Dalosa, Lafo, and Iva
Published in Artbeat, May 2025
Link to the full pdf here.
The Dalosa, Lafo, and Iva exhibition at The Physics Room is one to linger in. Curated by James Tapsell-Kururangi, the show presents an arresting arrangement of sculpture, installation, and photography by early-career Pasifika artists Lolani Dalosa, Ma'alo Lafo and Axel Iva.
A colourless skeuomorph of a fale umu suspends from the ceiling, eerily complimenting three black and white standees bolted into the gallery floor. Ma’alo Lafo’s exquisitely bound photo books, Sāmaria, nestle nearby on a modest shelf. They prompt a flip-through into intimate documentations of a life only possible after his parents’ sacrifices, each page imbued with a warmth delicately captured through Lafo’s lens.
“E afua mai mauga manuia o le tagata” which translates to “It’s from the mountaintops that we receive our blessings” is the whakataukī referenced by Lafo. It grounds the exhibition with the sentiment that we do not see the battles endured at the top of the mountains when we stand at the foot of them today, experiencing a new world born from our ancestor’s hardships.
Axel Iva’s VILT similarly acts as a portal to connect him to his father - the same way his father had built a fale umu after moving here, as a portal to connect to home. “I wanted to build something that was solid, but there was still a sense that it could collapse at any minute,” Iva recalls in the gallery kōrero. VILT hangs like a hopeful hallucination, scintillating in the artificial lights beating down through its deceptively robust body. Any minute imperfections only add to the reminder of Iva’s impressive craft in working with twin wall polycarbonate and PVC tubing.
Lolani Dalosa’s greyscale laser-cuts TELEFONI SO’O also utilise cold and apathetic materials - aluminium sheets - to solidify their floating presence. The magnetic illusion of the printed image - a dumbbell, a pair of roller skates, and a relaxed figure lying idly on their side - plays with scale in a way that feels strangely autobiographical through its salient lack of colour in the room. Back supports are exposed with enough space to walk behind these images - pixels that have resided everywhere else before posing as a decoy by your feet.
With sincere reinterpretations, documentations, and illusions, the harmonised weight of grief and gratitude reverberates through those who give in to the exhibition’s moving vacuum. It proposes a reminder not just of the inherent impermanence of the relationships we hold, but to also carry that impermanence close; to honour the unseen sacrifices made before our time that anchors us precisely to this place - a portal that could collapse at any moment.
Dalosa, Lafo, and Iva
The Physics Room
28 March - 18 May 2025
Link to the exhibition here.