Featuring Ngāsti (Aroha Scott & Tyson Campbell), Observed by John Miller
OPEN REHEARSAL:
FRIDAY 9 AUGUST, 11AM–5PM
PERFORMANCE:
SATURDAY 10 AUGUST, 6:30PM
Sumer is delighted to present Intermission (seini_transmit), a new work by Sydney-based Samoan artist Brian Fuata. This performance sees the artist returning to the country of his birth, in what will be his first in-person presentation in Aotearoa since 2016. It is also his first solo showing at the gallery.
Highly respected across fields of visual and live arts, Fuata is best known for his live and virtual performance incorporating structured improvisation, choreographed movement, oration, and text. Having emerged from Australia’s experimental performance scene in the early 2000s, over the past twenty years, he has presented works, both solo and collaborative, with leading cultural institutions across Oceania, Asia, North America, and Europe.
Broadly informed by lived experience and social discourse, together with tradition and customary knowledge, 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, Fuata 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.
Intermission (seini_transmit) will see the artist activating the empty gallery, “as an open repository of amassed material, generated since October 7. It will be energetically framed by an essence of Tongan artist, songwoman, and orator, Seini Taumoepeau, who passed away in May 2024.”
The artist will take up residence at the gallery from Monday 5 August, generating and accumulating material. On Friday 9th there will be an open rehearsal during standard gallery hours, 11am–5pm, leading to the performance on the evening of Saturday 10th August at 6:30pm.
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.
