Salome, ua e lē siva, aiseā? | Salome, where is your dance?
The archipelago of Aotearoa New Zealand features over thirty motu (islands, islets) and is situated within the wider Pacific Moana of islands and atolls. Motu, regardless of size, have always been a site of separation, displacement, seclusion and refuge. Historically, motu have been used as a method to control populations largely influenced by ideas associated with disease, punishment or protection.
Since 2002, Sāmoan-Japanese artist Yuki Kihara has continuously evolved the persona of Salome, inspired by a woman, said to be a part-Sāmoan, captured in a Thomas Andrew photograph. Stepping out of Andrews’ albumen frame, Salome resets her own framing of the landscape – with human visibility out of sight. How might we read Salome’s dominant presence and her ambiguous figure, eternally dressed in a grieving state?
Salome’s Victorian-era existence, references the Sāmoan meaning of ‘Motu’ as recorded in the nineteenth-century; (1) to be broken off, to be severed; to go through, and (2) an islet, a district or village, or a people of a place and a multitude of people (Pratt, 1984)[1]. Where is your siva (dance) Salome? Your still silhouette hovers against a moving landscape forcing the reader to readjust their view. Shall we critique Kihara’s sense of ‘othering’ of space and time? In one way, Salome breaks free, yet in another, disturbingly, she retains the component parts of Victorian dress, virtues and a high sense of gentility, deeply associated with a refined code of ‘civilisation’.
Since photographs tell stories, the selection of sites is specific, and reference very complex narratives, embedded in what is absent from view. The Pacific Moana, long before Salome, has witnessed the ebbs and flows of movement, a sea change of peoples, ideas, practices and objects. What can we distil from Kihara’s series on Quarantine Islands? Evidently, she draws attention to narratives of space, place and peoples, inviting a critical view of stories imbued across earth, water, rock and time. In this context, Aotearoa—with a team of five million—are reconfigured as raised modes of quarantine and isolation.
Salome’s dance across multiple sites includes disturbing tangata whenua land, where in some cases, buried bones rest a very long way from home. In others, Aotearoa was home and yet, they were deemed migrants or aliens. In Kihara’s images, Salome surfaces sites of quarantine, adapted to contain looming crises brought from beyond the horizon. Ironically, these crises were present within the perceived insularity of the motu as a laboratory experiment. These highly staged photographs of Salome identify her by dress, gender, ethnicity and locality. Similarly, Kihara, a well-known Fa‘afafine artist forces multiple conversations. A question I have is what invisibility weighs heavily on Kihara and Salome? Which borders do they seek to penetrate as an artist and performer?
These photographs are forensic in nature imbued with a sense of documenting a clinical holding place. What aspects of our current climate are mirrored in these images? The reader is given a partial view, almost close enough to touch and smell the visceral nature of the landscape. The heavily metaphorical images are dense in their makeup, and the composition very decisive. There is no warmth in the photographs. Just a ghostly figure asserting her presence in the 21st century but unable to burst into dance.
Safua Akeli Amaama
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa
[1] Rev. George Pratt, A Grammar and Dictionary of the Samoan Language, with English and Samoan vocabulary, Papakura: R.McMillan, 1984