Vasemaca (FKA Ema) Tavola is a Fijian-Pākehā artist, curator and writer currently based in South Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Having established her painting practice in Suva, Fiji at Oceania Centre for Arts, Culture and Pacific Studies at the University of the South Pacific, Tavola migrated to Auckland in 2001 to study at Manukau School of Visual Arts (MSVA). Introduced to the genre of social sculpture by artists, Amy Plant (UK), Alwin Reamillo (Phillipines / Australia) and Juan Castillo (Chile / Sweden) through MSVA’s residency programme, Tavola began to develop a site-specific curatorial practice grounded in an ethic of social inclusion and decolonisation.
In 2006, Tavola started working for local government in a role dedicated to developing the Pacific arts sector in South Auckland. Establishing the exhibitions gallery, Fresh Gallery Ōtara, Tavola expanded her curatorial practice producing 66 standalone exhibitions from 2006-2012. Her curatorial work was recognised in 2012 as the first curator honoured with the Contemporary Pacific Artist award in Creative New Zealand’s annual Arts Pasifika Awards. That year, she was also Associate Curator alongside Kolokesa Uafā Māhina-Tuai and Nina Tonga for Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki’s Home AKL survey exhibition curated by the late Ron Brownson.
In 2013, Tavola completed a Master of Arts Management at AUT University and began working independently on curatorial projects and consultancy work. After becoming a mother in 2014 to daughter Lanuola, Tavola continued to pursue national and international speaking engagements, residencies and curatorial projects. In 2015, she undertook the Summer Residency at Enjoy Contemporary Art Space in Wellington, co-curated The Veiqia Project with Dr Tarisi Vunidilo in 2015/16, and in 2017, she was awarded the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies Artist Residency at the University of Canterbury where she produced her curatorial manifesto.
In 2018, curator Christine Eyene invited Tavola to be part of the curatorium for Tales from Water Margins – the 4th International Biennial of Casablanca (Morocco), where she presented the curatorial project, A Maternal Lens. That year, Tavola also spoke at Heritage Deferred? Colonialism’s Past and Present for Goethe-Institut in Berlin, Germany and delivered a keynote at the Aesthetics, Politics and Histories: The Social Context of Art AAANZ Conference at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia. At home in Fiji, Tavola and father Kaliopate Tavola published a bilingual children’s book entitled, The Legend of Tanovo and Tautaumolau with the University of the South Pacific’s Institute of Education. The Fijian language version of the book is the first book published in the Dravuni dialect.
In 2019, Tavola established her independent gallery, Vunilagi Vou – a space to bring together her politics, audiences and curatorial concerns in Ōtāhuhu, heartland South Auckland. Impacted by the conditions of the global Covid-19 pandemic, Vunilagi Vou started a process of shapeshifting from 2020, changing locations and momentum three times until ultimately ceasing to operate as a gallery in late 2023. Before the pandemic bought about Vunilagi Vou’s series of reconfigurations, Tavola most notably discussed the gallery’s curatorial position as an invited speaker at the Para Site International Conference (2019) in Hong Kong, and later in the ACE Open Perspectives Series at Tarnanthi Festival in Adelaide, Australia (2019).
In the lockdowns of 2020/21, an invitation be part of Dr Torika Bolatagici’s curatorial project, Volume: Bodies of Knowledge for The Community Reading Room inspired Tavola to re-engage with her visual arts practice after a relatively long hiatus. The series Grounded, Flux + Faith (2021) reflected her personal and professional experiences of upheaval through the initial years of the pandemic, documenting specifically Vunilagi Vou’s first shapeshift from commercial to residential settings.
Tavola aligns her visual arts concerns and politics with women’s rights, Indigenous feminisms, and histories of BIPOC art and activism in the Global South. In her textile assemblages, she utilises patchwork and appliqué techniques to honour quilt-making and textiles practices passed down through both her maternal and paternal lineages. Initially, the appeal of textiles for Tavola was the ease of being packed and transported, as functional and durable works of art. Growing up in Fiji, England and Belgium, and later Aotearoa New Zealand, textiles reflect Tavola’s lived experience of impermanence and distance, always living with a sense of home being somewhere else. Throughout her life, hand-made blankets and treasured textiles, trims and embellishments have been tactile archives, holding memories, connection, and an intimate sense of safety and home.
Heeding the call to return to her visual arts practice, Tavola made a solo exhibition of paintings and textile assemblages entitled Backbone in 2023, and transformed Vunilagi Vou into a working studio later that year. In 2024, Tavola produced To Live + Die in South Auckland at Fresh Gallery Ōtara, marking a significant return to the site of her early curatorial career.
In 2024, Tavola started a second Master of Arts degree to refine and articulate her visual, social and critical practice through a lens of Applied Indigenous Knowledge at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa. Within a deeper enquiry on where her practice sits outside of traditional arts paradigms, Tavola’s research explores the Fijian concept of solesolevaki as a language of reciprocity and a guiding principle for her curatorial practice. Later that year, the concept was demonstrated in Solesolevaki, a commissioned exhibition project for Tautai Gallery featuring a series of creative acts pertaining to experiences of intergenerational cultural transmission within her family, and Tavola and her father, Kaliopate Tavola’s joint blog venture, kaidravuni.com
Throughout Tavola’s career – in curatorial work and her art making – she has been unapologetic about confronting the ideas and economics of taste. Whether purposefully elevating low-value materials, or low-brow aesthetics and design, to symbolically situating art in places that draw into question the cultural norms and socio-political baggage of Western art and arts appreciation, Tavola prompts quiet reflection on how taste is cultivated, and who has the power to do it.
Born in Suva, Vasemaca Tavola is proud to belong to Mataqali Navusalevu, a sub-tribe of Natusara, from the village of Dravuni, the northernmost inhabited island of the province of Kadavu, Fiji.
After 41 years of being known as Ema, in late 2023, Tavola reverted to her Fijian name, Vasemaca.
EDUCATION
Currently – Master of Applied Indigenous Knowledge, Te Wānanga o Aotearoa
2013 – Master of Arts Management, AUT University
2006 – Bachelor of Visual Arts, University of Auckland
AWARDS
2017 – Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies Artist Residency, University of Canterbury, Christchurch
2015 – Summer Residency, Enjoy Contemporary Art Space, Wellington
2014 – School of Art and Design Postgraduate Research Award, AUT University
2013 – Bachelor of Visual Arts Alumni Award, University of Auckland
2012 – Contemporary Pacific Artist, Creative New Zealand Arts Pasifika Awards
SELECTED SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS
Contributor, aabaakwad (it clears after a storm) (2024) (Toronto, Canada)
Keynote speaker, Ka Mua Ka Muri ANZAAE Conference (2023) (Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand)
Guest speaker, Art, Spaces and Island Ecologies (2020), MPavillion x Community Reading Room [Online] (Australia / Barbados / Aotearoa)
Guest Lecture, Perspectives Series (2019) for ACE Open (Adelaide, Australia)
Guest Speaker, Para Site International Conference (2019) for Para Site (Hong Kong)
Guest speaker, Singapore Art Book Fair (2019) for NTU Centre for Contemporary Art (Singapore)
Guest speaker, Spinning Triangles: Ignition of a School of Design (2019) for SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin, Germany / Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo)
Keynote speaker, Aesthetics, Politics and Histories: The Social Context of Art AAANZ Conference (2018) for RMIT (Melbourne, Australia)
Guest speaker, Heritage Deferred? Colonialism’s Past and Present (2018) for Goethe-Institut (Berlin, Germany)
Keynote speaker, Contemporary Pacific Arts Festival Symposium (2015) – Footscray Arts Centre (Melbourne, Australia)
Presenter, Pacific Arts Association 11th International Symposium (2013) – University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada)
Presenter, Urban Pacific Art in Aotearoa New Zealand, 97th College Art Association conference (2009) (California, USA)
Guest Speaker, Center for Race and Gender, University of California Berkeley (2009) (California, USA)
Guest Speaker, Art History Department, University of California Santa Cruz (2009) (California, USA)
SELECTED WRITING
‘Ercan Cairns rumbles Ema Tavola’, Michael Dodds Gallery [February 2022]
‘The Alchemy of Fresh’, Pacific Arts Legacy Project, The Pantograph Punch [November 2020]
‘A Lyrical Essay about Shapeshifting’, As Needed, As Possible edited by Sophie Davis & Simon Gennard, Enjoy Public Art Space [June 2020]
‘Common Moments: Instagram Portraits by Vinesh Kumaran’, Art New Zealand Issue #156 (Summer 2015-16)
‘When stars align’, LOCALISE edited by Ioana Gordon-Smith and Lana Lopesi for Whau Arts Festival (2015)
‘An enduring rootedness’, The Listener February 16-22 [2013]
‘My Pacific & My Auckland’, Metro July – August [2012]
‘Urban Pacific Art and the Role of Fresh Gallery Otara’, Home AKL catalogue, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki [2012]
‘The Paradise Economy’, Foreign Objects catalogue, Fresh Gallery Otara [2011]
‘Rebecca Ann Hobbs: Movement and Connection’, Eyeline Number 74 [2011]
‘Women, Water and The Moon’, Nga Hau E Wha – The Four Winds catalogue, Fresh Gallery Ōtara [2011]
‘Liquid Lady Swagger’, manu toi; artists and messengers catalogue, Māngere Arts Centre – Ngā Tohu o Uenuku [2010]
‘Poly-Virtual-Hypnosis 101’, manu toi; artists and messengers catalogue, Māngere Arts Centre – Ngā Tohi o Uenuku [2010]
‘Safe Space’, VASU: Pacific Women of Power catalogue, University of the South Pacific [2008]
‘Fiji: To you. For you. About you’, Kurunavanua catalogue, solo exhibition by Torika Bolatagici, Collingwood Gallery, Melbourne, Australia [2007]
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