Soʻotaga, everything carries forward… brings together Berlin-based Taja Vaetoru and Wellington-based Alison Leauanae in a focused dialogue on lineage, migration and continuity. Soʻotaga-connection-extends beyond ancestry to the quiet transmission of memory, belief and gesture across distance and time.
Both artists make identity visible through process. Vaetoru, of Cook Islands and Samoan whakapapa, moves between figuration and abstraction, drawing on Polynesian cosmologies and the tension between absence and presence. Paint becomes a space where personal histories are carried, revised and reimagined.
Leauanae's hand-stitched and woven works construct pattern as structure rather than ornament. Her lines operate like coordinates-mapping movement, reordering notions of home, and holding inherited knowledge in place.
Together, the exhibition proposes that nothing is isolated: each mark, each thread, carries something forward.
