These Shapeshifting Photos Reclaim Power for Gender-Diverse Pacific Peoples
These Shapeshifting Photos Reclaim Power for Gender-Diverse Pacific Peoples
Essay by Anthony Byrt
Photos by Pati Solomona Tyrell
Published in VICE
3 May 2018
Pati Solomona Tyrell is up for NZ's biggest contemporary art award, with his student project.
Pati Solomona Tyrell Eleele Sāmoa, Fāgogo, 2016
Pati Tyrell has had a meteoric eighteen months. In 2016, the co-founder of LGBTQI Pacific collective FAFSWAG submitted his video Fāgogo for his visual art degree at Auckland’s Manukau Institute of Technology. By the following June, it was exhibited as the centrepiece of his first post-art school solo exhibition, at Auckland’s St Paul Street Gallery. And in March this year, it was announced that Fāgogo had been selected as a finalist for New Zealand’s most prestigious art award, the Walters Prize.