Angela Tiatia Artist Talk

Angela Tiatia is talking about her work at the Newcastle Art Gallery on Saturday 26 September, from 2.00pm to 3.00pm in Gallery 2. It's a free session, so you can just turn up and listen.

Tiatia is a Sāmoan/Australian artist based right here in Newcastle. For the last twenty years, she's been looking at global power structures and how they hit Pasifika communities, working across performance, moving image, painting, sculpture and photography to get at representation, gender, neo-colonialism and the way bodies and places get commodified. The talk introduces Muse, her first major survey and the largest presentation of her work to date, which pulls together two decades of video, photography and installation. It follows her poetic considerations of climate, capitalism and colonisation, with three named works shaping the survey: Hibiscus rosa sinensis (2010), The pearl, commissioned by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and Narcissus (2019).

There's a second project on the table, too. Tiatia will talk through The Matildas, a 23-minute video portrait of all 23 players of the CommBank Matildas FIFA Women's World Cup 2023 Final Squad. It was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery of Australia and filmed across three continents, five cities and seven shoots, so it's a fair bit of ground to cover in one sitting.

Between the survey and the Matildas piece, there's a lot of her career on display at once. The talk runs from 2.00pm to 3.00pm on Saturday 26 September in Gallery 2 at the Newcastle Art Gallery, and it's free.