Para Site is pleased to present the performance, tagatanu’u, conceived and performed by Léuli Māzyār Lunaʻi Eshrāghi – Para Site’s current artist-in-residence. In the performance, Léuli’s speaks in Sāmoan, Hawaiian, Tałtan, Woi Wurrung, Secwepemc, French and English to criticise commodified nuts, medicines, and exoticised bodies that have simultaneously been crushed by missionary body-, spirit-, sex-shaming and the extraction of labour into tourism, military, security, nuclear testing and plantations. He purposefully immerses his body in water, flowers and nuts in a way that is currently taboo in Sāmoan and other Indigenous cultures, to be in his body in a way that has power over intergenerational trauma and violence.
This work has been developed in Honolulu, Kelowna, Narrm/Melbourne with Rosanna Raymond, Paradise Cove collective, Ricky Tagaban, Bryan Kuwada, Peter Morin, Tania Willard, Sone Luna’i Eshraghi, Yara El-Ghabdan, Louis-Karl Sioui-Picard, Angela Tiatia, Tyson Campbell and Julia Packard.
Para Site Art Space is financially supported by the Art Development Matching Grants Pilot Scheme of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
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The content of these activities does not reflect the views of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
About the artist
Léuli Māzyār Lunaʻi Eshrāghi is a Sāmoan and Persian artist, curator, writer, Monash University Art Design Architecture (MADA) PhD candidate, and an uninvited guest in unceded Kulin Nation territory. His work centres on indigeneity, language, the body, and queer futures. Across video, photography, painting, and installation, Eshrāghi processes intergenerational trauma, honours diasporic indigeneity, and imagines multilingual, sovereign bodies and relationships to our planet. He is a member of the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective | Collectif des commissaires autochtones board (Canada), Broadsheet’s editorial advisory panel (Australia), and Melbourne Museum’s Pacific Advisory Group (Australia).
