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Lean into the Pain: Archives of a tatau thesis is one of the latest Exhibitions at the Tautai Art gallery. The creative installations are the contributions of Faiumu Matthew Salapu aka Anonymouz.
Lean into the Pain is an interpretive translation of the term tali au. It is also the driving thesis behind Faiumu’s latest work. “Tali au was a phrase that was uttered to me and to a lot of other people who undertake the tradition of the tatau. Which was uttered to me by the Tufunga, basically that means ‘don’t fight the pain’.
Lean into it, give me your body. Because if you strain up, or if you try to fight it the ink won’t hold, it’ll come out… the framework is to accept the pain in order to get through the process,” says Faiumu.
The award winning musician says everybody has a story about why they got tatau. “This exhibition is about me assigning meaning to the reason I got Tatau done.”
Implying they know the true story, for example saying they know the true Tofunga family and while also backing another Tofunga family, that by the end of the day the tatau begins to get lost in this murky origin story.
Faiumu explains, “none of us were there during the origins of the stories when they started, and you can see a reoccuring theme of a dropped hard drives.
The Taemā Tilafaiga story about the siamese twins. Apparently they were given the tools, and they had a song in mind that the females were only meant to get tattooed. They went into the water because they saw a clam, they came back up and the words were reversed. Now the men were getting tattooed. And so metaphorically, that is a hard drive with a true story, that was dropped and the data has been corrupted.
And now we no longer know the true origins of the story. And now we’re in a digital generation washed with information, misinformation and increasingly disinformation. And so I feel as an artist we get too caught up in the legitimacy of those origins. And they get in the way of the meaning you assign to tatau.”
In Faiumu’s exhibition treatise of “Leaning into the pain” he describes a simplistic concept with therapeutic attributes that can be applied in our everyday lives. A premise that lends itself to many benefits for both physical and mental healthcare.
“The real leaning into the pain for me is in the gym when I don’t want to go, I know I need to. It’s at the kitchen table when I need to have those painful conversations with my wife or parents that I don’t want to have. Leaning into the Pain is something that I aim to try to do everyday. As opposed to something limited to leaning on the mat. The analogue experience on the mat. Everyday we metaphorically experience the mat in the decisions we make and choose to engage with as opposed to our default emotion which is to run away from the pain”, he says.
