Summary

The Tautai Fale-ship Residencies place value on the everyday experiences of Moana artists operating in their own creative centres. In a model conceived in response to the 2020 lockdown, we now celebrate the Fale-ship Residencies as a vital part of Tautai’s ongoing programme to foster and showcase Pacific creatives. This year, we launched our latest iteration of the Residency, which sought to provide three artists with more time and resources to explore their creative practices. This year’s recipients – Quishile Charan, Harrison Freeth, and p.Walters – each undertook a three-month residency to develop new projects within their own creative centres.  

Indo-Fijian craft and social practitioner, researcher, writer and critical theorist Quishile Charan approaches craft as a science-fiction practice of building new worlds from the seeds of reality. A descendent of Girmit — Quishile holds close a core set of anarchist—anti-colonial, anti-institution, anti-authority—values. In her experimental, relational pursuits, Quishile expresses these values while seeking to form different visions of home with her own hands.  

Harrison Freeth is an artist of German-Tongan, Sāmoan, and Scottish heritage, born in Ōtepoti and based in Tāmaki Makaurau. His process-based practice is guided by curiosity, materiality, and open-ended learning. Through themes of identity and belonging, his work reveals how individual experiences both shape and are shaped by a larger shared history. 

Taniwha p.Walters is local to the Kingdom of South Auckland and beyond, with wings and bones stretching across Aotearoa and to the islands of Tonga. Their work reflects their dissidence to the colonial imagination and legacy of “new zealand”, and their devotion to understanding and venerating their queer and monstrous body. 

The Fale-ship Residency Exhibition presents the outcomes of their undertakings.