and the anticipation of the next movement. A layover then, is about being-in-motion. For Layover, this concept of being-in-motion is used as a tool to discuss the complex ways in which culture moves physically, spatially and over time. How do we actualise a ‘home’ within moments of movement? Delving into these questions, Layover includes new commissions alongside existing work from Edith Amituanai and BC Collective with Louisa Afoa.

Edith Amituanai has developed ongoing photographic studies of Sāmoan homes over 15 years. Today, more Sāmoans live in diaspora than in Sāmoa itself. By observing the homes of this transnational population, specifically the homes of global family members, Amituanai makes visible the ways in which Fa’a Sāmoa culture travels and adapts. For Daniel Twiss and Cora Allan Wickliffe of BC Collective, homelands span Te-Moana-Nui-a-Kiwa to Turtle Island meaning that someone must always be away for the other to be home. Through shared experiences of Indigeneity across cultural and geographic contexts, BC Collective play with iconography of home using story, food, hiapo and ceramics.

Layover is the second iteration of an ongoing curatorial project which was initiated in 2017 at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane with the exhibition The Commute. The third iteration called Transits and Returns opened at Vancouver Art Gallery in September 2019. Layover then marks the mid-point of an exhibition journey too. Within this ongoing movement, Layover offers a place to be still, a site of consideration, a moment in transit, and the chance to look forward into the past.

Layover is a collaborative project led by Indigenous curators Sarah Biscarra Dilley (yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash, Chicana), Freja Carmichael (Quandamooka), Léuli Eshraghi (Sāmoa, Irān, Guangdong), Tarah Hogue (Métis, Dutch Canadian) and Lana Lopesi (Sāmoa).

Read the Layover floor sheet here.

PROGRAMS

Kai as Koha
March 21 and April 13, 2019, Artspace Aotearoa

Kai as Koha is an activation of the BC Collective’s artwork in the exhibition via an invitational three-course meal which seeks to acknowledge people who give back to their communities in multiple ways. Guests include the Visiting Curators, mentor and knowledge keepers who have contributed to the BC Collective’s work, and Moana and Indigenous storytellers and orators.

Travelling Places: A Non Symposium
March 22, 2019, Artspace Aotearoa

How can place travel?

Through networks of migration, trade, and exchange engendered in both deep time and every day, place and travel are integral to contemporary Indigenous experiences. Perhaps we can understand migration, trade and exchange as forms of commuting, and understand ourselves as commuting cultures. With commuting cultures come commuting knowledges which travel, exchange and take form over time and cross distance.

This notion of commuting is the framework of how the Visiting Curators – a curatorium of five curators, artists and writers from across the Great Ocean – are collaborating. Over three exhibition projects we have been interrogating the interconnection of both place and travel through a series of commissioned works by artists also located around the Great Ocean. In considering the conditions that engender our mobility as arts workers as well as the desire to build meaningful exchange across the waters, the curatorium has sought to foreground complex, wide-ranging experiences of Indigeneity that are inclusive of both ancestral knowledges and global connections.

Travelling Places: A Non-Symposium is a day of storytelling, skill sharing and dialogue centred on notions of place. As a Non-Symposium, the event rejects the authorial, academic voice in favour of asserting multivocality and openness as imperative to building understanding and collective futures.

Travelling Places: A Non-Symposium is supported by Auckland Arts Festival and Vancouver Art Gallery.

SCHEDULE

10.00am - 10.10am
Mihi Whakatau

10.10am - 11.30am
Storytelling with Qiane Matata-Sipu, Melanie Rands, Daniel Twiss

11.30am - 12.45pm
Break Outs: Choose a session with either Sarah, Freja or Lana

tpɨtɨ, tpɨlipɨʔ: acorn cake, elder jam, and relations across łpasini, Sarah Biscarra Dilley (yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini, Chicana)
Chatting over acorn cake and elderberry jam, like many generations past and future, Sarah will talk particular histories and cultural confluences of yak titʸu titʸu (Indigenous peoples) across łpasini, the sea, in places now known broadly as California.

Plenty of fish in the sea, Lana Lopesi (Sāmoa)
Join Lana for an ‘oka demonstration (will be shared as part of lunch) while she shares some of her thinking about the Moana as featured in her book False Divides.

Strands and stories, Freja Carmichael (Quandamooka)
Belonging to a family of Quandamooka weavers, Freja will share string making techniques and stories of her place of significance – Salt Water Country.

12.45pm - 1.45pm
Lunch: BC Collective

1.45pm - 2.30pm “we were never still,” Tarah Hogue (Métis, French Canadian, Dutch)
This presentation and discussion considers how movement deeply informs experiences of Indigeneity, from deep time to the present. Attendees are invited to contribute their own stories of migration, displacement, and visiting in response to Tarah’s offering.

2.30 - 3.15pm
Great Ocean Futures in recent art history, Léuli Eshraghi
(Sāmoa, Irān, Guangdong)
Léuli will discuss diverse ideas of time, space, nationhood and futures in recent works and texts by Indigenous artists and thinkers from around the Great Ocean.

3.15pm - 3.30pm
Closing Remarks by The Visiting Curators and Daniel Twiss