ʻO le ūa na fua mai Manuʻa’ brings fresh international perspectives to current endeavours to embody and awaken Indigenous sensual and spoken languages. The exhibition takes its title from a Sāmoan proverb that describes the incoming rain from the Sāmoan island of Manu'a (currently within the unincorporated territory of the United States of America) and bittersweet or melancholic moments leading to much-needed change.

This archipelago of Indigenous moving image works moves away from Western thinking of ‘the Pacific’ as an untethered region at the periphery of the action (Australia, Australasia, Asia), from a place somewhere over the horizon from where we find ourselves on Eora Nation shores and where contemporary culture is made in Australia. Instead, Indigenous concepts of relational space-time, kinships and responsibilities spanning the Great Ocean are the frameworks that ground this project. 

Drawing together works that span the intellectual and material territories of Yirrkala to Santiago, from Sydney to Kuujjuaq, ʻO le ūa na fua mai Manuʻa’ invites consideration of chosen genealogies and bloodlines meeting through language, movement, body and kinship. It features works that deepen understandings of complex Indigenous life today: focusing on language, memory, desire and pleasure (including sensitivity/care to queer, trans, feminist and matriarchal forms of belonging and kinship without being prescriptive).

Curated by Dr Léuli Eshrāghi (Sāmoan, Darwin/Montreal)

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