About
Photo credit: Emily Parr x PAPA clothing
BIO
Pelenakeke Brown (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores the intersections between disability theory and Sāmoan concepts. Her practice spans visual art, text, and performance. She is from Aotearoa (New Zealand) and is an Sāmoan/Pakehā, crip artist.
She has worked internationally presenting performances, exhibitions, published writing and residencies in New York, California, Berlin, Hamburg, London and Aotearoa.
She has worked with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gibney Dance Center, The New York Library for the Performing Arts and other institutions globally. Selected residencies include Eyebeam, The Laundromat Project, and Denniston Hill. Her work has been written about in Art in America, The New York Times and Art Agenda. In 2020 she was recognised with a Creative New Zealand Pacific Toa award.
She is informed by the Samoan concept of the vā- relationships across time and space, crip time and is continually trying to find sites to investigate that hold both of these dual theories. Pelenakeke’s work straddles many mediums, is it a poem, a visual work or a choreographic score- she asks, why not all three?