Summary

nobody belongs here more than you brings together works by six students from across Tāmaki Makaurau - Ayla Brockes, Portia Haddon, Carmel Aroha Salmanzadeh, Isaiah Swann, Teuila Va’aelua, and Miro Wrightson-Lyons. 

Developed through an open invitation, the exhibition provides a platform for emerging artists to present work outside of their respective academic institutions, highlighting the breadth, diversity, and current concerns of Pacific creative practice at an early stage of development. 

Across photography, moving image, sculpture, installation, and material experimentation, the artists explore questions of identity, memory, gender, grief, migration, housing, and belonging. Their works consider the traces left by absence, the politics of representation, and the ways personal and collective histories are carried across generations. Together, they reflect on the relationship between lived experience and the social, cultural, and institutional structures that shape it. 

Image courtesy of Isaiah Swann: November 2019 in the village of. Tamakautoga, Niue