This dissertation investigates how contemporary art in Oceania materializes the role of colonial history in understanding and addressing climate change. Future-centric representations and solutions to rising sea levels and dwindling biodiversity—such as apocalypse narratives and techno-fixes—allow for escapism from the root causes of ecological collapse. Colonially induced climate change in Oceania stems from the control and dispossession of Indigenous Pacific bodies and lands, urban and agricultural development, militarism, and resource extraction. This dissertation asks how contemporary art in Oceania and its diaspora helps global audiences understand the role of colonial history in these issues. Without a deeper engagement with colonialism, we risk repeating and perpetuating unequal structures of power into the future. How, then, does artistic practice make manifest the dialogic relationship between space and time in the context of climate change? By materializing the continually unfolding past on which the present and future depend, contemporary art has transformative potential for our responses to the climate crisis. The chapters investigate a range of artistic strategies, including: the use of archival photography and film to challenge historical narratives about nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands and phosphate mining in Banaba; digital media and site-specific installations that materialize alternative pasts and futures in an urbanized Hawaiʻi; and experimental films that make visible the ancestral present in the Northern Territory of Australia, resisting apocalypse narratives and ecological grief that climate change often engenders. These case studies investigate how the legacies of colonialism are contributing to climate change in site-specific, localized ways, while also identifying regional and global connections. The project contributes to the fields of climate justice, Pacific Studies, and art history by taking a sustained look at the material entanglement between ecological collapse, temporality (the passage of time), and historical consciousness (how we understand our relationships to the past). The dissertation concludes by outlining a framework for Indigenous Pacific Climate Change Studies that foregrounds the arts as a necessary mechanism by which climate justice in Oceania can be achieved.

On February 16, 2024, the North American chapter of the Pacific Arts Association hosted a panel at the 112th College Art Association (CAA) Annual Conference in Chicago. Chaired by Sylvia Cockburn (Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow) and Maggie Wander (senior research associate) from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this roundtable invited Halena Kapuni-Reynolds, associate curator of Native Hawaiian history and culture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), and Ingrid Ahlgren, curator for Oceanic collections at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, to share updates on their current projects and discuss critical issues in Oceanic art curation. The discussion centered on community engagement and critical methodologies grounded in Pacific epistemologies, the ethical and sociopolitical issues around museum collection and display, how to engage with different audiences (especially in the settler colonial context of North America), and how to collaborate across institutions.

This essay examines the recent group exhibition SALTWATER / Interconnectivity co-curated by Katharine Losi Atafu-Mayo and Giles Peterson at the Tautai Gallery in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand (October 16, 2020 to January 30, 2021), including its public exhibition talks, forums, and performance activations. The exhibition was intended to embody the Moana worldview and explore questions of justice, equity, identity, and ecology through newly commissioned work by six multimedia Indigenous artists and designers from the Moana-Solwara (Oceania region): Katharine Losi Atafu-Mayo, Peter Elavera, Te Ara Minhinnick, Shawnee Tekki, Telly Tuita, and Gutiŋjarra Yunipiŋju.