Angela Tiatia, Hisbiscus Rosa Sinensis
 

^{Image credit: Angela Tiatia, photographic still from Hisbiscus Rosa Sinensis, 2020. Images courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf}

As the temperature begins to cool, we launch into the 2025 ART AFTER DARK program on the Bunjil Place Outdoor Screen. Beginning the program is Angela Tiatia’s moving image work Hisbiscus Rosa Sinensis, aligning with the Floribunda exhibition taking place in the Bunjil Place Gallery. 

Bunjil Place Outdoor Screen
28 March - 30 April
5.00 pm - 7.00 pm  (daily)
 

Hisbiscus Rosa Sinensis 

In 1911, Mexican poet Enrique González Martinez penned ‘Tuércele el cuello al cisne de engañoso plumaje’ (‘Wring the Neck of the Swan with the Deceiving Plumage’). Martinez’s poem was a call to arms for South American writers to reject the Modernist impulse that valued models of European tradition of stylised Romanticism; and embrace a contemporary Mexican aesthetic.   

A century later, Tiatia transposes Martinez’s challenge onto a Pacific frame of reference, rejecting the Western constructed image of Polynesia. In this work, she wrings the neck of the swan by devouring an iconic Pacific motif - the lush hibiscus flower. The hibiscus flower has been long been used as the embodiment of the Pacific female body, sexuality, and abundance.   

In this work, Tiatia allows the camera to track her body as she emerges from tropical greenery holding a hibiscus flower in her mouth. For a brief moment she evokes the stereotype of the passive and available ‘dusky maiden’. However, Tiatia’s gaze quickly turns powerful and immovable as she begins to consume the flower.   

The symbolic violence of Martinez’s poem is transferred in an alluring and yet confronting manner, her gesture simultaneously destroys the notion of the sexualised exotic other and at the same time re-affirms her ownership of an emblem of paradise.  

Hibiscus Rosa Sinensis was filmed at Vaimaanga, Rarotonga, Cook Islands, at the failed Sheraton Resort development site.  

^{Footnote: S Tapscott, Twentieth-century Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1996, pp., 47-48.} 
Angela Tiatia
Angela Tiatia explores contemporary culture through performance, moving image, painting, sculpture and photography, drawing out the relationships between representation, gender, neo-colonialism and the commodification of body and place. Often through the lenses of history, popular and material culture, the artist moves deftly in her compositions of still and moving image from pointed detail to satellite view addressing themes within power structures and how these impact the individual and their communities. 

Tiatia's work has been included in a number of important institutional exhibitions, including After the Fall, National Museum of Singapore (2017/2018);  Personal Structures, 57th Venice Biennial (2017);  Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT 8), Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2015/16); as well as Tūrangawaewae: Art and New Zealand, Toi Art, Gallery of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, New Zealand (2018). 

She is represented by Sullivan + Strumpf in Sydney, Australia.