Sisters Stars and Savages

Rosanna Raymond, Shark of the Sea, FABrication, 2017, Courtesy of the Artist, Photo by Jermaine Dean.

SISTERS, STARS AND SAVAGES-A CURIOTORIAL ACTI.VA.TION EXPLANATIONWITH HB19 ARTIST ROSANNA RAYMOND

Wednesday, November 7, 2018, 5:30-6:30 PM HST

Hawai’i State Art Museum (HiSAM)

250 South Hotel St, Second Floor, Honolulu, HI 96813

How can the living performative body expand the concept of the Tā-Vā theory? Historically Samoan cultural understandings of the Tā-Vā have been grounded in relational and social space binding people and things together.My art practice centralises the body as a site of resistance using the Tā/Vā Theory as a methodology for an embodied art practice.

This presentation will talk to the work of the Pacific Sisters and the SaVAge K’lub. Two collectives I am deeply involved with representing over 2 decades of socially engaged art practice challenging and reframing ethnological tropes through the arts as cultural practitioners. CULT.ivators, FAB.ricators, Acti.VA.tors creating works of VA’rt. Using the body as the genealogical matter bringing the past into the present initiating Vā relationships with all that connects to it.

This is the VA in the acti.VA.tion an embodied practice where the ancient and the modern co-exist. The Vā body mediating our place in the globe as we travel through time and space in the present, binding people and things forming new relationships, creating new narratives adding to our indigenous indexes past present and future.

BIO

Sistar S’pacific aka Rosanna Raymond, an innovator of the contemporary Pasifika art scene as a long-standing member of the art collective the Pacific Sisters, and founding member of the SaVAge K’lub. Raymond has achieved international renown for her performances, installations, body adornment, and spoken word. A published writer and poet, her works are held by museums and private collectors throughout the UK, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Raymond’s practice works with people, spaces and things to acti.VA.te a dynamic relationship between them, to realise and reshape the ta-va duality. This is a choreographic process that extends beyond the frames of art, into both domestic routines and ritual protocols. It includes self-adornment and group enactments, activating space and collapsing time using the body and the genealogical matter.