Takatāpui & Queer Pasifika: Representation and Decolonisation in Museums, Galleries and Archives
Wednesday 2 June 2021, 8pm
Online - registration required
https://www.youtube.com/embed/gwu_Wdqmkq8
An unmissable international dialogue between Queer artists and museum professionals in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia with the Pitt Rivers Museum. This panel will discuss decolonising and 'queering' the Museum as inextricably related practices, looking at how gender and sexual identities beyond the colonial Western binary can and should be represented respectfully.
Panellists include renowned Tongan fa'afafine artist Dan Taulapapa Mcmullin, alongside activists and museum professionals from Aotearoa, New Zealand and Hawai'i.
Speaker Biography:
Dan Taulapapa McMullin is an artist and poet from Sāmoa Amelika (American Samoa). Their book of poems Coconut Milk (University of Arizona Press, 2013) was on the American Library Association Rainbow List Top Ten Books of the Year. In 2018, Samoan Queer Lives, co-edited with Yuki Kihara, was published by Little Island Press of Aotearoa. Taulapapa's performance poem The Bat and other early works received a 1997 Poets&Writers Award from The Writers Loft. Their artwork was in exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, De Young Museum, Oakland Museum, Musée du quai Branly, Bishop Museum, NYU's /A/P/A Gallery, and the United Nations. Their film Sinalela won the 2002 Honolulu Rainbow Film Festival Best Short Film Award. 100 Tikis is an art appropriation video at the intersection of tiki kitsch and indigenous sovereignty, and was the opening night film selection of the 2016 Présence Autochtone First Peoples Festival in Montreal; and was an Official Selection in the Fifo Tahiti International Oceania Documentary Film Festival; and at Pacifique Festival in Rochefort, France. Taulapapa's art studio and writing practice is based in Hudson, New York, where they live with their partner. They are currently working on a novel.
Webinar supported by TORCH Oxford,as part of the Humanities Cultural Programme.
This webinar is part of the Pitt RIvers Museum Radical Hope series. All talks will be recorded and are available to view after the event on the Radical Hope page.
