no place like home - Sione Monū

27th March - 1st May 2026

This exhibition by Tāmaki Makaurau based artist Sione Tuivailala Monū looks at state housing in Aotearoa as more than shelter, considering how state housing shapes ideas of who belongs, who is deserving, who is watched. For many Pacific families the state house is tied to migration, survival and opportunity but also to stigma.

no place like home asks you to think about home as both protective and exposed. A place of care, culture and gathering, but also a space shaped by rules, surveillance and limited choices. It considers how culture is carried intergenerationally, shaped by both pre and post migration experiences, and maintained through secondhand memory. What is inherited, what is adapted and what is lost or reshaped through displacement all sit within the walls of the home.

Sione's pieces — such as the pig on a spit, the kiekie, the weatherboarded exteriors and references to ancestral land — speak to continuity and adaptation. They hold memory and connection while also revealing what shifts or becomes fragile through displacement and economic pressure.

Monū reflects how domestic spaces carry layered meanings: comfort and control, intimacy and scrutiny, pride and shame. The work asks how colonial systems and housing policies continue to shape everyday life inside the home.

At its core sit the uncomfortable questions that interrogate the ethical viewer: Who gets to feel secure? Who is made visible? And how do we participate in the stories told about state housing and the people who live within it?

Artist Bio

SIONE TUÍVAILALA MONŪ (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist of Tongan descent. Monū was born in Tamaki and grew up across Australia as their father was part of the Australian defence force. Their mother is a Tongan cultural knowledge holder and avid collector of Tongan crafts, adornments and ngatu (bark cloth). As a child, Monū enjoyed experimenting with materials mimicking cultural adornments, having watched family in Australia making traditional adornments with non-traditional diasporic materials like beads. Monū developed early their own interpretations of the craft.

Not considering their current practice "traditional," Monū deems their works modern iterations of their heritage based on their present-day reality. Each work depicts a symbol of self: self in community, self in love, self in relation to family, and self-referential humour. Traditional methods blend diaspora in-jokes and personal omens. There are callouts to Monū's queer Pacific creative collectives and friendships, and often derided elements of Pacific identity and aesthetic articulating core parts of Monū's identity.

Monū has shown their work nationally and internationally, including National Portrait Gallery Canberra, Artspace Sydney, Artspace Aotearoa, Waikato Museum Te Whare Taonga o Waikato, Contemporary Jewelled Art Gallery & Museum Cagnes-sur-Mer France, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Christchurch Art Gallery, Māngere Art Centre, Robert Heald Gallery and Bergman Gallery. Monū has art held in numerous public collections including Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki; Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū; Ngā Puhipuhi o Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington Art Collection; Auckland Libraries Archives; and various private collections throughout New Zealand and abroad.

Additionally, Sione has been featured in publications such as Crafting Aotearoa: A Cultural History of Making in New Zealand and the Wider Moana Oceania (2019), Landfall Journal (May 2022), Pacific Arts Aotearoa (2023), and Sio FakaTonga 'ae 'Aati FakaTonga - Tongan Views of Tongan Arts (2025).