Image credit : Francoise Schneiders 2022, My Skin An Island (still)

Opening: Saturday 19th February

What threads us together?

Oceans

&

Love for our homelands

Our storytelling as women

Our connection

&

Pride

Of our bloodlines

Curated by: Maya Hodge

This group exhibition is an exploration of women's storytelling, culture, vibrations, weaving, family and ancestral ties, and the oceans and land which bridge our connection with one another.

Artists:

Anne-Marie Te Whiu | Ariana Tikao | Lǐ Xīng Yǔ - Echo Li |

Françoise Schneiders | Aqui Thami | Jenna Rain Warwick

Ariana Tikao

Ariana is a singer, composer, and leading player of taonga puoro, who was awarded as a 2020 Arts Laureate by the Arts Foundation of New Zealand. She writes waiata exploring themes relating to her Kāi Tahu identity and mana wahine, often drawing upon historical kōrero from her ancestors. Ariana’s music has featured in television, film, theatre, dance, and for online media.

Whatever the setting, Ariana always brings artistic integrity, making her a sought-after talent and collaborator in the arts scene in Aotearoa New Zealand today. She is also a published writer and poet.

Lǐ Xīng Yǔ - Echo Li

Lǐ Xīng Yǔ - Echo Li is an artist based in Narrm born in Suzhou, China. Her work traverses video, performance, photography and diasporic experience. By rethinking the dynamic nature of subjectively differentiated forms of love, she seeks to address the struggle of balancing personal and political dimensions of human experience. In love, nothing is ever balanced. From personal forces of infatuation to deeper political structures, she is interested in exploring intense emotions related to hybrid cultural identity. Significantly, her experience of destabilization as a state that works in concert with her desire to live with intensity.

Françoise Schneiders

Françoise Schneiders is a multi-disciplinary photographic artist of Tahitian and New Zealand descent. Her work spans the moving image, performance, portraiture and expanded documentary.

She has an interest in the interstitial moments of the human condition. In particular, diaspora, memory and myth, as well as the role of history, the arts, and the family album in identity construction.

Anne-Marie Te Whiu

Annie is a Māori-Australian (Te Rarawa) writer, weaver, curator, cultural producer and editor having worked on Solid Air: Australia and New Zealand Spoken Word and Tony Birch’s Whisper Songs. Her writing has been published across Australia and Aotearoa. Annie has worked at Red Room Poetry as a Senior Project Manager since 2019. She is a 2021 recipient of The Wheeler Centre’s Next Chapter Fellowship and was awarded an Unyoked Writer’s Residency. She is a part of the Taraheke collective and is working on her first collection of poetry titled Mettle to be released in 2022.

Aqui Thami

Aqui is a Janajati/Indigenous artist from the Himalayas , she lives and works in Bombay. aqui uses social exchanges and develops safe spaces to position art as a medium of healing in community. aqui's interdisciplinary practice ranges across ceremonial interventions, performances, drawings, zinemaking, fly posting, public intervention, brought together by participant involvement most of her work is self funded and realised in collaboration.

Jenna Rain Warwick

Jenna is an emerging Artist, Curator and published Writer living and working on Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung Country. Born in Mossman, Queensland, a proud Luritja Woman, Jenna’s published work speaks to her desire to champion the creative imagination of First Nations peoples. Jenna graduated with a Bachelor of Art History and Curating from Monash University in 2021. She is adamant that critical engagement with First Nations work should come from First Nations voices first and foremost. Jenna’s work seeks to challenge the notion of objectivity, weaving poetic narration with video and image; to swim between bodies, perspective and times, her creative work echoes each other and is all entangled. She has written for Un Projects, Art and Australia, her video work has been shown at Incinerator Gallery and Counihan gallery. 

Proudly Supported by:

Australian Government Indigenous Language and Arts, Creative Victoria & Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA)