Christopher Ulutupu: West / 27 September 2025 – 22 February 2026

Christopher Ulutupu ‘West Part 6’ 2025, single channel video. Photographer Kasmira Krefft, DOP Haz Forrester

Christopher Ulutupu

West

Jessica Kidd, Curator

Christopher Ulutupu is a contemporary artist of Samoan and Niuean descent, working in video and photography. His works carry a distinctive cinematic language, shaped through his practice as an artist and in stage design for theatre. They explore his indigenous identity and the representation of Pacific culture, myth and spirituality. Grounded in spontaneity and experimentation, Ulutupu’s practice moves toward atmosphere rather than prescription. West is his post-Tylee residency exhibition, presenting new video works filmed in and around Whanganui in 2023.

West is inspired by the spiritual essence of the whenua (land) and marks a shift from Ulutupu’s earlier, more theatrical style toward quieter, contemplative moments. This stillness appears in West Part I (2024), featuring his nephew Typhon sleeping in sand dunes, a handmade halo behind his head. Props crafted with cast and crew draw on his research into pre-colonial Samoan rituals, particularly moe manatunatu – dream-based dialogue with ancestors and atua (gods). These objects channel and embody spiritual elements, anchoring the work in a space between the sacred and the cinematic.

Ulutupu’s single-channel work Nowhere (2025) reframes a family trip to Mellonsfolly Ranch – an artificial Old West town in the central North Island, situated literally in the middle of nowhere – as an encounter with colonial fantasy. Often collaborating with family and friends, here his whānau wander through a theme-park museum of an imagined frontier, their presence unsettling a landscape built to erase them. The soundtrack, developed with Kane Laing, Jono Nott, and Moana Ete, emerged from an archive project and shaped the work’s country songs. Evoking the melancholy of sites like the Bridge to Nowhere, this work offers a poetic counter-history, lingering in the overgrown beauty of failed futures and questioning how we remember, sing along, and complicate these stories.

In this series, Ulutupu considers ‘west’ as both direction and ideology – from Samoa’s 1997 decision to drop ‘Western’ from its name, to the western cinematic tropes that inform his imagery. West blends the mystical with the everyday, opening space for new Indigenous narratives and histories. This body of work offers a meditative refuge from modern noise while keeping alive questions of memory, song, and belonging within landscapes shaped by ancestry and colonial desire.

The Sarjeant Gallery’s Tylee Cottage artist-in-residence programme is generously supported by Creative New Zealand.