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LA FINE DEL MONDO
Edith Amituanai
February 26 to April 11, 2010
Opening: Thursday 25 February, 6pm
Edith Amituanai’s exhibition ‘La fine del mondo’ presents a series of photographs which portray a Burmese refugee family’s resettlement to the West Auckland suburb of Massey. The photographs capture the Lai family as they negotiate elements of their new lives, a new house, school, community and culture.
Amituanai first met the Lai family in 2008 when she began working as a volunteer for Refugee Services in Auckland. Herself a West Aucklander, she witnessed the Lai family as they went about finding their place in her own community. She saw much of what she had been investigating in her own Samoan, New Zealand culture reflected in the Lai’s experience “It occurred to me that many things that I had been looking at in my own cultural milieu could be found in other immigrant cultures”.
The phrase ‘La fine del mondo’ is Italian and means both ‘the end of the world’ and ‘can’t be beat’ a duality that is also echoed by the experience often encountered by new immigrants, that of “feeling like being in two places simultaneously, one in the new adopted country and the other placed in the ancestral homeland.”
Amituanai is a New Zealand Samoan photographer; she was inaugural recipient of the Marti Friedlander Photography award in 2007 and was Shortlisted for the Walters Prize in 2008. In 2005 Amituanai was featured in the book ‘Contemporary New Zealand Photographers’, a major survey of art photography. She has recently finished her MFA at Elam, Auckland University and is represented by Anna Miles.
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