Royal Academy asks tribal leaders to bless ‘stolen’ treasures
SPANNING thousands of miles, 500 years and countless diverse island communities, it could easily lay claim to being the most ambitious and culturally sensitive exhibition ever staged in Britain.
Today, the curators of the Royal Academy’s landmark Oceania exhibition disclose their extraordinary decade-long mission to avoid offending the very people they intend to celebrate, as they welcome a “sea change” in how museums showcase other cultures.
The exhibition, which will be attended by the Duchess of Sussex next week, is the first major exploration of Oceanic art in Britain, and the largest ever to be staged in Europe.
It will include controversial artefacts taken, and in some cases stolen, from island tribes in the colonial era, now part of Western museum collections.
The finished exhibition will see indigenous communities privately bless sacred objects in person before they go on display, with a ceremonial procession of guests from New Zealand, Fiji, Tonga, Papua
New Guinea and Tahiti along Piccadilly in a special event to honour their cultural beliefs.
With 12 years of research and five years of specific planning, curators have conducted hundreds of conversa- tions with the many tribal communities of the Pacific islands.
A special “Tikanga” advisory group has been set up to ensure the finished show respects the “diverse cultural nuances and customary systems, values and practices of the contributing nations and peoples”, with the catalogue written by a Kanak, Hawaiian, Samoan, Papua New Guinean and Maori scholar. The exhibition has gained the approval of the High Commissioners and ministers in all nations represented. Subject to huge cultural sensitivities, it will show 200 pieces of art from museums and private collections, created across 500 years of history in Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia, encompassing the Pacific region from New Guinea to Easter Island, and Hawaii to New Zealand.
Only one item going on show remains disputed: a Solomon Island feast trough in the shape of a crocodile, that will be clearly labelled with the admission that it was “forcibly seized” in a violent punitive raid by HMS Royalist in 1891. Permission has been given for one statue of Ku, the Hawaiian god, on loan from the British Museum, to be clothed ahead of the exhibition by visiting indigenous representatives, who will wrap it with bark cloth to represent how it would have been seen in the 18th century. Other items have been approved for display by the descendants of the tribes they belonged to, with new histories added by them.
Publicity material for the show warns visitors that it “includes many objects that Pacific Islanders consider living treasures”, saying “some may pay their respects and make offerings through the duration of the exhibition”.
Christopher Le Brun, president of the Royal Academy, said the exhibition “deliberately avoids showing Oceania through European eyes”.
Prof Nicholas Thomas, director of the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology in Cambridge and co-curator, said the strength of the exhibition lay with a “sea change in scholarship”. He said: “Academics and curators no longer think we’re the experts, and that we should gather together objects that interest us and write labels about them. We [now] assume we’ve got an awful lot to learn from the communities from which these pieces are collected.
“That extends to questions of protocol, there may be works that are secret or very sensitive that reflect troubling histories in some sense, and there may be pieces that people would prefer not to be displayed. We have had the chance to engage in a lot of very rewarding discussions of that kind. The catalogue and labelling is very much richer because we can draw on local understanding.”
The procession is on Monday, before the Duchess attends the official opening on Tuesday and the public are welcomed on Sept 29.
‘There may be works that are secret or very sensitive that reflect troubling histories in some sense’