Unlike the stillness of Renaissance art, the Baroque was fascinated with the idea of movement and how it could reflect a world in constant transformation. In this work Yuki Kihara, dressed as her alter-ego, Salome, has harnessed the power of movement to narrate the momentous seas that lashed Sāmoan beaches in Tsunami Galu Afi (2009), while also recalling the waves of change that hit the Sāmoan island over a century earlier in the form of European ships and Christianity. Kihara was inspired to create Salome, a late nineteenth-century Sāmoan woman, after seeing Samoan Half Caste – a photograph taken by Thomas Andrew in an 1886 album (held in the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa).

For Baroque artists such as Caravaggio and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, movement was expressed through gestures, flowing drapery and blurring the line between reality and art, creating a dynamic energy between time and space to overwhelm the viewer’s senses. Stop motion animation techniques slow Salome’s delicate fluttering hands, which draws us into this taualuga – a traditional Siva Sāmoa dance using graceful hand and arm gestures and performed by women of high rank. Kihara has also engaged time and space to create this moving-image work, stating that the work:

draws upon – and contributes to – the Sāmoan concepts of tā and vā: tā means to beat or to demarcate time through beats; while vā denotes the space between things or social space between people.

Suspended in time and space, Salome hovers somewhere between the real world and an otherworldly realm.