Curatorial Notes

Every year, for as long as the Hakö people of the Nakas tribe can remember, they have witnessed and celebrated the ritual of coral spawning. Synchronized with a full moon, the corals release new life in the form of specks, and strings, and spirals; rising to the surface, floating, and falling down like confetti, which will then grow into new corals along the reef.

Taloi Havini, born into this tribe in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, documents this phenomena in her work Dengung Hyena. As human activities cause the decline in the health of coastal habitats, coral bleaching has become a common sight along reefs throughout the Pacific ocean. Yet amid this destruction, nature persistently shows us signs of revival. Havini distills this immense respect for the cycle of life and death into a collaborative four and a half minute video. Havini's video footage of the ritual is overlaid with Indonesian-Australian sound artist Michael Toisuta’s recording of his exploration of a Banyuwangi gamelan set.

The video was created during the height of the pandemic while they were unable to travel to their hometowns. The components are taken from each artists’ archives and assembled remotely in Australia. This methodology has opened new perspectives for collaborators; it offered opportunities to define history not as a sequence of events performed by individuals, but as simultaneously separate and dependent social frameworks. In Dengung Hyena, the artists highlight the connectivity and communality of ritual practices throughout the Asia-Pacific.

Being an indigenous land owner raised in a matrilineal community, Havini considers the ocean as their cultural space and finds no delineation between nature and culture. Her concerns for this holism manifest in a range of media including photography, audio-video, sculpture, immersive installation and print, often choosing collaboration with local people as the core of each project.

In 2021, Havini was commissioned by TBA21–Academy and Schmidt Ocean Institute for her solo exhibition at the Ocean Space Building for the Venice Biennale of Architecture. In its cavernous hall, she created a 22-channel sonic work that combines indigenous and contemporary scientific methods to engulf the listener in sound; using scale and the human body experience as a medium to evoke a sense of the ocean’s expanse and depth.

Havini’s other past works respond to the tensions and aftermath of the German plantations, Australian colonial mining pressures, and the deadly Bougainville conflict around indigenous land rights and independence of the 1990s. She has exhibited these works in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Australia, Japan, and UAE among others. This year, she won the Artes Mundi 10 Prize, an international recognition for contemporary art. She is currently represented by Silverlens gallery.

Words by Carla Gamalinda

About the Artist

Taloi Havini (Nakas Tribe, Hakö people) was born in Arawa, Autonomous Region of Bougainville and is currently based in Brisbane, Australia. She employs a research practice informed by her matrilineal ties to her land and communities in Bougainville. This manifests in works created using a range of media including photography, audio–video, sculpture, immersive installation and print.

She curates and collaborates across multi-art platforms using archives, working with communities and developing commissions locally and internationally. Knowledge—production, transmission, inheritance, mapping, and representation are central themes in Havini’s work where she examines these in relation to land, architecture and place.

Havini holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) from the Canberra School of Art, Australian National University. She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions and has exhibited with Artspace, Sydney, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Sharjah Biennial 13, UAE, 3rd Aichi Triennial, Nagoya, 8th & 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art Queensland Art Gallery | GoMA, Brisbane, and was recently commissioned by TBA21–Academy with Schmidt Ocean Institute at Ocean Space, Campo S. Lorenzo, Venezia for her solo at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, 2021. Havini’s artwork is held in public and private collections including TBA21–Academy, Sharjah Art Foundation, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, National Gallery of Victoria, KADIST, San Francisco, CA, USA.

Words by Silverlens Galleries