Latamai Katoa

Ko wai koe?
I’m Latamai Katoa, a queerio, a nasty hoe, and a raging, awkwardly unaware artist. I’ve inherited Tongan responsibilities and tendencies, and I regularly enjoy signing up for too much work. My mum told me to let you know I’m 21, by the way xx.

What are your pronouns?
She/they.

Where are you living & working right now?
I’m living in Onehunga and working just around the corner at the excessively prolific artist space Wheke Fortress. I’m in the perfect spot right now. Pull up if you’re in the area, girls, and hit me up on Instagram @latamai.

What do you do and why do you do it?
I dream a lot. I think the biggest strength in my toolkit is my ability to have delusions and to believe that those delusions are real. That’s the best way I can bring my work from the ether onto this earth through these dreams.

I recognise that my work exists both in my mind and in the physical world, and sharing it with you is a way of offering a piece of those dreams. This is deeply tied to my ongoing work with memory and space. The places I inhabit, both real and imagined, carry traces of personal and collective histories, and my work explores and transforms those traces into spaces that others can experience.

What are you working on at the moment?
I’ve been working on a long-form project called Travel Diary of a Dictator. It began in 2024 and involves recording my travels, both international, domestic, and mundane, alongside the internal discoveries I make around body and place. These experiences are projected onto old French châteaux and city streets. Overall, the work functions as a self-soothing practice, especially when things feel overwhelming.

What is your earliest memory in an art gallery?
This is a weird answer, girls, but my earliest memory in an art gallery was for my own show in high school. When I was in Year 10, our work was submitted for a show at Mairangi Bay Arts Centre, and we were also entered into a competition between other high schools.

My group were one of the finalists and won a $50 Gordon Harris gift card, along with the option to exhibit the following year in one of their galleries. The next year they emailed all the award recipients, and I was the only one who showed interest. That’s how I ended up with an entire gallery to myself. My first solo show, if you will. Ironically, it was only the second time I had ever visited a gallery.

Do you listen to music when making? Who is your favourite musician right now?
I listen to music while I’m making, but I don’t really have a favourite musician right now. Anytime I hear something I like, wherever it is, it goes straight into my liked playlist. Then I end up listening to the first five songs on repeat for a while.

At the moment those are:

• Both Sides of a Smile (feat. James Blake) – Dave
• Fever – Vybz Kartel
• Die Another Day – Madonna
• My House – Nikki Giovanni
• Tangerine – Ocean Alley

So I kind of just live inside those five songs for a bit until something new sneaks in.

Is there an artwork that changed the way you view the world?
For me it has to be the installation Kindred: A Leitī Chronicle by Sione Monū and Manuha’apai Vaeatangitau, which I first encountered at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.

This is a work I’ve harped on about so much that I even made a whole slideshow about its impact on me. The installation presents a pantheon of leitī through a series of portraits and sound, imagining a world centred around the experiences and power of leitī identities.

As a young girl, seeing this pantheon of leitī was completely captivating. It was the first time I saw art made by people I actually looked up to in person, and it cemented a connection between how I felt and how I should see. It helped place a lot of the confusion I had about my identity at ease and allowed me to finally establish a connection between who I am and where our work belongs.

If you had one wish for the art world, what would it be?
My biggest wish for the art world is a full-time income for art practitioners. I want us all to be able to live with consistent housing for ourselves and our work, being able  to nourish our bodies, and to exist in a world where our work is valued just as much as anyone else’s.