Exploring cultural identity and feminism using the body in art with a focus on Angela Tiatia’s 2014 video artwork, Walking the Wall.
Is your body your own? Within it you experience; through it you express. Yet our bodies are surveilled and are regulated, both from without and from within ourselves. More than we often realise. Think Foucault.
Angela Tiatia uses her body to express the contradictions that push and pull on bodies. My essay draws upon thinkers in this sphere including Olu Oguibe and Brendan Hokowhitu, and a feminist art heritage.
In Walking the Wall Angela Tiatia uses her body to assert and explore female indigenous heritage and identity in a society annexed by Western culture. Of Pacific Island heritage Tiatia is aware of the changing world in which we live. She has concerns about how globalisation does, and will affect people. Layered on this is both her particular connection with neo-colonialism and feminist views – these she believes, “sits on the body”. In her actions in this artwork she is presenting the ‘absurdity’ of these conflicting ideals placed on women within the indigenous milieu.
⏰ 20-25 minutes
Tiatia's new work The Dark Current (2023) is presently on exhibition at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery to 27 April 2025.
Bice Grace Lapin 