Vaimaila Urale is a Samoan-born interdisciplinary artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa. She has ancestral ties to the villages of Fagamalo, Matavai, Falealupo, and Safa’ato’a in Samoa.

Her practice is deeply engaged with the politics and poetics of technology, exploring how digital languages intersect with Indigenous knowledge and visual culture. Urale uses ASCII characters—such as “<”, “>”, “/”, and “\”—to create graphic compositions that reference traditional Samoan motifs found in tapa and tatau, translating ancestral mark-making into code-like forms. By merging digital language with customary symbols, she navigates the tensions and connections between contemporary systems and ancestral storytelling.

Urale has exhibited widely across Aotearoa, including at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery – Len Lye Centre, The Dowse Art Museum, and Māngere Arts Centre. Internationally, her work has been shown at Kunsthall Trondheim (Norway), Para Site (Hong Kong), the Casablanca Biennale (Morocco), and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Australia).

She is the co-founder and Director of Moana Fresh, and a member of the collaborative art collective D.A.N.C.E. art club.

 

Artist photo credit: Dane Taylor