The Shape of Time: Art and Ancestors in Oceania
Drawing on highlight works from the Metropolitan Museum’s collection of Oceanic art, this paper takes a fresh look at the art of the Moana/Oceania through a conceptual lens which foregrounds its relationship to ancestral time; voyaging and mobility; and ideas of visual power, ancestral agency and efficacy. Grounding itself in specific examples, the paper will assess the materiality and aesthetic dimension of artworks from islands that occupy a deep tranche of space and time in the Pacific in a bid to examine the overarching conceptual landscape in which they were conceived.These artworks, which include dazzling canoe prows, elaborate fiber works and towering slit drums, unleash a panoply of questions relating to the ways in which art is deployed by communities throughout the Pacific:
The paper will show how a close analysis of art from across the Moana helps us map out key coordinates of the culture which continue to be unifying for its communities in the 21st century.