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Marama T-Pole | Presenter This week the 21st Pacific Music Awards held in Manukau. The Ministry for Pacific Peoples Lifetime Achievement was awarded to the legendary Tokelau-Tuvaluan music maestro Opetaia Foa’i, who also won the PMN Best Pacific Language award. He joins Marama along with his equally talented daughter Olivia Foa’i for our talanoa.

By Kevin McCarthy  What a weekend that was. What a weekend it will be. In typical introspective fashion, we’ve been looking for things to dissect for the All Blacks. Chief is the rush to dump Billy Proctor and reinstate Reiko Ioane. Given how long we’ve invested in making Ioane a  world class centre – which...

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump took to his social media platform, Truth Social, to again denounce the Smithsonian. The museum network, he claimed , has only devoted itself to showing “how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been.” But his splenetic outburst also had a broader target: not only “Museums throughout Washington,” but also ones “all over the Country,” which he described as “the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’” “How bad Slavery was”? That’s not really the only thing these museums aim to portray. The comment itself suggests a limited and dangerous perspective on those institutions. Consider the galleries of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), one of the many institutions run by the Smithsonian. Those galleries do present the transatlantic slave trade as a horrible, violent institution, so Trump is at least correct in that regard. The NMAAHC’s collection testifies to this reality: v...

Almost 50,000 people have signed a petition to stop the Bayeux Tapestry being loaned to London’s British Museum. The appeal, which was launched in July by the French art historian Didier Rykner, cites warnings from textile restorers who said that transporting the 1,000-year-old tapestry could damage its embroidered linen fabric. The work is slated to be shown at the British Museum from September 2026 to July 2027, while its home, Normandy’s Bayeux Tapestry Museum, is renovated. The loan was announced last month by Britain’s prime minister Keir Starmer and French president Emmanuel Macron. Rykner told The Art Newspaper that while the number of signatures on the petition isn’t enough to prevent the loan, he said “we have a year in hand, we still have time.” He has experience in rallying support against cultural projects; he previously initiated a petition to block Macron’s decision to commission contemporary stained-glass windows for six chapels in Paris’ restored Notre Dame Cath...

Above: When the pink Lions and Manawatu met last year. Caleb Delany and Hugo Plummer looking to charge down the kick of Jordi Viljoen. All three start on Sunday. Photo: Andy McArthur. The Wellington Lions will be hoping Palmerston North is a happy hunting ground for their next match on Sunday. The Lions face the...

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery will close its Los Angeles space just seven years after opening it. The last exhibition there will be its current one for Ben Hyunjin, whose solo show closes on August 29. “Tanya Bonakdar Gallery has made the considered decision not to renew the lease on its Los Angeles space, which concludes this September,” the gallery said in a statement. “After seven meaningful years on Highland Avenue, the lease’s end offered a natural pause to assess, and celebrate, all we have accomplished with the Los Angeles gallery exhibition program.” Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, which is based in New York, opened in Los Angeles in 2018. Its namesake dealer said at the time that she had made the decision to launch the gallery because many artists on her roster “expressed interest in having a presence on the West Coast.” Since then, the gallery has mounted shows there for artists such as Amalia Pica, Laura Lima, Susan Philipsz, and more. In the intervening period, many other galleri...

A vast trade network likely linked the ancient inhabitants of Southeast Asia’s jungles and coastlines, a two-millennia-old trove of silver coins suggests.     A study led by researchers at the National University of Singapore and published in  Antiquity found commonalities in the coins’ weights and metallurgy. The coins alone weren’t a new discovery. Officially dubbed the Rising Sun/Srivatsa, after their flip-side motifs of a rising sun and the Srivatsa, two significant symbols in Indian religious tradition, the trove was already unearthed across hundreds of miles spanning the river deltas of Bangladesh and the plains of Vietnam. Chinese records as early as the second century BCE also mention a trade route that connected politically affiliated groups in Persia and beyond, across Southeast Asia.     This study, however, is the first comprehensive attempt to study them beyond their national boundaries, and as a group. “This offers compelling evidence of ex...