Leilani Kake

Talking Tivaevae

Kake is a multi-media artist who works with moving images to create video installations that reflect her identity. Leilani instils her art with herself, the works are visually and emotionally engaging while also provocative. Her work is reflective of her Māori and Cook Island heritage. Beginning with issues that are close to her heart, Leilani's art expresses and reflects the human condition in a way that is not powerful in an abrupt way but in a soulful, modest, and touching way because it is always an integral reflection of her own life. That soul of her work is multicultural like her home of Otara, South Auckland which is often the location of her art.

Leilani studied Moving Image at Manukau Institute of Technology (MIT) and worked at Tangata Whenua Television. In 2004, Leilani decided to pursue her art fulltime. Also that year, Ema Tavola invited her to participate in an exhibition at Fresh Gallery in Otara. Her work for this show was an opportunity to address the spiritual consequences of the Foreshore and Seabed Bill for Māori. Entitled Te Kiri Haehae, the multimedia installation addresses how the loss of the Bill was like the loss of family for Māori because to be cut off from land is to be cut off from ancestral ties and knowledge.

Cordoning off an area in the courtyard in front of the gallery, Leilani brought in two tonnes of sand to create the illusion of

Talking Tivaevae

the foreshore and from that shaped the ancestral body of Papatuanuku (Earth Mother) as a Tupapaku (deceased person). Māori karanga (chants) called out from projected images on either side. The emotional calls across the darkened space are evocative and touching.

As part of postgraduate studies at MIT in 2005, Leilani documented the making of tivaevae in the installation Talking Tivaevae. The tivaevae's island designs, in the colours of the Māori flag, represent the Māori ideology of balance with nature. Black as darkness, in the sense of darkness in the womb or before an idea arrives, a positive darkness; white as enlightenment and purity; red as the female essence, blood, and connections.

Leilani's art touches upon the social and spiritual and work like Tino Rangatira Tanga is not uncomplicated but work like this resonates.

In 2008 as her father Richard Kake was dying, not knowing what to do, Leilani instinctively picked up her camera, putting it between her and the devastating passing of her father. There was anger amongst her family that Leilani could go against Māori tradition and record the events but knowing her father's constant encouragement of her art Leilani kept filming. After her father's burial, the footage helped Leilani to heal

Tino Rangatira Tanga

Tino Rangatira Tanga is not so much about death as it is about life. The installation calls the audience into the space where three monitors create a semi-circle around the viewer. The monitors play footage of Richard Kake receiving his Ta Moko Rangatira (chiefly facial tattoo) with boys performing a Māori chant paying homage to their chief followed by a hangi (feast) to celebrate the event; the last days of his life and funeral; and a compilation of photographs of Richard and whanau (family) through the years.

This is Leilani's tribute to her father's memory. This work, like the others, is healing part of Leilani's journey through her art.

The same year she produced Tino Rangatira Tanga, Leilani was awarded the Salamander Gallery/Creative New Zealand Emerging Pacific Visual Artist Award. Leilani and her work have travelled extensively throughout the Pacific to American Samoa, Tonga, Cook Islands, Fiji, and Hawai‛i as well as Taiwan and USA.