Lana LopesiWhat is your relationship to Oceania?

James BelichI’m part of New Zealand’s reverse diaspora whose project is to recolonise Britain and reframe it as the very north island of New Zealand. Brexit, some of you may not realise, is only stage one of this project.

Oceania in the east stretches to Easter Island and had some contact with South America, - because the kumara, the South American sweet potato was redistributed through the Pacific. What’s less well-known is that Oceanic influences also stretched west, to Madagascar. So Oceania was part of a remarkable globalisation that spread across the whole Southern Hemisphere, from South Africa to South America, the long way.

When European expansion began, this was the widest-spread culture group in the world. So what you see in Oceania is not just local and particular histories, though it’s that too, but also artistic expressions of one of the world’s great globalising cultures. That’s the big history of Oceania which engages me as a global and New Zealand historian. It’s relatively unsung compared to European driven globalisations, but it’s very important in terms of global history.

The other thing that intrigued me is that its history is not only big, but it’s also fast.  The latest evidence suggests that New Zealand Māori arrived in the 13th century. So even a culture as dynamic and sophisticated as the Māori is only 800 years old. Tahiti and Easter Island are not much older. And, of course, the Pākehā people of New Zealand, of whom I am one, have an even shorter history, of around two centuries.

What Oceania teaches us is that history does not have to be long to be resonant and significant. This is something my colleagues in the Northern Hemisphere have yet to fully grasp.

Pauline AutetCould you expand on the significance of this moment, the unprecedented collaboration between museums from both New Zealand and the Pacific and European museums such as the Royal Academy, which have loaned works and contributed to making Oceania happen?

LLMatariki, you’re here because of your connection to Kiko Moana, the contemporary work by Mata Aho Collective which greets you as you enter the exhibition. Could you tell us about that work?

PAMatariki, you also work with many historic objects and ancestral belongings at the national museum Te Papa. We’ll call those taonga although the limitations of that word as being New Zealand-specific should be noted as the exhibition includes many pieces that are not from New Zealand.

Could you describe the way in which taonga are treated and the protocols around display and presentation within Te Papa and New Zealand museum practice and whether this might differ here?

LLWhen I first went into Oceania, I did a really quick whip around to find what treasures were there from Samoa. I acknowledge that the show functioned on that level. 

Then I was also really gutted to see that one of the treasures was from Te Papa – I had come all this way to London and I wanted to see everything that was out back! The way I interacted with that exhibition was to see these treasures I really wanted to see, show them some love and let them see us again. I was also trying to find my space within the Oceania show.

A question I have for both of you is, now that you’ve seen the show, whose Oceania you find is represented in the exhibition and maybe more importantly, who or what is not there?

MWI’ve been to the show three times now, each time quite quickly. I did the same as you Lana, went searching for Māori taonga, I think it’s quite natural to want to see yourself reflected back at you but also to see how other people have interpreted you.

The most recent time I went was this morning when the exhibition was officially opened to the public and that was the most overwhelming of the three visits because of the amount of people taking photographs. In the room where Fiona Pardington’s photographs are on display, there is a hei tiki (carved pendant) which I have gone to see a couple of times and have touched the glass of the case, but I’ve not been able to touch the pounamu (greenstone). The label says that it was collected in 1769, and that it’s not from a New Zealand collection. The sense of loss that is on display is immense and that it’s so far from home is awful.

One thing that is not in the exhibition is the people. So many people from these islands would not be able to view the exhibition because it’s in London and the question was raised at the Royal Academy symposium this week whether it could tour.

We spoke of the problems, even the financial reasons, for why exhibitions of this nature will possibly not be able to travel. These include insurance reasons and loaning institutions wanting to have reassurance that the buildings that they go into will have security and the right kind of humidity levels.

For me, that’s what’s missing: the people from these places being present.

PAIndeed, I think it is an exhibition where the object labels are very important. I kept looking again for the collection name, to know where the item is held.

One question I had entering the show revolved around the way in which the histories of the items on display, especially the ancestral belongings, would be communicated. This is especially in this context of being outside the Pacific. 

There is an audio guide accompanying the exhibition from which you can get an insight and an understanding as to where some of those items have come from, of their journey. 

So my question is, what is the importance of the communication surrounding an exhibition like this, whether in an audio guide format, or within labels? And how important is it for people to have access to the information related to the journey, history and significance of the item they’re looking at? 

Do either of you have comments on displaying works of this significance outside of their home context, and whether there are important things that we need to keep in mind to avoid the risk of them being exoticised: to be looked at and appreciated for their aesthetic value more than sometimes spiritual, religious, and cultural significance?

JBI don’t have a personal claim to any of the treasures that are in the exhibition but it does strike me that many of them demand to be seen. They’re rooted in particular places and particular times but they also have stories to be told.

It’s a dilemma, isn’t it? If these things are living things, what would they prefer? To be buried in a vault? Or to be seen, ideally in their original home? I’m inclined to think they’d choose being seen, especially if they’re seen in a context of respect.

In the end, everything is a compromise. And I think that on balance, the Oceania curators seem to have steered pretty damn cleverly between Scylla and Charybdis.

PAConversations of these last few days have highlighted the positive outcomes that have already started to emerge from this exhibition. The forward-thinking discussions around museum practice and how that might be evolving. The understanding and appreciation for the craftsmanship but also the living cultures represented in the exhibition are definitely very positive outcomes. 

I’ve only heard good things from the artists involved, they are well looked after and appropriate protocol and events were put into place for the opening week. At the same time it’s important to encourage critical debate and reflect on the ways we can do things better. Certains issues raised by this exhibition are problematic and complicated, like you said.

So my next question is probably one of the first questions I heard being raised when the show was announced last year. It has to do with the potentially inappropriate and uncomfortable juxtaposition of conveying the exhibition as a celebration of Oceania and at the same time marking the 250 years of Captain Cook’s departure from the UK to the Pacific, because this moment is seen by many as the beginning of colonisation in the region. 

Now that the exhibition is here, how have these two things been negotiated and can they even fit together, is it possible to combine the two?

JBIt is an interesting irony, isn’t it? Someone said earlier that people in the Northern Hemisphere weren’t as aware of Captain Cook as in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s an iconic name, a kind of symbol, of several things, actually, not just the spread of colonisation, but also of science, of a kind of humble Yorkshire man who manages to make a name in places like the Royal Society and the British Museum, despite the fact the British elite despised him.

I’ve always been intrigued by the possibility that the writer of Star Trek was fascinated by Cook’s voyages – Cook/Kirk, Endeavour/Enterprise, an interesting resonance, yes? Cook has been colonised in his turn by American television.

Then there’s the Tupaia factor which I think is important. But you raised the point that hundreds, maybe thousands, of Māori and also Tahitians and Samoans went the other way. One of the greatest collections of Māori artefacts in the world is in Salem, Massachusetts because that’s where whalers went. There’s a huge diaspora of Māori men.

LLA couple of reviews of Oceania have made comparisons to the exhibition Te Māori which is held in such regard in New Zealand, so it’s a big comparison to make. I wondered if you had thoughts about that comparison. It’s a big claim to make.

MWThat’s quite complicated, too. I work in a collection that has been built predominantly by European men so it’s very masculine and high status. From my perspective as a wahine Māori, it’s a collection full of gaps because there’s very little to do with women, children, the everyday. But there’s a huge amount of weaponry and tools that were arguably used by men. Great that our taonga is seen as having mana but to the founding collectors, only some of them were.

For a Māori person working or wanting to work in a museum, Te Māori is like an albatross around your neck. At the same time there is very little interrogation of the fact that there are no wāhine Māori artists represented. 

One similarity I see with Oceania is the amount of exposure that it is receiving and the way that is affecting mainstream media back in New Zealand.

I don’t want to speak on behalf of Mata Aho but seeing this clip of them with royalty make it to Māori media, and mainstream media, and that being the angle in which the exhibition is being spoken about rather than the virtue of their work... Last year, they were at Documenta, the first time New Zealand was selected for this incredibly important art exhibition. But it takes, until they have a hongi (pressing noses in greeting) with the Duchess of Sussex for media to pick this up – a year later.

LLI’ll switch into panellist mode, and say that for me, what is time? Time is not linear and actually it makes a lot of sense to have all these things together and to remind people that we’re not dead, not in the past. We’ve survived context. We’re very different. There’s a lot of diversity, thousands of languages still spoken, diaspora populations are big. It’s multifaceted and complex and complicated. So why wouldn’t you do that? Why don’t we see it happen more? 

When I walked into the show I was greeted by Kiko Moana and the spoken poem. Obviously I was there to see these ancestral belongings which had been locked away but to have that really contemporary introduction to the exhibition, I thought was a really exciting move. And while my curatorial mind thinks, of course we should hang it there because that’s the highest ceiling, I also think that makes a really politically strong statement. It’s a room full of young women. That’s dope.

JBThere’s an interesting tension between what’s just been said by both panellists and the historian’s perspective that time is linear and that things need to be seen in the context of their own time. There are dangers in letting times blur and merge because are you being fair to people in the past when you do that? 

At the same time, I think historians can get too precious and hung up on that.  In a sense what the contemporary art in the exhibition demonstrates is the importance of hybridity, of the mishing and merging, though not blurring, of these specific island cultures and how significant that can be. 

Hybridity is a very powerful force in history which has been underrated by the propensity to nationally package history so that it’s not the interaction between two cultures that matters but the separation between them. It’s possible for those two perspectives towards time to learn from each other or at least benefit from each other to some extent.

PAI wanted to share a testimony included in the audio guide of the exhibition that seems quite fitting to finish. The Hawaiian woman speaker describes her visit to London and her finding in various museums that Hawaii has little to no footprint within the displays while she also knows that some of the most significant cultural items from her country are held within these collections.

She says that “in order to reconnect with and to recall with clarity and dignity what those items mean and continue to mean to my community, it is important for those objects to come home.”

JBThis is the Elgin Marbles question, isn’t it? My view is that the Elgin Marbles should go back to Athens, if there’s an Athens. But if that’s too hard, then there has to be some kind of compromise solution whereby if not the whole exhibition then a version of it. 

Several smaller, packaged exhibitions about the Pacific, drawing on immense collections of the British Museum, the Natural History Museum and Oxford, and circulate them amongst say the Pacific Islands, and perhaps throughout New Zealand. That might be some kind of solution.

The other point is that it’s not just a colonial issue but also a national one –  one that Te Papa engages with all the time when artefacts which have very specific tribal roots are displayed in Wellington. Not always to the delight of the tribes concerned. Te Papa has a lot of experience in negotiating compromised solutions as to how that might be handled, and maybe with its advice, the British Museum could be led into the 21st century.

LLMaybe the replicas should be the ones that stay in the museums...