70
FIG. 4 (above): Twinned fi gure
hook. Tonga. Before 1876.
Whale ivory, glass beads, fi ber.
H: 12.2 cm.
Presented to Sir A. Gordon in Fiji by
Ratu Tevita Madigibuli, 1876. Museum
of Archaeology and Anthropology,
University of Cambridge, inv. 1955.247.
FIG. 5 (below): Lisa Reihana
(b. 1964), In Pursuit of Venus
Infected (detail), 2015–2017.
Single-channel video, Ultra HD, color,
7.1 sound, 64 minutes.
Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tamaki,
gift of the Patrons of the Auckland Art
Gallery, 2014.
Image courtesy of the artist and
ARTPROJECTS.
tions. While communities adapted to circumstances
in each new environment, water was, of
course, a constant element, sustaining life and
shaping cosmological belief systems. From the
rivers and swamps of dense rainforests to the
tranquil lagoons that encircle coral atolls, the
ocean and its watery depths were enlisted as
metaphors of history and identity, marking the
spiritual passage between life and death. To this
day, metaphysical waterways convey the recently
deceased to the potent underworlds of Pulotu
and Hawaiki, ancestral homelands where the
spirits of one’s antecedents are believed to dwell.
The Royal Academy’s exhibition Oceania
presents the region’s distinctive landscape as a vital
and deeply interconnected highway that links
Pacifi c peoples together in a network of dynamic
exchange and encounter. It includes an astonishing
array of some 200 artworks, ranging from
fourteenth-century carving to twenty-fi rst-century
painting—such as Niuean artist John Pule’s
10-meter-wide and 2.7-meter-high odyssey Kehe
tau hauaga foou (To all new arrivals) from 2007
(fi g. 3). The show is structured around three key
themes that guide the visitor and reinforce the
close conceptual underpinnings that connect
what appear (on a formal level at least) to be radically
distinct art traditions. “Voyaging” evokes
the extraordinary story of navigation across
this vast landscape, presenting the arts associated
with ocean travel: Decorated paddles and
immaculately executed fi shhooks are accorded
ritual, as well as practical, purpose; exquisitely
carved canoe sterns and highly embellished
prow fi gures from the Solomon Islands are inlaid
with sections of shell designed to catch the
light (fi g. 1). An iconic navigational chart from
the Marshall Islands is deceptively simple: This
knotted grid of sticks was not intended as a literal
map but was deployed as a mnemonic device
to unlock the wealth of intangible knowledge required
for long-distance voyaging. Using visual
and sensory cues from the atmosphere, highly
skilled priest-navigators learned to “read” their
way through the constantly shifting landscape
of the ocean; fi xing a star or constellation as a
point of reference in the sky, they were able to
carve out pathways to arrive at their destination.
A second theme, “Making Place,” explores
the extraordinarily innovative ways in which
Islanders created and inhabited homelands in
these vastly distinctive geographies, establishing
dwellings on sacred sites where they might interact
with their gods in the strip of existence
afforded them between ocean and sky. The artworks
in this section of the show tell a multitude
of stories relating to origins, ancestral power,
performance, secrecy, and initiation. They include
some of the great masterpieces of Oceanic
art, such as carved and elaborately painted
façades of ceremonial houses, crocodile reliquaries
from the Sepik region of New Guinea,
and spectacular turtle shell masks from the Torres
Strait Islands.
ART ON VIEW