Andy Leleisi'uao lives and works in Auckland, New Zealand. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Pātaka Art + Museum; Museum of New Zealand - Te Papa Tongarewa; Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki; Chartwell Trust; New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade; The Arts House Trust; University of Auckland; University of Canterbury; University of Otago; Auckland Council; Pacific Business Trust; Casula Powerhouse, Sydney, and the Museum of Ethnography, Frankfurt.
Archipelago Area 51 is an alternative reality that disregards time and space. These villages are inhabited with extraterrestrial and human sentiments who have created their own culture and history. They are impossible collectivist and joyful societies that revel in the simplicities of their existence.
Opening Speaker, Dr. Teariki Puni.
Andy Leleisi'uao's return to Rarotonga for his first solo exhibition in five years continues his exploration of extraterrestrial visitation, alternative social structures, and the critique of entrenched cultural ideologies. Archipelago Area 51 extends themes first articulated in The Umu Collection of Titles (Whitespace Gallery, Auckland, 2003), drawing on Polynesian mythological frameworks and the speculative narratives surrounding the classified U.S. Air Force facility known as Area 51. Within this conceptual space, Leleisi'uao constructs an imagined society where interstellar visitors establish a utopian order free from the social hierarchies and prejudices embedded in contemporary human civilizations.
Central to Archipelago Area 51 is a radical reconsideration of community and coexistence.
Leleisi'uao envisions collectivist enclaves that operate beyond the constraints of race, gender, and class-structures that often define social stratification. His hybridized, exaggerated figures reject normative aesthetic conventions, resisting imposed classifications and instead serving as vessels for a broader, universal human experience.
These works function not as escapist fantasies but as speculative interventions, proposing alternative modes of existence that challenge prevailing cultural paradigms.
Leleisi'uao describes the series as "an alternative reality that disregards time and space," emphasizing its conceptual positioning outside conventional historical and geographical frameworks. Archipelago Area 51 offers not a retreat from reality, but an artistic reconfiguration of possibility, wherein Leleisi'uao engages in a visual and philosophical exploration of reimagined social formations.
