Sumer has recently announced representation of Sydney-based Samoan artist Brian Fuata. His first solo showing at the gallery, Intermission (seini_transmit), will take place next 9 and 10 August 2024. This performance sees the artist returning to the country of his birth, in what will be his first in-person presentation in Aotearoa since 2016.

Highly respected across fields of visual and live arts, Fuata is best known for his live and virtual performance incorporating structured improvisation, choreographed movement, oration, and text. Having emerged from Australia’s experimental performance scene in the early 2000s, over the past twenty years, he has presented works, both solo and collaborative, with leading cultural institutions across Oceania, Asia, North America, and Europe. Broadly informed by lived experience and social discourse, together with tradition and customary knowledge, Fuata’s work incorporates a diverse array of performance and communication modalities, including spoken word, concrete poetry, authentic movement (dance), correspondence, clowning, glossolalia (speaking-in-tongues), and sound art.

In many works, Fuata inhabits the role of trickster; engaging humour in his blurring of lines, between autobiography and fiction, audience and performer, art and the everyday. His prodigious and enigmatic output speaking, contemporaneously, of the body, place, self, and other. Next month’s staging Intermission (seini_transmit) will see the artist activating the empty gallery, “as an open repository of amassed material, generated since October 7. It will be energetically framed by an essence of Tongan artist, songwoman, and orator, Seini Taumoepeau, who passed away in May 2024.” The artist will take up residence at the gallery from Monday 5 August, generating and accumulating material. On Friday 9th there will be an open rehearsal during standard gallery hours, 11am–5pm, leading to the performance on the evening of Saturday 10th August at 6:30pm.