Latamai Katoa is an interdisciplinary artist of Tongan and Pākehā descent based in Tāmaki Makaurau whose practice revolves around themes of visibility, repair, and the ethics of looking. THE UNDERWORLD (2024) is set in the artist’s backyard at night where they perform sensual gestures through shifting screens and frosted windows. Sitting somewhere between the tender, theatrical, and quietly confrontational, THE UNDERWORLD negotiates the descent from private ritual to public performance. Ultimately, Katoa’s work negotiates the visibility of their body, encouraging us to consider: should we be watching this?
THE UNDERWORLD is curated by CIRCUIT’s Mana Moana Resident Mauatua Fa’ara-Reynolds. Presented at CIRCUIT for just three days, the installation is deliberately presented as a temporal event. Screening at Level 2, 27 Dixon St, the work’s balance of performance and privacy unfolds in a hushed corner above the noise of Courtenay Place.
The installation concludes with a screening and artist talk on Saturday 22nd from 2-3:30pm at CIRCUIT entitled VĀRUA: Imagining a Queer Pacific screen. The programme begins with a screening of three moving image works by Sue Pearson and Pauline Reynolds, Latamai Katoa, and Samson Dell, followed by a talk with artists Iz Randell, Latamai Katoa, and Samson Dell, moderated by Mauatua Fa’ara-Reynolds. Together, they will respond to the works and discuss the reparative capacity of moving image for queer Indigenous Pacific artists.
The Mana Moana Residency is a 3 month placement at CIRCUIT supported by Creative New Zealand. The residency supports an emerging Pasifika writer/curator to develop a body of work that increases the visibility of Pasifika artists working in the moving image. CIRCUIT’s 2026 resident is Mauatua Fa’ara-Reynolds, a Mā’ohi-Norf’k writer and tapa-maker based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. In 2025 they completed their MA in Creative Writing at the IIML, where they received the Letteri Family Prize for Creative Non-Fiction. THE UNDERWORLD is presented alongside Mauatua’s accompanying essay series on circuit.org.nz, A huri i tō mata i te pō which considers how Pacific artists are reclaiming the screen to heal from colonial legacies and forge their own legacies. Read the first essay on Pearson and Reynolds film Hina's Granddaughters (2022).
