(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:
Related works sharing similar palette
© » KADIST
Eleanor Antin
1973Comprised of fifty-one photographic postcards, Antin’s 100 Boots is an epic visual narrative in which 100 black rubber boots stand in for a fictional “hero” making a “trip” from California to New York City...
© » KADIST
Seulgi Lee
2018The Korean title for U: Repair the cowshed after losing the cow = Too late is —a famous Korean proverb meaning “you are doing something when you are already late to do it”...
© » SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
How Banksy’s 2015 amusement park parody Dismaland transformed a gallery founder’s view of exhibitions | South China Morning Post Advertisement Advertisement Art + FOLLOW Get more with my NEWS A personalised news feed of stories that matter to you Learn more A mermaid sculpture sits in front of a fairy castle at Banksy’s Dismaland amusement park parody in Weston-super-Mare, England, in 2015...
© » THEARTNEWSPER
In pictures: focus on Caribbean artists Art market Museums & heritage Exhibitions Books Podcasts Columns Technology Adventures with Van Gogh Search Search Art Basel in Miami Beach 2023 feature In pictures: focus on Caribbean artists María Elena Ortiz, curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, picks her favourite works at Art Basel in Miami Beach Alexander Morrison 9 December 2023 Share April Bey, COLONIAL SWAG: Not Conceited, CONVINCED! (2023) © Liliana Mora María Elena Ortiz is a trailblazing curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (the Modern), but she also has close ties to South Florida...
© » KADIST
Stéphane Calais
2007L’herbier (petit Trianon) consists of four “realistic” drawings of plants, screenprinted on transparent PVC...
© » KADIST
John Gerrard
2016Flag (Thames) 2016 depicts a small section of the Thames River—one that is adjacent to the Palace of Westminster in London—as an algorithmic representation on an LED panel...
© » GALERIE MAGAZINE
8 Emerging Artists Who Made a Splash at This Year’s NADA and Untitled Art in Miami - Galerie Subscribe Art + Culture Interiors Style + Design Emerging Artists Discoveries Artist Guide More Creative Minds Life Imitates Art Real estate Events Video Galerie House of Art and Design Subscribe About Press Advertising Contact Us Follow Galerie Sign up to receive our newsletter Subscribe Installation view of Henrik Godsk at Vigo Gallery at Untitled Art 2023...
© » KADIST
Sabelo Mlangeni
2019The Royal House of Allure is a name of a safe house on mainland Lagos where members of the queer community in need of boarding, due to various circumstances, live together...
© » KADIST
Gabriel Orozco
1992Gabriel Orozco often documents found situations in the natural or urban landscape...
© » ARTS EQUATOR
Weekly Picks: Singapore (7 – 13 January 2019) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Weekly To Do January 7, 2019 The Past and Coming Melt by Koh Nguang How , Grey Projects, 12 – 23 January With a focus on environmentally engaged art that speaks to Koh’s early and crucial artistic position on environmental crises, ‘The Past and Coming Melt’ features archival works as well as new recreations of previously destroyed or unavailable work and material...
