The much anticipated annual Westfield Style Pasifika fashion extravaganza is set to flow down the catwalk tonight at Auckland’s Vector Arena. The show features 85 garments selected from hundreds of submissions. The Pasifika-inspired designs are judged in several categories including evening, bridal, urban streetwear, traditionally-inspired, parent and child, body art, Pasifika Hero, Asia-Pasifika, and men’s wear. Westfield Style Pasifika is a two hour entertainment spectacle of traditional and contemporary fashion, dance and music. It is intended to reflect Pacific mana: strength, respect and pride. The show begins at 7.30 pm, Friday 4 September, 2009.
(Past winner of the bridal category, by designer Visesio Thomsen. Image from the Westfield Style Pasifika Website)
Award winning Samoan photographer Edith Amituanai is bringing her latest installation to Wellington. The show is a collection of photographs she has taken of a Burmese family resettling in New Zealand, presented alongside Film Archive footage which documents the immigrant experience in this country. The exhibition shows at the Film Archive’s Mediagallery, corner of Ghuznee St and Taranaki St, from 10 September to 10 October 2009. Art lovers and members of the public are warmly welcomed to attend the opening of “La Fine del Mondo” on Wednesday 9 September at 5.30 pm at the Film Archives.
South/Central is the latest exhibition to show at South Auckland’s Fresh Gallery Otara. The exhibition coincides with the 2009 New Artists Show in Auckland and features exciting new work by emerging artists Bobby Macdonald, Samiu Napa’a, Dean Purcell, Sean Purcell and Siliga David Setoga. Their works range from documentations of protest and cultural interface to tributes of political change-makers, cultural spaces and symbolism. South/Central runs at Fresh Gallery Otara from 4 – 26 September, 2009.
"Vivid Hikoi" by Bobby Macdonald, 2009. Image courtesy of Fresh Gallery Otara.
Celebrated Fijian New Zealand filmmaker and playwright Toa Fraser has been selected as this year’s recipient of the three month Fulbright- Creative New Zealand Pacific Writer’s Residency at the University of Hawai’i. Fraser will use the residency to write his second draft of the screenplay for a film adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Beach at Falesá. The project was previously attempted by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, whose version never made it to screen. More recently, Alan Sharp, wrote the screenplay for Fraser’s latest film Dean Spanley, attempted his own screenplay of The Beach at Falesá. He recently handed the project over to Fraser, who will finalise the screenplay and direct the film. Fraser sees it as “a conversation between Stevenson, Sharp (and to a lesser extent Dylan Thomas) and myself” in which he aims to provide authentic roles and voices for Pacific characters in the story. Fraser hopes to begin shooting the new film on location in Samoa in 2010. He is the sixth New Zealand writer to take up the Fulbright-Creative New Zealand Pacific Writer’s Residency at the University of Hawai’i, following in the footsteps of fellow filmmaker Sima Urale, playwright Victor Rodger and several others.
The much anticipated annual Westfield Style Pasifika fashion extravaganza is set to flow down the catwalk tonight at Auckland’s Vector Arena. The show features 85 garments selected from hundreds of submissions. The Pasifika-inspired designs are judged in several categories including evening, bridal, urban streetwear, traditionally-inspired, parent and child, body art, Pasifika Hero, Asia-Pasifika, and men’s wear. Westfield Style Pasifika is a two hour entertainment spectacle of traditional and contemporary fashion, dance and music. It is intended to reflect Pacific mana: strength, respect and pride. The show begins at 7.30 pm, Friday 4 September, 2009.
