Opening 6pm Thursday April 16, all welcome.
Opening Speakers:
Cate Walker
Paula Paniani
Marcus Hipa
This exhibition confronts the experience of Niuean and wider Pacific men drawn into the First World War-an encounter defined by scale, shock, and rupture. Men left small island societies shaped by intimacy, cultivation, and continuity, and were delivered into vast, hostile environments governed by machinery, hierarchy, and industrialised violence. The war was not only distant from the Pacific geographically, but conceptually alien: its ideologies abstract, its loyalties inherited rather than chosen.
The works approach this history without mediation or nostalgia. They register the rawness of first contact with mechanised warfare, trench systems, unfamiliar climates, and collapsing European authority. Imperial symbols and belief systems appear not as stable structures, but as brittle frameworks imposed on bodies unprepared for their consequences.
Niuean cultural knowledge-particularly ideas of endurance and persistence-runs through the exhibition, not as resistance or protest, but as survival. The result is a direct reckoning with displacement, scale, and emotional intensity, asserting Pacific presence within a global conflict that was neither understood nor forgotten.