Islands not to scale (Maru a’o) – Act II

Islands not to scale presents recent works by Mark Maurangi Carrol, developed during his 2024 residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and refined during a return to Rarotonga in January 2025. This evolving exhibition series explores themes of scale, movement, and representation from a diasporic Pacific perspective. The title references a 1980s Cook Islands tourism brochure in which a map carried the footnote “islands not to scale” — a factual disclaimer that Carrol recontextualises as a critical lens for interrogating colonial cartographic frameworks.

These frameworks have historically misrepresented the Pacific as a scattering of isolated landmasses adrift across the world’s largest ocean, thereby marginalising its spatial realities and cultural complexities. In contrast, Carrol reasserts the ocean’s centrality, challenging continental paradigms that overlook Pacific connectivity and epistemology.