01/05/2023
Please join us to welcome Léuli Eshrāghi, our newest artist in residence, in collaboration with
Come and engage with Léuli in a community conversation, led by Drew K Broderick, on Saturday, January 7th at 5:30pm at Aupuni Space. Refreshment and pūpū to follow.
You may have crossed paths with Léuli, as they are a frequent visitor to Hawai‘i. This month long residency presents an opportunity for Léuli to exchange ideas, gain knowledge of, and strengthen ties with Kanaka Maoli and their Hawaiʻi based allies. Léuli (Sāmoan/Persian/Cantonese ancestry) works across visual arts, curatorial practice and university research to center Indigenous kin constellations, sensual and spoken languages, and ceremonial practices.While in residence at Aupuni Space, Eshrāghi will work with Kānaka ‘Õiwi and Hawai‘i-based poets and artists to conceive their performance, moving image, writing and installation project afiafi.
Meaning day, afternoon and fire in Sāmoan, afiafi affirms and situates non-colonial temporality where sensuality, pleasure, sexuality, joy, and spirituality—expressed in French, German and Austrian colonial collections of fau (hibiscus) and uʻa (paper mulberry) barkcloth obtained from the Sāmoan archipelago in the 1700s-1900s as much as in photographic archives of Indigenous ancestors—in symbiosis with kin animals, deities, and territories threatened by climate catastrophe, are deeply embraced. This work is not so much a response to the invisibility of non-binary and Indigenous-gendered people in Eurocentric art history upheld across the Great Ocean, but moreso a tender yet rigorous offering for today’s challenges of intersecting crises of violence against faʻafafine-faʻatama, māhū, q***r, trans, and non-binary bodies, and of Indigenous homelands threatened by the rising Great Ocean.
This program is made possible through a generous grant from the Laila Twigg Smith Art Fund via the , we are grateful for their continued support of our efforts.
