Tongan-born artist Telly Tuita is Sydney Festival’s Visual Artist in Residence in 2025. You’ll see his vibrant “Tongpop” aesthetic splashed across The Thirsty Mile – from flags and totems to the SS John Oxley. Tuita’s ancestors hail from a long line of navigators, and through his bold Tongpop aesthetic the former steamship has been given a ceremonial rebirth.

Telly Tuita brings his Tongpop multiverse back to its birthplace for Sydney Festival 2025. It marries the duality of his history and reality: his birth and childhood in Tonga and the beautiful designs he was surrounded by, with the dizzying pace of Sydney, where he was transplanted to as a child. Influenced by music, TV, pop culture, fashion, shopping malls and night clubs, Tuita proudly creates a mixtape that combines the extraordinary sights of his shared history. 

Tuita never shies from showing his biography, warts and all. Archetypes, villains and heroes sometimes mask Tuita’s many faces. His material practice is the manifestation of this multiplicity, consistently using ngātu, ta’ovala, kupesi and kiekie, interwoven with treasures discovered in op shops and two-dollar stores. There’s processing, experimenting and styling with ribbon, synthetic lei, tinsel, textiles, sequins and all manner of glossy and colourful plastics of varying opacity. Tuita combines his drag queen fantasies with his wayfinding ancestry, creating form, direction and beauty from chaos.

Tuita makes art the way he talks: a lot and very colourfully. To date, The Thirsty Mile is Tuita’s most ambitious project. Scale and aesthetic bring these sites to life, adding and remembering how our beautiful cultural objects, our personal stories and our state of living brings ‘mana’ (the spiritual lifeforce and healing power that permeates the universe) to us all. The importance of place and one’s ownership of that place. Back to the future, showing the present from the past.

Tuita dedicates his practice to the Moana theory of reality, tā (time) and vā (space), time-travelling from one work to the next. Constantly informed by past experiences while always negotiating the conflicting present, his island home is where he is, walking forward to the past and backward into the future, bringing a mixed bag of knowledge to the various forms he creates. Out of this chaos, balance, harmony and beauty is his aim. The ‘manulua’, a tapa design representing two birds flying, is prolific in Tuita’s practice, the physical representation of tā and vā. This symbol is one of Moana’s oldest and most endemic patterns, found on ngātu, wood carving and pottery.

The deification of vessels, wood and found objects is an important aspect of Tuita’s “Tongpop”. By glorifying everyday objects with decoration, dressing and fanfare, Tuita continues the practice of imbuing the ordinary from our world with the realm of the spiritual, creating totemic and ceremonial pieces.  It’s Mardi Gras, camp and healthy doses of kaleidoscopic chaos.

So Sydney, right! 

In the tradition of Paris Is Burning, category is: MOANA GLAMAH! POP POW BAM!

Tuita is a show-off and always up to giving a show! From animation, site-specific sculpture, photography and large-scale paintings, along with Tuita’s collaboration with Amigo and Amigo on the Colour Maze, he brings Tongpop interactively to the audience, literally encapsulating us.   

Tongpop honours and maintains tradition with a pop-pow-punch of contemporary life. A not-so-humble grass skirt adorns a restored 1920s grand old timer, the SS John Oxley, in a most Tongpop fashion. A ta'ovala manafau (dancing skirt) and kiekie (waist ornament) adorns this ship, bringing hundreds of years of Moana artistic and cultural processes in ceremony and celebration. It’s a cultural object still made and used today by most of the Indigenous people of Moana. Its evolution of survival to the plastic hula skirt, as an object of commercialisation, and in turn an environmental burden, are conflicting ideas that Tuita loves to play with, the tong and the pop. The conflicting but harmonious contrasts.



Placement of a ta’ovala on the body connects oneself to ancestors, showing respect, and for Tuita the connection of his tā and vā to his birthplace. He does not dwell on thing’s lost, rather he celebrates, constantly inventing and decorating the life he has. After all, nothing is ever truly lost, it’s just relocated with a new haircut.   

Tuita’s performative self-portraits flying in the breeze showcase his latest archetypical characters, his Tēvolo (ghost) divas, named after his favourite opera characters: Carmen, Norma and Lucia. They are combinations of real figures (Tuita witnessed people going through mental and emotional breakdowns during his childhood in Tonga, blaming and naming the Tēvolo as the culprit), imagined figures of our shared history, his history (Tuita loves opera but also shares many of the vices and traits of these archetypes) and the very real burdens of mental illness and its effect on our behaviour. Tuita presents his Tēvolo divas, posed like moody models, personifying opera divas and dancing as if an MTV music video. 

In the shared foyer, three animated figures of fate from an unknown time, in an unknown space. All the while symbols, archetypes, objects and patterns familiar to Tongpop float and move around.  

Let’s be honest, Tuita loves drama and maximalism. That’s why, Tongpopping the s**t out of every square metre in every aspect of his practice is as normal to him as bloody Alf on Home and Away. Whether he’s creating his mise-en-scène in his performative self-portraits or creating large-scale paintings and sculptures using materials from his Tongpop world, he’s always seeking and seeking to be.

Tuita’s take on the Festival ‘S’ offers monogrammed kupesi (tapa design) of varying depictions, emblazoned like a familiar branding of a French fashion house. So Tongpop.

Inside the Moonshine Bar, Tuita pays homage to the traditional yet nek-minute, using plastic raffia hula skirts as the hairy body of standing totems. Six metres high and accessorised with fans, capes, decorative combs and fabulous sequins, they show their true colours, standing in formation to welcome you. The monotonal totems stand guard. Each imbued with dual and contrasting personalities: yellow is unstable energy, purple an ambitious moodiness, blue is calming coldness, pink a sweet weakness, orange has ignorant courage and turquoise has protective envy. The red lei painting is all dangerous passion, the most fun kind… the varied textures of coloured plastic luminosity confront but invites the viewer… which colour are you???

Tuita thoroughly echoes the hum, beat and colour of Sydney – a little bit of Tong and a whole lot of pop.

About Telly Tuita 

Telly Tuita is a Tongan-born artist who moved to Sydney in 1989 as a 9-year-old. For 12 years, Tuita worked as an art teacher then assistant principal in special education. Moving to Aotearoa New Zealand in 2017, Tuita began his full-time art practice. 

Last year, Tuita held his first solo show in Australia at Campbelltown Arts Centre. In 2023, he delivered several public solo projects, including Tongpop Pantheon at Ballarat International Foto Biennale, and Tongpop to Britomart, Britomart Precinct, Auckland. 

In 2022, he participated in the group exhibition Wetūrangitia/Made As Stars at the Dowse Art Museum, New Zealand, and Divergent: New Photography Aotearoa at The Renshaws in Brisbane. 

In 2022 and 2023, Tuita participated in the Aotearoa Art Fair. In 2021, he featured as part of the group exhibition MĀNAWATIA TAKATĀPUI: DEFENDING PLURALITY, in Tauranga, New Zealand.