Fiji revisited

Fiji: Art & Life in the Pacific

The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia, Norwich 15 October–12 February 2017 01603 593199 scva.ac.uk

The Pacific island of Fiji has been a locus of cultural interactions from as early as 1000 BC, when canoes carried people to neighbouring islands, continuing to the 19th century when Europeans arrived and Fijians chiefs asked to join the British empire. This exhibition explores the cultural history of the island since the 18th century, and features Fijian artworks as well as European responses to them, with paintings and historic photographs providing context. But the highlights are Fijian artefacts.

“An important aspect of this exhibition is that the many examples of exceptional Fijian creativity on display are not presented as ‘ethnographic specimens’ or ‘illustrations’ of Fijian culture,” says curator Professor Steven Hooper, “but a as works of art in their own right, as worthy of attention as anyy art tradition in the world.”

Exhibits include (clockwise from top left) a man-shaped dish used by a priest when channelling his ancestor in a spirit t house; a pedestal dish used for serving yaqona, a drink made from the root of a pepper tree, in a traditional ceremony; a whale-ivory goddess image given to the medical officer in Fiji in the 1870s; and a whale-ivory wasekaseka or necklace made by craftsmen on neighbouring Tonga, collected by the colonial governor in 1880. With 270 objects on display, this is the largest exhibition about the island ever assembled.