Latai Taumoepeau

Latai Taumoepeau (b.1972, Gadigal Ngura/Sydney) makes live art as an expanded Indigenous practice of service, which merges cultural, political, rhetorical and formal concerns. Her work is grounded in the Tongan doctrines of fonua (land/place/body) and tauhi fonua (care for land/place/body); faiva (body-centred actioning); and vā (space) as informed by her birthplace on the unceded lands of the Gadigal people. Drawing from these concepts, her practice is in service of climate justice and its dire implications on race, class, woman and the Pacific body politic. 

Working across performance, choreography, film, sound and print, her collaborative immersive installations are composed through instructional scores and logic systems.Through her work, she aims to bring unseen communities to  the unromanticised,  frangipani-less foreground. This practice sits alongside her eventual return to the Kingdom of Tonga, where she will continue what to her is the ultimate faiva: sea voyaging and celestial navigation before becoming an ancestor. 

We Latai (reminisce) Tau-moe-peau (battle-with-waves) 
We stand for Moana Oceania interventions 
We stand for the baptism of the frontline 
We stand for saltwater sovereignty 
We stand for the embodied archive 
We stand for 1 degree of difference 
We stand for the monstrous femme body 
We stand inside shifting coordinates of the in-between 
We stand for defending our Moana.

As part of the Djamu Program at the Art Gallery of NSW, Latai is currently collaborating with Paris Taia. They are co-designing and growing a Pacific garden with young men in the Pacific brotherhood program at the Frank Baxter Youth Justice Centre and it is her favourite most meaningful project. 

Taumoepeau has presented and exhibited across borders, countries and coastlines, including most recently Ocean Space, Venice Bangkok Art Biennale; ANTI Festival,  Finland; Taipei Contemporary Arts Festival; National Portrait Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Art Gallery of New South Wales and Sydney Festival; Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tamaki; Serpentine Galleries, London; 22nd Biennale of Sydney; and the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. Her works are held in private and public collections. In 2023, she was the recipient of the Creative Australia Emerging and Experimental Arts Award.