The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

169 ARTISTS Top left: Tungaru: The Kiribati Project artist Chris Charteris working on Bwebweraki (to grow to evolve) 2014 / Photograph: Lizzy Leckie / Image courtesy: The artist Below: Te ma (Fish Trap) (detail, top right) 2014 Ringed venus shells, nylon, wood / 460 x 740 x 80cm / Photographs: Jeff Smith / Images courtesy: The artist Lead artist: Chris Charteris Born 1966, Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand Lives and works Coromandel Peninsula, Aotearoa New Zealand Collaborating artists: Lizzy Leckie, b.1965; Kaetaeta Watson, b.1947; Louisa Humphry, b.1952; Mwemwetaake Ataniberu, b.1960; Rareti Ataniberu, b.1968 String makers: Rakera Teitibora; Tiobia and Tiebane Boiaki; Koinawa, Tebunginako; Nuotaea Villages Abaiang, Kiribati Armour support: Tetairua Ataniberu and Bateriki Nabeia Support: Kiribati Australia Association and Manokan Kiribati Initiated in 2012, Tungaru: The Kiribati Project emerges from Chris Charteris’s connections with his ancestral homeland and extended I-Kiribati family. 1 Comprising works by Charteris, long-time collaborator Jeff Smith and members of the I-Kiribati communities in Aotearoa New Zealand and the Republic of Kiribati, the project celebrates these relationships. The elegant sculpture Te ma (Fish Trap) 2014 has been created from over 8000 pairs of ringed venus shells that Charteris collected with family members from his local beach on the Coromandel Peninsula, south-east of Auckland. Over seven metres in length, the work replicates the unique heart-shaped forms of the te ma , which Charteris and his family viewed from a plane lining the shore of Tarawa on their first journey to Kiribati in 2012. Te ma (fish traps) are created by stacking broken coral into walls in the shallows between reef and ocean, and are collectively owned and cared for by coastal communities who depend on the fish for their daily sustenance. Highlighting their natural beauty — and drawing on this potent symbol of connection, community and life — Charteris has created a work that uses readily available resources to invite audiences to reflect on a shared responsibility to build and maintain sustainable structures of communal wellbeing. This sentiment is reiterated in the spherical Te Nii (The giver of life) 2014, a wall-based work comprised of coconuts. The circle symbolises unity, sustenance and peace in Charteris’s homage to the important role that the ubiquitous coconut plays in everyday life on Kiribati. People coming together and the massing of individual objects references ideas of the collective, an intrinsic aspect of Kiribati culture. The significance of this concept is embedded in the name the indigenous inhabitants gave to the coral atolls comprising their homeland — Tungaru , which means ‘gathering together in a joyous kind of way’. 2 Accordingly, the I-Kiribati community in Brisbane — like the many around Aotearoa New Zealand to which earlier iterations of the project has toured — have embraced the Tungaru vision. The local community will activate works in APT9, including the iconic Kiribati armour and a selection of Te Tai (headdresses) to perform dances, a passionate expression of contemporary I-Kiribati culture. Created from rolling fibres of coconut husks harvested from palms from the Kiribati atolls, the armour Te Buangui (The whale tooth) 2018 has been made collaboratively with Kiribati community members for APT9. Drawing on research using museum collections around the world, 3 the team has reconstructed knots and weaving techniques to reawaken knowledge about this garment’s manufacture, meaning and use. Significantly, this elaborate dress once formed part of a very structured process of conflict resolution, in which the aim of fighting was not to kill your adversary, but simply to wound them. The brutal-looking shark-tooth swords and spears that were the basis for Charteris’s refashioned objects had the potential to cause great harm; however, the densely woven fabric, thick belts and high backboards of the garment were carefully designed to protect both the wearer and their attacker from fatal injury, and subsequent compensation payments that death would entail. Reworking these forms with community and drawing on contemporary materials at hand today, the works in Tungaru: The Kiribati Project celebrate Kiribati culture, and provide new forms of connection, growth and sustenance for the people of this unique island nation and its diaspora. Ruth McDougall Endnotes 1 Adopted at birth, Charteris believed that he was Māori until he was in his mid twenties, when he discovered that he was of Fijian and Kiribati descent on his mother’s side. A Creative New Zealand research grant in 2012 enabled Charteris, his family and collaborator Jeff Smith to return to Kiribati to connect with extended family. 2 Teweiariki Teaero, ’Reflections on Tungaru’, in Chris Charteris and Jeff Smith, Tungaru: The Kiribati Project [self published], Auckland, 2012, p.4. 3 This includes: Auckland War Memorial Museum; Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge; British Museum, London; Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, Cologne; and Queensland Museum, Brisbane. Tungaru: The Kiribati project