Each year from 2010 - 2020, an Auckland-based artist was commissioned to create a new body of work for exhibition during the Festival.
View the 2020 Auckland Festival of Photography Annual Commission that features three Auckland-based artists.
Qiane Matata-Sipu (Te Wai-o-hua, Waikato-Tainui)
About Artist:
Qiane Matata-Sipu (Te Wai-o-hua, Waikato-Tainui) is a South Auckland-based journalist, photographer and social activist. She has been documenting her papakāinga, Ihumātao for the past twelve years. She was part of the 'Cultural Memory' symposium at the 2014 Festival, was shortlisted in 2015 for that year's Annual Commission and was also exhibited by the Festival at Pingyao Photo Festival, China. Her six image social documentary series about the campaign to protect land next to the Ōtuataua Stonefields Historic Reserve in Māngere from development as a Special Housing Area won her a 2018 NZ Geographic Photographer of the Year Photo Story award.
About Comissioned Work:
Uri 2020 - Epson Enhanced Matt 189gsm
Responding to the 2020 Festival theme ‘unseen’, the work by Qiane Matata-Sipu continues the ongoing body of images Qiane has been documenting for the past 13 years around her whānau and papakāinga of Ihumātao. Uri embraces the whakataukī, ‘ka muri, ka mua’, to walk backwards into the future. It connects te Ao Marama with the realm of Hine nui te pō. Uri is descendant, relative, blood connection. The two wāhine in this piece are uri of the tupuna and whenua before them, at dusk, you sense the mauri of the unseen. Harmony Smith stands on the slopes of her maunga Te Puketaapapatanga a Hape. On her head, a pare kawakawa, a wreath to mourn both those passed, and the confiscated whenua she stands on. Haeata te Kapua holds in her hands the flesh of our Atua Wahine Papatūānuku, nurturing a fresh kawakawa cutting. The native is rongoa, medicinal, in this instance, a tohu in the healing of intergenerational trauma for future generations.
Raymond Sagapolutele
About Artist:
Raymond Sagapolutele is an Aotearoa-born Sāmoan artist with family ties to the villages of Fatuvalu in Savai'i and Saluafata in Upolu, Samoa. Sagapolutele picked up the camera in 2003 and began a self-taught photography journey that would see him work with editorial publications Back to Basics and Rip It Up as a staff photographer as well as submissions to the NZ Herald and Metro Magazine. Sagapolutele completed his Masters in Visual Arts passing with first-class honours and received the Deans Award for Excellence in Postgraduate study from AUT. Sagapolutele was also showcased in the 2019 Wallace Arts Award and a finalist in the 2019 Glaister Ennor Graduate Art Awards.
About Comissioned Work:
Indonesia 2020 & Free West Papua 2020 - Digital prints on textured museum quality cotton rag
UNSEEN is a diptych presented as a statement on the unequal power relationship existing between Indonesia and the indigenous independence movement in West Papua. For Raymond Sagapolutele photography is methodology to extend research into the Samoan practice of ‘fagogo’ whereby knowledge is imparted from one generation to another via oratory and chant. The work shows a skull painted in the colours of the Indonesian flag, and then repainted to bear the colours of the banned ‘Morning Star’ flag of the West Papuan independence movement. The skull evokes the presence and active participation of ancestors in the dialogue of the diptych – rather than the skull functioning as a call to remember one’s mortality it involves the sanctity of the head common to many Moana cultures. The lei adorning the repainted skull was a gift to the artist made at the conclusion of a march in 2019, which commemorated the struggles of the Samoan Mau independence movement against the violently repressive colonial power of New Zealand.
Saynab Muse
About Artist:
Saynab Muse provides a unique perspective to the cultural landscape of photography, with her Muslim heritage, love of photography and talent at it as a means to express in a hearing world. Saynab graduated with a Bachelor of Creative Enterprise at Unitec.
About Comissioned Work:
Women feminism 2020 - Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308gsm
“My project is about being a feminist and the Muslim religion, detailing my identity that turned into a project to share with others. I want to showcase my perspective of what it's about, so others can understand about how my religion informs ideas such as diversity and feminism. I grew up wearing a Hijab (head scarf), and that shows the part of me as a Deaf Muslim women".
