Teresia K. Teaiwa, “Bikinis and Other S/pacific N/oceans,” The Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1 (1994): 87–109.
Epeli Hauʻofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” in We Are the Ocean: Selected Works (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2008), 27–40.
“The Middle of Now-here,” the name of one of the sections in my book Coral and Concrete: Remembering Kwajalein Atoll between Japan, America, and the Marshall Islands (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2020), was adopted as the title for the inaugural Honolulu Biennial in 2017, which focused especially on contemporary art from Oceania and for which I served as one of the curatorial advisors.
Teresia Teaiwa, “We sweat and cry salt water, so we know that the ocean is really in our blood,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 19, no. 2 (2017): 133–36.
Burying of the placenta in the earth as ritual and linkage to land appears in the literary and theoretical work of Samoan writer Albert Wendt, French Polynesian writer Chantal Spitz, and Māori writer Witi Ihimaera, for example.
These dates are based on the adoption of international treaties that officially conferred governing status to Germany or Japan, respectively. In terms of local realities, the “Japanese period” began as early as 1914, when Japan defeated Germany in a significant battle of World War I and subsequently began settling the Marshall Islands and other island groups. Likewise, though a clear postwar treaty was not worked out until 1947 with the formation of the US Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, Japanese civilians and military, and all Japanese rule, had been eliminated from Micronesia by 1945.
Vicente Diaz, “Stepping in It: How to Smell the Fullness of Indigenous Histories,” in Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies, ed. Chris Andersen and Jean M. O’Brien (Routledge, 2016), 86–92.
I explore these metaphors more deeply in my book Coral and Concrete.
Here I pay homage to Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s meditation on intersecting “little” versus “big” histories in her book Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan’s Cold War (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 13.
As a scholar of Pacific history, I am especially concerned by how the Pacific has often been framed a sort of “new frontier” by faraway academics, artists, and curators who sometimes appropriate Pacific knowledge, designs, stories, and secrets deprived of their original context, recolonizing the Pacific over and over again with no respect for who and what was already there.
Take, for example, Bruce Conner’s 1976 Crossroads, which features twenty-seven minutes of edited archival footage of the Baker test, one of the first atomic weapons tests conducted at Bikini Atoll, which meditates on the sublime spectacle of nuclear warfare without regard for the displaced Marshallese people and their brave acts of resistance and ongoing fight for compensation. More recently, Julian Charrière’s photographic work in Bikini Atoll (in his 2018 Berlin exhibit “As We Used to Float”) is an example of important and devastating work that brilliantly draws attention to the horrors of nuclear war in its depiction of unnatural, irradiated Marshallese landscapes and seascapes, but it also emphasizes remoteness, desolation, and annihilation as it literally ponders Cold War concrete ruins while relegating Islanders to the past. As harbingers of impending climate apocalypse, Pacific Islands are also often portrayed as sites of future ruin by environmental activist artists from outside the region, who typically render Islanders as helpless victims or leave their voices out of the story entirely.
Peter Brunt, Nicholas Thomas, Sean Mallon, et al. Art in Oceania: A New History (Thames & Hudson, 2012).
Noelle Kahanu, plenary comments during the “Oceania” Exhibition Curatorial Talk, 23rd Pacific History Association Conference, Royal Academy of London, December 3, 2018.
Margaret Jolly, “Becoming a ‘New’ Museum? Contesting Oceanic Visions at Musée du Quai Branly,” The Contemporary Pacific 23, no. 1 (2001): 123.
In 2017, I helped to advise the inaugural Honolulu Biennial, directed by Fumio Nanjo and Ngahiraka Mason, who prominently featured Hawaiian and Pacific indigenous artists—a curatorial intention that was built upon again in 2019 by artistic director Nina Tonga. In 2020, the Sydney Biennale made history when it highlighted over one hundred artists mainly of First Nations heritage from around the world, under the artistic direction of Brook Andrew, who titled the exhibition “NIRIN,” a term from his maternal Wiradjuri Aboriginal heritage that translates approximately to “Edge.” “NIRIN” is an example of how international networks of indigenous curators have been catalyzing meaningful changes in how artists are chosen and exhibited globally, and Oceania is a major hub of these movements, particularly between Aotearoa-New Zealand and Australia, but also in conversation with First Nations communities in Canada, and in collaboration with artists, curators, galleries, and initiatives in Hawaiʻi, Guåhan, Sāmoa, Vanuatu, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and other island sites. Indigenous artists from Taiwan, too, with their ancestral Austronesian links to Oceania, began participating in the Festivals of Pacific Arts in 2004, and have since collaborated with and exchanged with Pacific artists in Kaohsiung, Taipei, and other cities. Later this year, “Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art” at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki will be the largest ever exhibition of indigenous art from Aotearoa-New Zealand.
These were Australia-based Bougainvillean artist Taloi Havini and Marshallese artist Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner, respectively. I also curated a special program of indigenous Pacific Islander film at the 2019 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival entitled “Am/nesia: Forgotten ‘Archipelagos’ of Oceania,” which focused on the virtual disappearance of Micronesia as a result of the war between Japan and the United States in the Pacific.
See Ingrid Ahlgren, “The Meaning of Mo: Place, Power, and Taboo in the Marshall Islands” (PhD diss., Australian National University, 2016).
Brunt, Thomas, Mallon, et al., Art in Oceania, 11.
Dee Jefferson, “Lisa Reihana: A Monumental, Immersive New Artwork Reanimates the Story of Captain Cook and First Contact,” ABC News, August 31, 2018 →.
Personal communication with Lisa Reihana and James Pinker, August 27, 2020.
Personal communication with FAFSWAG, September 3, 2020.
See for example →.
Personal communication with FAFSWAG, September 3, 2020.
When the Covid-19 pandemic erupted we had already been engaging in conversations on the ground, visiting artists in Guåhan, Kosrae, Pohnpei, and Majuro, talking locally with singers, chanters, navigators, weavers, painters, and poets. This process, though seemingly interrupted by the grounding of planes and closing of borders, has actually gotten richer and more innovative as artists in each community facilitate their own conversations and share with us and each other in weekly transoceanic Zoom workshops. Micronesians, who are experts in overcoming distance and isolation, are patient teachers of bridge-building and celebrating togetherness across the water.
Australian-based Tongan artist Latai Taumoepeau also deserves mention here for her attention to ritual and custom in her performance and video art while addressing the severe injustices of colonial encounter and environmental harm. I-Land X-isle (2012), in which the artist suspends herself bound intricately by ropes to a massive melting block of ice, symbolizing the direct consequences of the melting polar glaciers for Pacific Islander communities, could be read as a direct response to the kind of climate art I mentioned earlier that deprives Islanders of agency by disarticulating islands from their inhabitants. In the 2020 Sydney Biennale she performed a piece called The Last Resort, referencing the resilience, struggles, and vulnerability of Pacific Islanders living on the front lines of climate change. The piece evokes the communities stacking up sandbags to fend off the rising sea, symbolized by bags filled with glass bottles (originally derived from melting sand/silica), which she pounds using traditional practices and crushes wearing shoes made of bricks.