For the Global Pacific Solutions conference (10-11 April 2025), a small body of Moana Pacific artwork was curated for the Moana Dreaming plenary session. Displayed as a digital exhibition and reflecting the kaupapa for the session, “Envisioning the future with cultural and academic experts who elevate Pacific and Indigenous knowledge, integrating traditional ways of being into their research, methodologies, and practice”, the Vunilagi Vou showcase includes seven artworks by Indigenous artists from Moana Oceania working across diverse mediums in diverse ways.
Learn more about the artists here
Margaret Aull
Artist, curator and project manager Margaret Aull works in installation, painting and sculpture. Based in Te Awamutu she has exhibited in Fiji, Australia, Morocco, Aotearoa and has been working in the Arts for over 20 years.
A strong advocate of the importance of artists and their role in the community, she also facilitates a number of wānanga aimed at bringing artists together to support their practice. ‘My practice has always been centred around social, political and cultural themes that thread in whakapapa, whenua, ritual and belief systems. I am a multimedia artist in which rangahau informs the exploration of my ideas through installation, sculpture and painting’.
Nigel Borell
Nigel Borell (b. 1973) is an artist, curator, writer and Māori arts advocate. He has a diverse painting practice that spans both customary and contemporary Māori art. The artists formative training began by working on the kōwhaiwhai and mural painting on three community meeting house projects under tohunga whakairo Pakariki Harrison (from 1995-2000) followed by three more meeting house projects across Aotearoa New Zealand. In addition, Borell gained a Bachelor of Māori Visual Art (Hons) from Massey University (2000) and a Master of Fine Art (Hons) from Elam School of Fine Arts, The University of Auckland (2002).
His painting practice incorporates fabric and textile considerations to present works that amalgamate customary kōwhaiwhai and Māori representational language with an abstract painting sensibility, which the artist inclusively describes as ‘contemporary Māori art’.
Borell’s work can be found in public and private collections in New Zealand, Hong Kong, Australia and Tahiti. The Chartwell Trust Collection- Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Auckland Council Art Collection and The Massey University Art Collection.
His work has featured in significant exhibition projects such as Taiāwhio: Continuity and Change, Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington (2002), Biennale d’art Contemporain – Noumea Biennale, New Caledonia (2000), TOI OHO XX – 20 Years of Māori Visual Art, Te Manawa Art Gallery, Palmertson North (2015) and Nine Māori Painters, Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland (2021). Selected solo exhibitions include: Kua whteurangi koe, you have now become a star in the nights sky, Oxford Art Gallery, Christchurch (2021), Karanga Hokianga, Village Arts Gallery, Kohukohu (2017), Hawaiki, Tauranga Art Gallery (2010) and Pirirakau: Bush Beautiful, The Lane Gallery, Auckland (2006).
Borell’s curatorial practice is extensive and includes the roles; Associate Curator Māori Art at Auckland War Memorial Museum in 2013 and Curator Māori Art at Auckland Art Gallery from 2015-2020. In 2020 he curated ‘Toi Tū Toi Ora’, the Auckland Art Gallery’s largest exhibition of Māori art and the most attended exhibition since 1989, with 191,000 visitors over its four-month run. Other curatorial projects include The Māori Portraits: Gottfried Lindauer’s New Zealand, that toured to deYoung Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco in 2017 and co-curator with Zara Stanhope Moa Hunter Fashions by Areta Wilkinson for The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial, Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane in 2018.
Currently Borell is Curator Taonga Māori with the Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira. In 2021 he received the New Zealand Art Foundation’s inaugural He Momo – A Moment In Time Award for curating Toi Tū Toi Ora and in 2022 was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to Māori art.
Tiana Carling
Born and raised in Suva, Fiji, Tiana has always had a deep love for the ocean and the natural world. After relocating to Aotearoa New Zealand in 2020, she chose to expand her involvement and understanding in this space by studying marine biology, ecology and biodiversity, and New Zealand Sign Language at Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington.
Tiana’s creative expression in collage, illustration, jewellery-making and painting provides a much needed balance to the rigidity and rigours of STEM; creativity allows her to slow down and let ideas flow. As an extension of this, Tiana is also part of Sista Sticks, a collaborative project with sister, Ella Carling, doing hand-poked mark making + tattoo. As a young Pasifika woman in STEM and the arts, Tiana feels great pride in expressing herself and her cultural identity in whatever form it takes.
David Garcia
David Garcia (he/they) is a mapmaker, urban planner and geographer from the Kapampangan and Tagalog peoples of Luzon Island in the Philippines. He has formerly worked with the United Nations in typhoon-affected areas and was a faculty member at the University of the Philippines. Notably, he assisted in reconstruction planning after the Battle of Marawi in Mindanao, Philippines, and helped document the human rights violations of the US-backed Duterte regime. As a mapmaker, Garcia is on a journey of subverting and overcoming the limits of Western mapping practices to contribute to Indigenous sovereignty and liberation — a journey that has paved the way for a multi-media art practice.
Garcia gained a Master of Science in Geospatial Analysis from the University of London in 2017, and in 2018 moved to Ōtautahi Christchurch from the Philippines to complete a PhD dissertation at the University of Canterbury on coloniality, indigeneity, time, space, and contemporary mapmaking from his positionality as a Filipino. His focus is on the sociotechnical and colonial nature of digital mapping, as well as the decolonial potentials of the practice. Garcia is particularly interested in how people shape maps according to their own biases, and how today’s digital mapmakers can help democratise mapmaking, although it is a struggle to decolonise and politicise the production of geographic knowledge.
In 2021, a meeting with curator Vasemaca (FKA Ema) Tavola of Vunilagi Vou turned into Garcia’s first solo exhibition. big islands deep oceans is a series of digitally constructed underwater maps of the Pacific showcasing the hidden underwater landscape. It is a body of work that invites us to reconsider the role maps play in our understanding of the Pacific Ocean.
Garcia attributes the queer community with being pivotal in his creative work: “It is from a place of refuge, especially with Indigenous queers, that I was able to find ways to escape mental colonial imprisonments and create my current work.” As Garcia moves away from conventional cartography, he is continually inspired by Jim Enote, a Zuni mapmaker, who said: “There are maps in songs and in prayers. There are maps that are etched in stones and woven into textile and painted in ceramics.” Garcia adds, “in the future I would like to decentre the visual through unmapping, as mentioned by Professor Tao Leigh Goffe, whose work is in making auditory, gustatory, and many more kinds of spatial memories possible.” In his spare time, Garcia creates sonic geographies while enriching their practice through Filipino cuisine.
As DJ Mapmaker, David wants to show you a beautiful cartography of refuge and liberation. While at the intersection of shifting oceans, genres, and worlds, David is exploring the sonic realm in solidarity with historically-marginalised communities. Through selection, this mapmaker’s practice – represented by the canoe – bends and expands time, space, and bodies, backwards into the future. Now, this mapmaker is finding their way to anything shady, horny, and silly.
David is deeply inspired by wayfinding practices and his intergenerational relationships with his relations and ancestors descended from Austronesia, and their collective love for the Ocean and its peoples. For them, the canoe and the Ocean are the centre of the universe.
Instagram: @mapmakerdavid
More info: https://www.satellites.co.nz/archive/people/david-garcia
Niu Lemalu
Niu Lemalu (b. 1988) is a painter based in Papatoetoe, South Auckland. He held his first solo exhibition at Fresh Gallery Ōtara in 2010 after a short stint at art school. Consisting of 22 painted portraits, this first solo project grounded his practice in portraiture as a medium to explore identity, viral notoriety and the absurd. For the past decade, Lemalu has exhibited sporadically but honed his painting practice in the informal Pacific art economy of commissioned portraits and banners.
Inspired by painters from the Bay Area Figurative Movement and the work of Francis Bacon, Lemalu has a love/hate relationship with the act of painting seeing it as both a futile practice, a problem, and an exercise in attention and intimate understanding. Harvesting imagery and inspiration constantly from bizarre corners of the Internet and popular sub-cultures, Lemalu fixates on subjects and situations that reveal, through the painting process, a way of understanding his own unconscious mind.
In 2023, Lemalu presented his second solo exhibition, Let’s Play Outside for Vunilagi Vou.
Vasemaca Tavola
Vasemaca (FKA Ema) Tavola is a Fijian-Pākehā artist-curator currently based in South Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Tavola’s practice is aligned with the politics of decolonisation and indigenous feminisms, motherhood, and histories of BIPOC art and activism in the Global South. She established her painting practice in Suva, Fiji before relocating to South Auckland where she studied sculpture and arts management, and is currently undertaking postgraduate research in applied indigenous knowledge.
Since 2004, Tavola has produced curatorial projects for galleries and museums throughout Aotearoa and travelled extensively speaking on her approach to indigenous curatorial practice. In 2019, she established Vunilagi Vou, a shapeshifting gallery, creative studio and consultancy advocating for creative practice as a tool for connection, healing and decolonisation.
As a visual artist, Tavola has been exhibiting since 2000 showing in Fiji, Aotearoa, Europe, North America, Australia and the Pacific. She has work in public and private collections both nationally and internationally.
Born in Suva, Tavola is proud to belong to Mataqali Navusalevu, a sub-tribe of Natusara, from the village of Dravuni, the northernmost inhabited island of the province of Kadavu, Fiji.
Czarina Wilson
Czarina Wilson is an Auckland-based designer and visual artist with more than two decades of varied experience in the Pacific fashion, arts and cultural sectors in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Establishing herself as a designer in the mid-1990s, Czarina was a multiple award winner at the Style Pasifika Fashion Awards with iconic pieces now held in the Auckland War Memorial Museum and Te Papa Tongarewa permanent collections. In the Villa Maria Cult Couture Awards, Czarina became well-known for her labour-intensive garments, often including vinyl, repurposed materials and cultural insignia.
Czarina’s maternal lineage is from the Hema kainga of Kolomotu’a, Tonga. Her paternal lineage is from the Wilson line, of Scottish / English heritage.
