European Society for Oceanists 2025 Conference

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Session Detail (parallel)

(Re)painting Pictures of Oceania: Exhibitions, Films and Other Media

Coordinator(s)

Safua Akeli Amaama, Philipp Schorch, Vilsoni Hereniko

Session presentation

Pictures of Oceania have been painted and circulated for centuries on a global scale, through exhibitions, films and other media. Those mobile, malleable technologies have allowed for a variety of images to be drawn, contested and revised. Painting pictures entails establishing connections with audiences. Exhibitions, films and other media would not make sense without viewers to engage with. It has been widely recognised that, for a long time, Oceanic pictures have mostly emanated from beyond rather than within the region. These representations have become embedded in the consciousness of viewers outside and within Oceania even though they were mostly inaccurate or incomplete. Working in tandem with Christianity, Western education, and militarism, colonization deployed these representations to justify efforts to move Islanders from “darkness” into the “light”. Yet, histories of exhibiting and displaying have shown that Indigenous actors have reappropriated expressive technologies for their own purposes and engaged with visual expressions, even when imposed from the outside, on their own terms. In the contemporary context, Indigenous film has evolved into a burgeoning field of rearticulation and reclamation through visual means, simultaneously geared towards Indigenous audiences - through Native languages, narrative and aesthetic registers, and temporal frames - and travelling, once again, on a global scale to advance Indigenous causes for (post)colonial ends. This shift in the creation of imagery has become more impactful and far-reaching so that Indigenous voices advocating for their own representations have shifted the cultural and artistic landscape considerably. The value of outsider perspectives now lays in collaborative approaches tackling the entanglements inherited form the past to explore Oceania in its complexities and manifestations. This panel invites historically grounded, present-day engaged and future oriented reflections upon the potentialities and efficacies of exhibitions, films and other media to (re)paint pictures of, and (re)make connections from within and beyond, Oceania.

Paper submissions are closed

Accepted papers

Deframing Oceania: How Comics and Graphic Novels Have Challenged the Narratives of Pacific Islands and Islanders

Guido Carlo Pigliasco (University of Hawai'i-Manoa)

Suzanne Finney (University of Hawaii West O'ahu)

In February 2017 a working group was started at the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO) meeting held in Hawaii. This was four months after the release of Moana, Disney’s Polynesian princess film, a computer-animated musical fantasy action-adventure picture that drew compliments and controversy from within
Oceania.
The working group discussed a number of topics, from the impact of Moana to the representation of Pacific Islanders in a variety of visual mediums, including comics, graphic novels, manga and anime.
The result of this initial group discussion is a compilation of perspectives that seek to explain how Oceania, and the people of Oceania, have been represented through visual media from the last 100 plus years. Our goal was to find contributors from both within
and without Oceania, seeking stories told from Oceanic cultures and stories told about Oceanic cultures from Europe, Japan and the U.S. We chose to name this collection: Deframing Oceania: How Comics and Graphic Novels Have Challenged the Narratives of Pacific Islands and Islanders.
This presentation will briefly describe the history of the project, and explain some of the significant outcomes of this ongoing discussion, including publication.

MAKAWALU: The eight eyes of indigenous filmmaking

Vilsoni Hereniko (University of Hawai'i)

At this time of writing, indigenous films are evaluated according to Euro-American standards and creating a disconnect between why an indigenous film is made and how it is evaluated. Also, should it be evaluated as a work of cinematic art or a work that best illuminates an aspect or aspects of the culture and the people that inform the cultural expression? Or, should the critical review draw from indigenous as well as Euro-American ways of evaluating a movie? This paper presents a model for evaluating indigenous films that I use at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Hawaiʻi. It is informed by the Hawaiian concept of makawalu which translates as “eight eyes”, suggesting that for an indigenous film, there are eight perspectives that could be considered in evaluating a film’s contributions to indigenous aesthetics or indigenous filmmaking. My hope is to open up a discussion on the pros and cons of using this model of evaluation for indigenous films.

Connecting with a Visual Past: Access to historical photographs from Papua New Guinea

S R Jan Hasselberg

For Papua New Guinea, there are numerous poorly known and sometimes poorly accessible photographs that can help give us a better image of the past, by themselves or when supported by a text, as support and visualisation in a text, or used in any other way.
Whether you are a writer, publisher or researcher looking for a historic illustration, a local looking for old images of your village or your relatives, a museum wanting photographs to bring visuality and context to an exhibition, or an artist for something to play a part in a project, there is for PNG a treasure trove of photographs to choose from. But how do we find our way to this material?
I will look at access to PNG historical photographs and give examples of the challenges we meet with when we search: many are kept far away in repositories that have to be physically visited; some collections have been poorly or incorrectly registered; most have never been published; and when published, the photographs which were and still are selected often show a narrow spectre of subjects and types of images. But then, more and more can now be found online.
As a tool for finding historical New Guinea images, I have produced a list of more than 350 pre-1940 photo collections, and this can be downloaded from PAMBU’s website. I will show how this compilation can be accessed and used.

RePicturing Oceania at the Met: Connections Old and New—1982-2025

Nancy Lutkehaus (University of Southern California)

In 1982 the Rockefeller Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), dedicated to the art of Africa, Oceania and the Americas displayed in a dramatic high modernist space, opened to rave reviews by art critics and equally critical reviews by anthropologists. The new Department of Primitive Art was chaired by Douglas Newton, a scholar of Melanesian art. Nelson Rockefeller’s collection of primitive art formed the basis of the wing’s collection.
Dedicated to Nelson’s deceased son, Michael Rockefeller, the wing’s centerpiece was a series of Asmat funerary poles (bisj) Michael had collected on an ill-fated trip to Dutch New Guinea.

43 years later a newly renovated Rockefeller Wing will open in May 2025 designed by the renowned architect Kulapat Yantrasast. This paper describes and analyzes the reimagined Oceania galleries curated by Maori-UK art historian Maia Nuku and her associates. It depicts the cross-cultural process by which Pacific Island artists and scholars were involved in the wing’s reconceptualization and the institutional and cross-cultural challenges they faced to incorporate indigenous voices in the display of Oceanic art within one of the world’s preeminent encyclopedic art museums.

It also contrasts the historical, political, intellectual and artistic ideas underlying the original and the new Rockefeller wing in order to highlight the shifts in cultural politics and cross-cultural connections between the United States and Oceania since the wing first opened.

Oceania in Arkansas

Bernida Webb-Binder (Spelman College)

The largest population of Marshallese Islanders in the United States reside in Northwest Arkansas, a metropolitan area and region of the Ozark mountains bordered by Oklahoma on the west and Missouri on the north. Not only is NW Arkansas home for an estimated 45,000 Marshallese, but it is also the home of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, a world-class museum overlooking 120 acres of Ozark forest. A current exhibition of Marshallese art, “Navigating Lolelaplap,” developed with the museum in partnership with the Arkansas Coalition of Marshallese (ACOM), features traditional and contemporary art made by local Marshallese artists and chosen by curators in conversation with the community. “Lolelaplap” is the Marshallese name for the Marshall Islands, and the exhibition links communities in Arkansas and Oceania through the intermediary of the southern United States. “Navigating Lolelaplap” is the first case study for a project on Pacific art in the United States and North America.

Carvings as narratives

Martin Soukup (Charles University)

The conference paper will focus on so-called storyboards, which are made by carvers in the East Sepik region of Papua New Guinea. These are artefacts offered by locals for sale to tourists. They depict scenes of everyday life, mythical themes and Christian narratives. The conference paper is based on repeated research visits (since 2017), particularly in Kambot village. It is based on the notion of storyboards as a means of collective memory. The aim of the talk is to demonstrate, using these carvings as an example, that there is thematic continuity in the East Sepik. Particular attention will be paid to the historical context of the emergence of the phenomenon of storyboards through the work of Catholic missionaries originally from socialist Czechoslovakia.