Sydney Festival's visual artist-in-residence, Telly Tuita, presents Tongpop, a vibrant and meaningful installation exploring his Tongan and Australian heritage.
It’s colourful and camp, can be joyfully silly but has layers of meaning and deep cultural references. Welcome to Tong pop, the wild and wonderful creation of multidisciplinary artist Telly Tuita, visual artist-in-residence at this year’s Sydney Festival. Tuita’s installations feature at the festival hub in Walsh Bay, and he has also staged a Tong pop takeover of the historic steamship SS John Oxley, complete with a six-metre totem dubbed Carlotta after the legendary Les Girls performer.
Tuita came to the attention of festival director Olivia Ansell when she saw his show at Campbelltown Arts Centre. He spent seven months conceiving and making work for the Sydney Festival show calledAll his work, often repurposing cheap plastic material, is woven through with references to his own remarkable story growing up in Tonga and Australia (he now lives in New Zealand). Despite being abandoned by his parents “for complicated reasons” as a young child, he recalls his early years in Tonga with his extended family as idyllic. It was also where he learnt many of the traditional techniques he now employs in his art practice. “A lot of my daily life was chores,” he says. “There were domestic chores, but then also chores helping the women with the crafts and the art stuff, preparing materials for weaving or ngatu . So I grew up around a culture that makes things not to show, but because it’s part of daily life, part of the economy and part of the production of culture.”In 1989, aged nine, Tuita was sent to live with his father and stepmother in Minto. It was the biggest of culture shocks. “I arrived at the airport, met complete strangers and then went to KFC to have a meal from this talking box,” he says. “It was that sort of big punch of life where your whole world shifts and turns overnight.”Speaking only Tongan, Tuita went to Campbellfield Public School, where he recalls being taught English for two years by a “lovely palangi lady”
ART CULTURE SYDNEY FESTIVAL TELLY TUITA TONG AUSTRALIA
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