It’s colourful, camp, and can be joyfully silly but with layers of meaning and deep cultural references. Welcome to the wild and wonderful world of Tongpop, the 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 Tongpop takeover of the historic steamship SS John Oxley, complete with a six-metre totem dubbed Carlotta after the legendary Les Girls performer.
Tuita with one of the pieces in his show at the festival’s Walsh Bay hub.Credit: Rhett Wyman
Tuita came to the attention of festival director Olivia Ansell when she saw his show Tongpop’s Great Expectations at Campbelltown Arts Centre. He has spent seven months conceiving and making work for the Sydney Festival show called The Ta and Va of Tongpop.
All his work, often repurposing cheap plastic material, is woven through with references to his own remarkable story growing up in both 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 [bark cloth]. 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.”
Tuita frequently repurposes cheap plastic materials in his work.Credit: Rhett Wyman
In 1989, when Tuita was nine years old, he 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.”
