Telly Tuita’s obsession with costumes and masks makes his first Australian solo exhibition, Tongpop’s Great Expectations, fun and accessible. There’s a darkness underlying the colourful characters though, stemming from the artist’s life, disrupted. Telly spent the first nine years of his life in Tonga before being abandoned by his biological parents. He was rescued by his grandfather and sent to live in Minto with his father and stepmother. At age 16 his step-mother threw him out, and he moved in with his aunty: the woman he considers to be his mother to this day. These three mothers all make an appearance in his work in Mummy Issues I—III (2020). Women and madness are also the focus of his 2023 series Tevolo (ghost) where UV ink acrylics and digitally printed artworks on fabric are nicely hung by curator Isabelle Morgan.
Returning again and again to the self-portrait, as you walk through the exhibition you can viscerally feel the artist wrestle with who they are, trying on different masks to help determine where exactly they fit in. Living between cultures creates a pining in Telly that you can feel most strongly in Bali Ha’i (2023), a piece commissioned by Campbelltown Arts Centre for this exhibition. Stretching more than two meters, this acrylic work on lavalava (sarong) references the imagined island that can never be reached in the song by the same name from the 1949 musical South Pacific. It’s displayed in a darkened room referred to as Dusk, representing the artist’s adulthood, with a dark piece called The Great Land of Oz (2023). This mixed media piece juxtaposes recycled materials and plastic waste with tourism-inspired stereotypes of Oceania to exemplify our troubled relationship with our Pasifikan neighbours.
There’s a lot of overlap with queer culture and drag in this exhibition that takes over the whole arts centre until 28 March. At the opening night party, Australian documentarian and photographer, William Yang was in attendance. Telly acknowledged his work, which famously includes the documentation of the Sydney LGBTIQ+ community from the 1970s onward, as an inspiration. The exhibition was opened by the chief executive of the Powerhouse Museum, Lisa Havilah, who had spent time in a leadership role at the centre and in an assistant director role at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre overlapping with Telly’s early years studying art at Western Sydney University. Guests from all walks of Telly’s disrupted life were treated to a DJ set from the ‘Gayasian empress of Sydney’, Dyan Tai and pink ‘dusky diva’ cocktails with vodka, coconut water, watermelon, lemon, lime and lemonade.
