In the lead-up to ‘The 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT8), QAGOMA’s conservation staff applied their skills and knowledge to several artworks that are on display. We share some background information on one of the exhibition’s major works, which required the collaboration of the Queensland Museum.
Collaboration with the Queensland Museum
Rosanna Raymond’s APT8 installation SaVAge K’lub is a meeting place, a locus of activity and happenings, set in the scene of a late-nineteenth century gentlemen’s club. She presents ideas about space and activation in response to historical practices of collecting, storing and displaying cultural objects. Ruth McDougall, Curator, Pacific Art, explains that Raymond seeks to redefine museum ‘care’ to incorporate ideas of animation, use and community connection:
Gently, but resolutely, she embarks on a process of educating and enabling curators, conservators, registrars and other staff across three Queensland cultural institutions to understand the importance of Pacific people and their bodies in order to ensure the long-term ‘care’ and wellbeing of the tāonga (cultural treasures) of which they are custodians.
The objects and artworks that adorn the space and fill the cabinets have been sourced by Raymond from local museum and university collections, from individuals and from communities across the Pacific region. The volume of objects necessary to compose the installation, along with the logistics required to transport, conserve, and prepare these objects for display, places SaVAge K’lub in the realm of ‘a museum within a museum’.
SaVAge K’lub
One of the first priorities for objects and artworks entering the Gallery is planning for their care while on site, in conjunction with the safe management of the Gallery’s Collection. Around 300 objects were borrowed for the SaVAge K’lub installation: on arrival at the Gallery, each of these was assessed, in accordance with the Gallery’s collection management procedures. Objects that came from international lenders were first evaluated by Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service on entry into the country. As part of the Gallery’s preventive conservation program, all plant- and timber-based objects underwent low-temperature treatment before being made available for display. This involves freezing objects at minus 18 degrees Celsius to ensure that they are free of insects that might pose a risk to the rest of the Gallery’s Collection.
A range of objects for the SaVAge K’lub was selected from the collection of the Queensland Museum. Gallery conservators, registrars, designers and workshop officers benefited from our proximity to and relationships with our precinct neighbour. In the lead-up to installation, QAGOMA staff were able to undertake a great deal of preparatory work at the Queensland.
Museum on objects that had been selected for loan. This included multiple visits to view and document objects, to discuss the logistics of transport, and prepare objects for treatment and display. Two particular loans posed interesting conservation and display issues — a kahu kiwi (feathered cloak) acquired in 1925, and a contemporary waka (outrigger canoe), created for Brisbane’s Warana Festival in 1989.
QAGOMA sculpture conservator Liz Wild and I worked closely with Queensland Museum conservators Cathy ter-Boght and Jennifer Blakely, to devise a suitable display system for the kahu kiwi, a delicately constructed plant-fibre cloak intricately woven with kiwi and other bird feathers. The mounting system uses a ridged, shaped supporting ring onto which the cloak is attached using a discrete system of magnets. The waka presented interesting challenges due to the scale of the object. The canoe is four metres long, the binding that lashes the outrigger to the canoe has completely failed, and it was necessary to suspend the object high within the installation space. All of these factors needed to be considered in the display of the object. In order to design a safe and suitable display system, it was necessary for several Gallery staff members to view, measure and document the canoe before arranging its transfer to the GOMA conservation laboratory. Artworks such as SaVAge K’lub present a range of interesting challenges for conservators, designers, registrars and installation staff. Connecting with our Queensland Museum colleagues and working together to conserve the kahu kiwi and the waka will be an enduring legacy of this project.
Amanda Pagliarino is Head of Conservation and Registration, QAGOMA
Watch | Savage Klub’s performance by Pacific artists
The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) is the Gallery’s flagship exhibition focused on the work of Asia, the Pacific and Australia / Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / 21 November 2015 – 10 April 2016
Since the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) began in 1993, the series has been celebrated for its engagement with Aotearoa New Zealand and the wider Pacific. Through the APT, the Gallery has built a collection of vibrant works by Pacific women artists. A significant number of these have been acquired through generous bequests made by two women: Jennifer Phipps (1944–2014) and Jennifer Taylor (1935–2015). Staged in two rotations in the upper galleries of the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), ‘sis: Pacific Art 1980–2023’ is the latest in a series of exhibitions to profile and celebrate the depth of this important area of the Collection.
Joyce Mary Arasepa Gole Ol ‘ Cooking pot’ 1997
In 2016, retired National Gallery of Victoria curator Jennifer Phipps made a significant bequest to QAGOMA to establish the Oceania Women’s Fund and support the ongoing development of women artists’ practices in the Pacific. Phipps was moved to this action through her close friendship with her colleague, Bougainville-born curator Sana Balai, and her own involvement with artists and women from this much overlooked region. As Balai has more recently shared, ‘we don’t see much contemporary art from outside of the Polynesian centres in Aotearoa New Zealand in our Galleries here, let alone the work of women from the “islands”’. Together with a bequest received in the same year from Australian architect, professor, critic and author Jennifer Taylor, the Oceania Women’s Fund has consolidated an already strong commitment within QAGOMA to acquiring and profiling the diversity of Pacific women’s practices across the region.
Kapulani Landgraf ‘Au‘a’ 2019
Featuring 162 works by 30 artists, the first rotation of ‘sis: Pacific Art 1980–2023’ reflects on practices of women from Hawai’i, the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Tonga, Vanuatu, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and their diasporas. Bringing together works by internationally celebrated figures Latai Taumoepeau, Taloi Havini, Kapulani Landgraf and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner alongside artists from the island communities ‘back home’, this display introduces audiences to the deep sense of attachment and responsibility that each woman has to their land, community and culture.
Susan Jieta ‘(Jaki-ed)’ 2017
Although seeming quiet in their presentation, the revival of knowledge associated with the patterns in woven pandanus Jaki-ed mats, created by Marshallese artists such as Susan Jieta, makes them as deliberate and as powerful as the compelling performance poetry of their ‘sister’, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, in their response to the loss of sovereignty over land and culture resulting from histories of conflict, colonialism, nuclear testing and climate change. Like Jetñil-Kijiner, Jieta and her fellow Jaki-ed weavers spend hours deeply focused — in a time of peril — on the creation of symbols of cultural resilience.
Such perils for Pacific peoples, specifically those facing the immediate and dramatic effects of climate change, are also addressed by Tongan Punake Latai Taumoepeau, who uses her own body in a series of durational performances. Documented through video, Taumoepeau’s works viscerally evoke the interdependence of Pacific peoples and their environment. In Repatriate 2015, for example, we witness the artist in a glass tank desperately trying to perform a tau’olunga (Tongan dance) as the enclosure slowly fills up with water. As we watch the artist’s desperate efforts to maintain her movements against the force of the water, the labour required of Pacific peoples in the face of rising sea levels and catastrophic weather events is brought home.
Employing an array of approaches across photography, video installation, ceramics and sound, the work of Bougainville-born Taloi Havini speaks to the importance, more particularly, of women’s labour as well as their matrilineal connections to land. The elegant sculptural form of Beroana (shell money) II 2016 is inspired by the long strands of shells (known as beroana) created by women for use in ceremonial exchanges, including weddings, reconciliations and funerals. Comprising over a thousand hand-formed stoneware porcelain and earthenware ‘shells’, hung to replicate the shape of the open-pit Panguna mine in Central Bougainville, Beroana (shell money) II contrasts the once-robust economy of Havini’s people — grounded in labour and respectful interactions with their environment — with the destruction, displacement and conflict of global extractivism.
Bernice Akamine ‘Hau (Hibiscus tiliaceus) (Sea hibiscus)’ 2006
Similarly concerned with the impacts of development and extraction, Kanaka ‘Öiwi artist Bernice Akamine documents endangered native plants in her homeland of Hawai’i, using knowledge handed down from her grandmother to create natural dyes resulting in subtly coloured fabrics, then intricately embroidering portraits of each plant on them.In doing so, Akamine references how Hawaiian women have maintained important Indigenous cultural practices, values and knowledge by innovatively adopting and transforming the techniques and artforms introduced by the wives of Western missionaries.
In the second chapter of the exhibition, opening in late March 2024, ‘sis’ continues sharing artworks and practices that negotiate the impact of Western values, ideas and encounters on the peoples and cultures of the Pacific. Drawing together works from Aotearoa New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Australia, the Cook Islands and Tahiti, this display explores the many ways in which Pacific women continue to respond to the changes these histories have brought.
Lisa Reihana ‘Mahuika’ 2001
The work of Māori artist Lisa Reihana uses lens-based media to rethink moments of encounter, privileging the histories and perceptions of Pacific peoples. One of the legacies of the European voyages of discovery and subsequent colonisation of Aotearoa has been the diminishment of traditional leadership roles for women and the demonisation of female ancestor figures ostensibly driven by Christian values and ideas. In her 2001 – series ‘Digital Marae’, Reihana reasserts the significance of goddesses such as Hinepūkohurangi and Mahuika, using new technologies to position them alongside their male counterparts as foundational supports within the sacred Māori architectural space of the marae.
Responding to the lack of respect expressed towards contemporary Melanesian women, Mekeo artist Julia Mage’au Gray’s work focuses on the importance of cultural tattoos or marks, created and worn by women as a...
