“POWA WAVE”
Hannah Brontë
14 Jan → 26 Feb 2023

West Space is proud to begin our 2023 program with the Naarm/Melbourne premiere of POWA WAVE by Hannah Brontë.

POWA WAVE frames the experiences of Queer women in Australia’s surfing culture. Working with Queer female surfers as her subjects, Brontë’s new digital artwork explores the radical act of being a woman in the ocean today.

The history of surfing has its roots firmly planted as far back as the 12th century in Polynesia predating any European contact. Imagery is depicted on cave walls of humans surfing towering waves. The contemporary surf culture we see today was developed by the first peoples of Hawaii and popularised in the Americas. We didn’t see surfing on the island of “Australia” until 1914, when Hawaiian Great Duke “the Big Kahuna” Kahanamoku surfed a 16-foot pine Malibu on Manly Beach, Sydney.

“There are now 2.7 million surfers nationally and yet being a Queer surfer is still considered dangerous and taboo. Being a woman in the surf, let alone a Queer woman, takes a sport so freeing and transcendent and makes it a radical act of defiance.
POWA WAVE is a Queer romance that follows two lovers in the waves. They joyfully and powerfully walk on water, connected to each other and the ocean. Water supports them completely, letting them be weightless and held in their love and wild Queer joy. The lovers wear sweet suits, costumes that adorn Queer bodies to make the world gentler. The sweet suits are love letters to the camp history of wearable art and are decorated with the incantation ‘me and my love are safe in the waves’. 
POWA WAVE is the freedom to repaint the world with the beauty and complexity of people in love. You are close enough to smell the salt.” – Hannah Brontë

POWA WAVE is a UTS Gallery, Sydney commission delivered in partnership with West Space.

a figure peeks around a black curtain that runs adjacent to a white wall with "POWA WAVE" on it in wall vinyl
2 figures lay on the ground at West Space with yellow pillows under their heads. They are watching a projection of two female surfers walking with their boards out to the ocean
A shadowed figure sits in front of a thin format projection the length of a large wall depicting a heavy swell of an ocean
a figure in a pink hat stands in front of a wall inscribed with text that says "POWA WAVE is a queer romance... They joyfully and powerfully walk on water, connected to each other and the ocean. Water supports them completely, letting them be weightless and held in their love and wild Queer joy. The lovers wear sweet suits, costumes that adorn Queer bodies to make the world gentler. -Hannah Bronte"
A figure stands in front of a projection on a wall. She is dressed in summer clothes and the video still is of a womans neck and chin

Hannah Brontë is an artist living and working on Yugambeh country, whose body of work explores the feminine experience, and its intersections with queerness, spirituality and motherhood journeys. She makes video, textiles, texts and soundscapes that present speculative dreamscapes and alternate universes through her own distinctive kaleidoscopic lens. Brontë has collaborated with spiritual and physical healers and is interested in appplying these practices within art-making to expand connection and community.