Pacific Arts: The Journal of the Pacific Arts Association

Pacific Arts Vol. 25 No. 2 (2025) Cover, Journal Information, and Table of Contents

Pacific Arts N.S. Vol. 24, No. 1 (2024) Full Issue

The online exhibition iSausauvou: Arts | Transmission | Resilience (2022–ongoing) was organized in the framework of “Urban Pathways: Fiji. Youth. Arts. Culture.,” a collaborative research project funded by the British Academy’s Youth Futures program. Following an overview of the project and its core activities, this article focuses on the online exhibition, which showcases artworks created by young people who live in Fiji and its diaspora communities. Asked to reflect on urban youth culture, these young artists contemplate the social and cultural expectations that come with being youth in a multifaith, multilingual urban environment during the COVID-19 pandemic. By putting these youth artistic expressions within the framework of scholarship of “the future,” this paper aims to move away from the tendency to associate youth with problems such as youth unemployment and lack of education, and instead focus on how youth imagine the future through art.

Atalilo: Motifs in Sāmoan Material Culture (2024–27) is the first exhibition staged in the newly established Ōfaga o Saʻliʻiliga National University of Sāmoa Research Museum. The exhibition explores the myriad uses of motifs across six genres of Sāmoan material culture: tatau (tattooing), afa (sennit lashing), ʻele (pottery), maʻa (petroglyphs), laʻau (wood carvings), and siapo (barkcloth). While displays of each genre had its own challenges in presentation, design, and curation, the most complex was the section on siapo. This article begins with an introduction to siapo’s cultural and historical significance and its contemporary production and use. It then outlines emerging institutional and cultural ironies in attempting to display nineteenth-century siapo in contemporary Sāmoa—issues that prompt deeper questions about the urgent need to recognize and support both the living and ephemeral dimensions of Sāmoan heritage.

This article explores the relationship between knowledge, colonial entanglement, and material culture through the case study of a ceremonial headdress, a mormah, from Simbu Province, Papua New Guinea, currently held in the Linden-Museum Stuttgart. The mormah, once used during highland rituals such as buka ingu, exemplifies how colonial collecting practices decontextualized culturally significant objects, transforming them from living ceremonial regalia into static museum artifacts. Drawing on postcolonial theory and Donna Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledges,” the authors adopt a collaborative, decolonial methodology that brings together archival museum research and oral history interviews conducted in the Kuman language with a key cultural informant: co-author Clara Bal’s grandmother. This interdisciplinary and transnational research design highlights the epistemic authority of insider knowledge and the ethical imperative of trust-based engagement. By analyzing the symbolic, ecological, and ceremonial meanings of the mormah, the article foregrounds the object’s role within Indigenous systems of memory and social reproduction. The authors argue for a reorientation of museum practice that goes beyond provenance as property tracing, toward provenance as a relational, ethical, and political project. Through this approach, the mormah becomes a site of cultural resilience and epistemic repair, offering new pathways for restitution, reinterpretation, and collaborative knowledge production between museums and societies of origin.

This article discusses the recent visual return of photographs made in Iatmul villages (East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea) between 1929 and 1933 by British anthropologist Gregory Bateson to those communities. It introduces the project and its methods, focusing on the specificities of returning culturally sensitive images to the region. It then discusses Bateson’s photographic practices in relation to the broader history of anthropology and its uses of the camera, highlighting the ways in which photography can be seen as cutting its subjects from their original context. It also uses the metaphor of a lotus growing, comparing the return of photographs to Iatmul communities to a horticultural “striking” process and the researcher to a gardener placing a “cutting” in a fertile environment in which it can sprout and grow anew.

This visual essay introduces the work of Gisela McDaniel, a diasporic, Indigenous CHamoru artist based in New York. Working primarily with women and femme people who identify as Indigenous, multiracial, immigrant, refugee/displaced, and/or of color, her work responds to historical/contemporary patterns of censorship as it relates to the exhibition of women’s/femme bodies, voices, and narratives.

In a three-part interview, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui engages multimedia artist, visual poet, and educator Meleanna Aluli Meyer, and scholar, curator, and writer Noelle M.K.Y. Kahanu. They discuss the Hawaiʻi Triennial 2025 (HT25): Aloha Nō, the state’s largest thematic exhibition of contemporary art in Hawaiʻi, the Pacific, and beyond. In the first segment, Kauanui engages Kahanu and Meyer regarding their connection through friendship, related kin ties, and the Hawaiian art scene. In the second segment, Meyer discusses her vision for and creation of her installation work ‘Umeke Lāʻau: Culture Medicine and how it relates to her longtime art practice. In the third segment, Kahanu discusses her trajectory as a curator and how that artistic labor is connected to her ongoing work in relation to the Hawaiian community.

Book review: Kathleen Haddon, author, and Virginia-Lee Webb and Jonathan Fogel, editors, An English Girl in New Guinea: Kathleen Haddon’s Journal and Photographs from New Guinea, September 16–November 18, 1914. San Francisco, California: J. M. Fogel Media, Inc. and Premier Arts Editions, 2023. ISBN 13: 9781733007856. 192 pages, color illustrations, maps, portraits. Hardcover $89.

Exhibition review: Hawaiʻi Triennial 2025: Aloha Nō, curated by Wassan Al-Khudhairi, Binna Choi, and Noelle M.K.Y. Kahanu. The exhibition was presented at fourteen venues on Oʻahu, Maui, and Hawaiʻi Island, February 15–May 4, 2025.

This article reviews the exhibition Voices of the Pacific: Innovation and Tradition (CaixaForum Madrid, May 28–September 14, 2025), which featured more than 210 artifacts from the British Museum and other collections. The exhibition explored the artistic and cultural expressions of Oceanic island communities through seven thematic sections: innovation and tradition, innovators, weavers, dancers, warriors, carvers, and travelers. It gave special attention to emblematic objects such as Polynesian idols, Melanesian weaponry, Micronesian ceremonial gear, and an installation by Māori artist George Nuku.

Calls for participation, conferences, exhibitions, new publications, position announcements, PAA membership