(Untitled) Nimoa and Me: Kiriwina Notations
2015 - Installation (Installation)
63 x 43 cm
Newell Harry
(Untitled) Nimoa and Me: Kiriwina Notations by Newell Harry brings together a litany of contemporary politics—mobilization around enduring racism, the legacies of Indigenous and independence struggle, and the prospects of global solidarity against neocolonialism and social injustice. Yet what makes his stance unique is his idiosyncratic ‘anarchival’ method, developed over twenty years of living, working, and gathering in and around the South Pacific. From the resulting miscellany, Harry elicits thought-provoking new connections between collected artefacts; photographs and impressions authored by himself; and items drawn from journalist, activist, and documentary archives. The neatly gridded wall installation gives a formal consistency to Harry’s miscellaneous encounters and anecdotes, resisting any linear or monolithic narrative, well-known hazards of documenting “other cultures”. This photographic series consists of framed and matted black-and-white photographs, some accompanied by typewritten vignettes, describing an event or episode from the artist’s expedition to Kiriwina Island in Papua New Guinea’s Milne Bay Province. The largest of the Trobriand Islands, Kiriwina is a highly loaded location—the site of Bronislaw Malinowski’s celebrated anthropological field studies of island life, sexuality, and that archetypal model of non-capitalist exchange, the Kula ring. Kiriwina has long been a quasi-sacred site for the human sciences, but while attentive to the facts of non-linear economic and symbolic exchange, Harry’s candid photos and diaristic reflections paint his “island friends” with decidedly profane humor and matter-of-fact contemporaneity. (Some text adapted from Samuel Lee, Antenna , Summer 2021, vol. 2 )
Newell Harry’s practice traces an intimate web of connections and histories linking Pacific island cultures (especially those of the Vanuatu archipelago)–via Australia, where he lives, and the Malay world–to South Africa’s Western Cape Province, the home of his extended family. He is known for acid text works featuring pithy appropriations of Pidgin and Creole languages, marrying a concrète poetics with craft traditions of the South Pacific. But his art is rooted in a studious kind of gathering , of stories, images, and artefacts, both on the ground in the course of his travels and in archives, markets, and collections. Harry has long explored island societies’ unfinished histories of exploitation and epistemological upheaval, as well as the cultural friction of colonial migration and its legacies concerning race and identity. His own South African and Mauritian descent affords a dissonant perspective on present-day Australia, a nation whose schizoid settler imaginary—as both colony and Pacific colonizer—is plagued by its uneasy history in a region looming ever larger in global affairs. Through the lenses of journalism, documentary practice and his own family’s experience, Harry’s recent research uncovers transnational solidarities and the contradictions of white multiculturalism in a certain geography of decolonization, lately called the ‘Indo-Pacific’.
Colors:
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