Artist Angela Tiatia Keeps ACMI Visitors Guessing

The opening sequence of New Zealand-born artist Angela Tiatia’s The Dark Current, a 17-minute digital video now screening at the ACMI in Melbourne, is as mesmerising as it is suspenseful, Lenny Ann Low writes in a story published by The Sydney Morning Herald.

Tiatia, 49, a Samoan artist born in Auckland who has won multiple awards and has work in collections around the globe, says it was the first image she imagined for the video.

What unites each of the film’s three parts, Low writes, is a gripping, flowing merging of lush colour, slow reveals of evolving forms created by human bodies, landscape and marae in the Pacific region and hyperreal computer animation that upends historical stereotypes of objects and people.

“That opening segment is like a homage to my parents’ generation,” Tiatia says. “My mother travelled from Samoa to New Zealand and she was one of the very first in the family to set up the remittance economy that the Pacific Islands and Samoa is so reliant on, of family members sending money back to the islands to support them.”

Original article by Lenny Ann Low, The Sydney Morning Herald, September 8, 2023.