'Any concept of time that poses the past, present, and future as separate moments is incompatible with Samoan thinking. The ancestors do not recede into a lost time: in fact, they are continually available.' Albert Refiti.
Opening Speakers:
Fatu Feu’u, Artist, Patron/Founder – Tautai Contemporary Pacific Arts Trust
Raymond Sagapolutele, Artist
Raymond Sagapolutele’s Aua e te Fefe – Don’t Be Afraid is an intimate and deeply personal interrogation of ancestral presence, cultural inheritance, and the role of memory in shaping diasporic Samoan identity. At the core of this exhibition is the artist’s exploration of liutofaga, the Samoan practice of reinterring the dead, a ritual that speaks to the enduring connection between the living and their ancestors. This tradition, passed down through oral histories and family practices, disrupts Western notions of death as an ending, instead positioning the remains of the departed as integral to the continuity of life, knowledge, and spiritual presence.
A formative moment in Sagapolutele’s artistic consciousness can be traced back to a childhood encounter with an image in a book—of a person using a skull as a pillow. This stark and unconventional use of human remains unsettled him at the time, yet it remained lodged in his memory as a quiet challenge to dominant narratives of fear and finality surrounding death. Years later, as a postgraduate student researching Samoan visual culture, this image resurfaced, aligning with familial recollections of ancestral practices and revealing itself as a significant counterpoint to colonial perceptions of the Pacific.
Within Aua e te Fefe, the skull functions as a central visual motif, recontextualized through two primary lenses. First, Sagapolutele presents the skull as an assertion of ancestral presence—beyond mere remembrance, it serves as a tangible connection to those who came before, ensuring that their guidance and knowledge remain accessible to future generations. These skulls are not relics of decay but are instead visual signifiers of an ongoing, cyclical existence, where the past and present continually inform each other.
The second interpretation of the skull emerges from Sagapolutele’s personal experiences during the Covid-19 lockdown. In this context, the motif becomes a fragile placeholder of psychological endurance—an expression of the artist’s struggle to maintain creative agency amid uncertainty. The skull, stripped of its historic weight, becomes a deeply personal reflection of resilience, representing an internal dialogue of survival and adaptation.
Crucially, Sagapolutele’s works reject the Western memento mori tradition, where skulls symbolize mortality and the inevitability of death. Instead, his visual language reframes them as markers of lived knowledge, continuity, and collective identity. In recalling the words of his grandmother—aua e te fefe, “don’t be afraid”—he challenges viewers to reconsider their own inherited perceptions of death and to embrace the presence of ancestors as a guiding force rather than a haunting absence. Through Aua e te Fefe, Sagapolutele asserts that these bones are not remnants of an ending, but rather, sacred vessels of history, identity, and cultural endurance.
