Broadly informed by lived experience and social discourse, together with tradition and customary knowledge, Brian Fuata’s work incorporates a diverse array of performance and communication modalities, including spoken word, concrete poetry, authentic movement (dance), correspondence, clowning, glossolalia (speaking-in-tongues), and sound art. In many works, he inhabits the role of trickster; engaging humour in his blurring of lines, between autobiography and fiction, audience and performer, art and the everyday. His prodigious and enigmatic output speaking, contemporaneously, of the body, place, self, and other.
Brian Fuata (born 1978, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand) currently lives and works on Gadigal Country (Sydney, Australia). Alongside his solo practice, Fuata also produces work as one half of artist duo Wrong Solo, with Agatha Gothe-Snape. In 2022, he co-curated MONUMENTAL (working title), with artist Latai Taumoepeau, a weekend of multidisciplinary performance for the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s 150-year anniversary celebrations. And he was the winner of ANTI Festival, Helsinki’s International Prize for Live Art in 2020.
Past works include: Apparitional resurrect, SeMA Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul (2024); THIS IS (after Easter), PICA Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (2023); Untitled (Intermission), 2022 ANTI Festival Helsinki and Singapore Biennale (2022); Five Columns, MUMA Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne (2020); of a house besieged (proposition retweeked), Art Gallery of New South Wales (2021) & The Kitchen, New York (2023); Apparitional Charlatan ~ Minor Appearances, NIRIN GIR: the 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020); Care disfigurements (flowers), 4A Gallery Sydney for Hong Kong Art Fair, Hong Kong (2019); Broadloom, Murray Art Museum Albury (2019); IWMLDFS (or MINIBAR), Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2019); The Guest House, Gwangju Biennial, South Korea (2018); All Nothing, Poetry Project, New York (2015); All titles, PERFORMA, New York (2015); Untitled (a refit of the sheet), Chisenhale Gallery, London (2015); Points of Departure 1–3, ACCA Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2014). His work is held in important public collections in Australia, New Zealand and the United States.