Pacific Arts: The Journal of the Pacific Arts Association

Pacific Arts Vol. 23 No. 1 (2023) with Special Section: PAA-E Conference

Pacific Arts Vol. 23 No. 1 (2023) with Special Section: PAA-E Conference

Fanny Wonu Veys, president of the Pacific Arts Association­–Europe, describes the 2022 organisation’s annual meeting held at the Musée du quai Branly—Jacques Chirac in Paris. She introduces three essays based on papers presented at the meeting, focused on the theme “Gendered Objects in Oceania.”

This paper explores the interplay between gender and barkcloth, or tapa, among the Maisin people living along the shores of Collingwood Bay in Papua New Guinea. Tapa features in Maisin economic, political, social, and spiritual life as an object of wealth that is both alienable and inalienable. It constitutes beliefs and values about gender relations and identity, mediating relations between the individual and the social. At the same time, tapa connects the living with the ancestors, God, and the church. In short, tapa is intertwined with all aspects of Maisin life. While in earlier publications I have detailed the gendered manufacturing and use of tapa in various settings, in this paper I bring this work together, highlighting how barkcloth is not just a gendered object, but crucial in creating gendered embodiments and performances, and, as such, experiences of gender identity.

In 1897, German anthropologist and collector Wilhelm Joest spent the last three months of his life on Nendö, Santa Cruz Islands, assembling an extensive ethnographic collection. It includes a piece of tevau, or “feather money,” originally used by the islands’ inhabitants to pay bride price or purchase female concubines, among other things. This paper explores this artefact’s various gendered layers of meaning. Used to transform women into the collective property of Nendö men’s associations, tevau was already gendered and charged with sexualised meaning before being collected. This made it attractive to Joest, who had always recorded non-European sexualities with an ethnopornographic voyeurism. The object, I argue, reveals a complexly gendered collecting situation and Joest’s tentative affinity with the men of Nendö based on an (assumed) shared patriarchal outlook. As such, the history of Joest’s collecting is relevant both to the presentation of tevau in Western museums and cultural revitalisation attempts on Nendö itself.

Paradise Camp, an immersive exhibition of Yuki Kihara’s artworks first presented at the 59th Venice Biennale, was curated by Natalie King with Ioana Gordon-Smith, assistant Pasifika curator. Kihara is the first Pasifika, Asian, and faʻafafine (“in a manner of a woman,” third gender) artist to represent Aotearoa/New Zealand at the international art show. Inspired by an essay by Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, the exhibition features twelve new photographic works alongside a “Vārchive” of the artist’s research materials and a remix of a five-part “talk show” created in 2018. Through a camp aesthetic, Kihara presents a faʻafafine perspective that decolonizes paradise and gender, argues for community solidarity, and fosters intentional stewardship of the environment in response to climate change, among other topics. The Venice Biennale installation invokes the Sāmoan theory of vā and is accompanied by solidarity programming, an immersive website, and an extensive exhibition catalogue that signifies the tā-vā theory of reality, an Indigenous Moana framing.

Between 2004 and 2008, celebrated Sāmoan writer Albert Wendt held the Citizens’ Chair in the Department of English at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. By 2007, Wendt had completed twenty-seven paintings, each one a visual ode to the land and people of Hawai‘i. These paintings were featured in his first art exhibition, held at the Louis Pohl Gallery in Honolulu in 2007. This piece is a review of that exhibition, Le Amataga: The Beginning, along with an interview with Wendt that took place soon after the exhibition opened.

This photo essay is based on the artist’s doctoral research and exhibition Tātara e Maru Ana—The Sacred Rain Cape of Waiapu. The PhD thesis interrogated the history of photography in Ngāti Porou to show how lens-based image-making can enact Mātauranga Waiapu: cultural knowledge systems specific to this place and oriented to the restoration of the Waiapu River and the wider taiao or environment. The creative works in the project critically adopt the strategies of landscape photography to activate transformative relationships among iwi and hapū in recognition of the degradation of Te Riu o Waiapu by settler colonial practices of deforestation.

This research note describes the work of Joycelin Kauc Leahy, an artist, writer, curator, and climate activist. The author focuses on the ways Leahy addresses the relationship between climate change, land, and identity—especially in Papua New Guinea—through her research, curatorial projects, and illustrated children’s literature.

This research note describes ComCard Pacific phonecards from the Republic of Nauru as well as phonecard presentation folders. Eighteen phonecards are identified and classified into five thematic groups based on the images they feature. Their varying visual themes suggested that issues such as wildlife conservation, religious values, and immigrant communities were central in Nauru from the mid 1990s through the 2000s. The article also describes two phonecard presentation folders that promoted tourism and wetland conservation in the Republic of Nauru in 1995.

In -/+peace = @.edu, an ongoing work of images and poems that will include multiple series, artist Cheryl Nohealani Olivieri explores home in Hawaiʻi as a place of fragmentation—where natives, islanders, residents, and visitors become entangled and call into question the production of identities amidst postwar shifts in geo-political relations.

Kanohi ki te Kanohi: The Living Portrait (2021, 21 minutes) is a video collaboration between Māori and other Pacific artists who were producing portraits in their studios in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. Produced and directed by Regan Balzer and edited by Grant Triplow, it features work by Shane Tuaeu Andrew (Cook Islands), Regan Balzer (Aotearoa), Kauanoe Chang (Hawaiʻi), Turumakina Duley (Aotearoa, living in Australia), Michelle Estall (Aotearoa), Tanya Leef (Aotearoa), Rangimoana B. Morgan (Aotearoa), James Ormsby (Aotearoa), Taniela Petelo (Tonga), Vaihere Vaivai (Tahiti), and John Walsh (Aotearoa).

An exhibition review of the Hawaiʻi Triennial 2022: Pacific Century—E Hoʻomau no Moananuiākea that was presented February 18 through May 8, 2022, in Honolulu, Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi. Organized by Hawaiʻi Contemporary, the triennial was on view at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, Foster Botanical Garden, Hawaii Theatre Center, Hawaiʻi State Art Museum, Iolani Palace, Honolulu Museum of Art, and Royal Hawaiian Center. It was curated by Dr. Melissa Chiu in collaboration with associate curators Dr. Miwako Tezuka and Drew Kahu‘āina Broderick.

In 2022, Edith Kekuhikuhipuʻuoneonāaliʻiōkohala Kenao Kanakaʻole (1913–1979) was selected to be featured on a U.S. quarter as part of the American Women Quarters program, a collaboration between the United States Mint, the Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Museum (AWHM), the National Women’s History Museum, and the Congressional Bipartisan Women’s Caucus that celebrates the accomplishments and contributions of American Women to a variety of fields. In 2023, the United States Mint and the AWHM partnered with Hawaiʻi Community College, the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, and the Edith Kanakaʻole Foundation to organize a celebration of the quarter’s release. Collectively titled E Hō Mai Ka ʻIke: Celebrating the Launch of the Edith Kanakaʻole Quarter, the two-day event (May 5–6, 2023) showcased the vitality and innovative forms of contemporary Native Hawaiian visual and performing arts—a testament to Aunty Edith’s enduring legacy as it continues on through her descendants and students today.

The author reviews the exhibition Maḏayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala, held at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, September 4–December 4, 2022; and the Katzen Arts Center, American University, Washington, DC, February 4–May 14, 2023. The exhibition’s tour continues at The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, February 3–July 14, 2024; and Asia Society, New York, September 24, 2024–January 5, 2025.

Karen Stevenson’s memories of the Aotearoa New Zealand-based Sāmoan artist Johnny Penisula (1941–2023).

Tautai Pacific Arts Trust in Tāmaka Makaurau, Aotearoa New Zealand, remembers and honors the artist Lily Laita.

Calls for papers & participation, PAA membership, advertisements, new publications, position announcements