Edith Amituanai: Double Take

Edith Amituanai: Double Take

Publication details

Softcover, 28cm x 22cm, 141 pages with colour illustrations
ISBN: 978-1-877309-43-4

Author and/or Editor name/s

Editor: Christina Barton

Authors: Christina Barton, Niko Besnier, Anna Miles, Haruhiko Sameshima, Ane Tonga

Author and/or Editor bio/s

Ane Tonga is an artist and curator based in Auckland, New Zealand. Ane was appointed as the inaugural Curator of Pacific Art at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki in March 2020. Previously, she was the Lead Exhibition Curator at Rotorua Museum Te Whare Taonga o Te Arawa and has undertaken curatorial roles at Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dowse Art Museum and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. She was the Judge of the 2016 Miles Art Awards at Tauranga Art Gallery and Judge of the 2017 Estuary Art and Ecology Prize at Malcolm Smith Gallery. She has held academic positions including Adjunct Lecturer at Unitec Institute of Technology and Professional Teaching Fellow at Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland. Ane has also written for numerous art publications and catalogues on artists which include Mata Aho Collective, Amie Siegel, The Pacific Sisters and recently published the monograph, Te Ringa Rehe – The Legacy of Emily Schuster.

Christina Barton is an art historian, curator, writer and director of the Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi.

Niko Besnier is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. His essay draws on a European Research Council-funded project ‘Globalisation, Sports and the Precarity of Masculinity’ he directed between 2012–2017.

Anna Miles is an Auckland art dealer and part-time lecturer in Visual Arts at Auckland University of Technology. Anna established Anna Miles Gallery in 2003 and has represented Edith Amituanai since that time.

Haruhiko Sameshima is a photographer based in Auckland. He publishes artist publications through Rim Books and is a partner in Studio La Gonda, a fictional commercial studio modelled on the nineteenth-century photographic studios of New Zealand.

Ane Tonga is an artist and curator based in Auckland, New Zealand. Ane was appointed as the inaugural Curator of Pacific Art at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki in March 2020.

Year of publication

2019

Publisher

Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Abstract

This publication, and the exhibition it accompanies, is the first to survey Edith Amituanai’s photographic practice. In images spanning 2003 to the present, Amituanai shares her experiences of life as a first-generation New Zealand-born Sāmoan, presenting portraits of people and places from her home in Ranui, West Auckland to her homeland of Sāmoa, to the scattered sites of Pacific diaspora from Christchurch, New Zealand to Montpellier, France, and Anchorage, Alaska. These prove her empathy and engagement, confounding photography’s reputation as an organ of control and objectification. In this volume, Haruhiko Sameshima calls Amituanai a ‘village photographer’. This term aptly captures her commitment to record events and occasions as an embedded chronicler working for her community; it also encompasses the notion that her’s is a global village connected by her lens and through her ready embrace of social media. The images brought together speak to the multiple realities that exist both here and across the world that expand our presumptions about who ‘we’ in Aotearoa are and what constitutes ‘home’.