The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

171 ARTISTS Clockwise from top left: From ‘Te Moana Nui: Navigating Time & Space’ series: Whakapapa (Holding the Ancestors) 2017; Ika Wōka Waka Neke Nano 2017; Pakanga (The Price of Land) 2017; Atua (In the Name of God) 2017 Daguerreotypes / 12.7 x 10.2cm (each) / Courtesy: The artist, Vivien Anderson Gallery, Melbourne, and GAG PROJECTS, Adelaide | Berlin Kaurna, Māori Born 1986, Mildura, Victoria, Australia Lives and works in Canberra, Australia James Tylor’s photography examines the colonial ethnographic documentation of Indigenous peoples, and is a rich expression of his Kaurna heritage and other ancestry, including Māori. His series of daguerreotypes entitled ‘Te Moana Nui: Navigating Time & Space’ 2017 explores the idea of the Pacific Ocean as a site of voyaging, and as a place where local and settler cultures came into contact. He is especially interested in histories that formed contemporary identity in the region, and Aotearoa New Zealand in particular. With an ancestry that is predominantly Kaurna (Nunga), but also Māori (Te Arawa), English, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, Iberian and Norwegian, Tylor’s work is imbued with ideas rising from his settler context in Australia, and resonates with different relations of connectivity to land — from the perspective of the colonised and the colonisers. Landscapes are partly obliterated by geometric shapes in the two black-and-white series (Deleted scenes) From an untouched landscape and (Erased) From an untouched landscape , both 2015. In contrast, the mountains in Aotearoa my Hawaiki 2015 are missing their bases, the images seemingly torn at midpoint. The hand-coloured images of Un-resettling (Happening) 2015 and Un-resettling (Haunting) 2016 allude to the artist’s separation from his culture, and his subsequent pursuit of learning language and histories. These works are also a counter to colonial photography in emphatically documenting Indigenous life, visible in bird hides and fish traps, ochre mines, debarked trees and ochre handprints. Accompanying Tylor’s investigation of nineteenth-century histories is a desire to master photographic techniques of the era. ‘Te Moana Nui’ comprises nine distinctly toned daguerreotypes, the earliest process to be adopted for professional photography. ‘Te Moana Nui’ differs from the artist’s previous daguerreotype series of impressive landscapes belying the contested nature of the land: places in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand that make reference to Captain Cook in ‘DeCookolisation’ 2015, or imagined cartographies scratched into the surface of prints as grids in ‘Territorial Encounters’ 2016. Drawing on his Māori genealogy, ‘Te Moana Nui’ celebrates Pacific culture: customary tools and technologies, such as carved fishhooks, ancient Micronesian navigation charts, the Māori koatiate (weapon), tattoo instruments, as well as a taonga (treasure) in the form of a hei tiki (greenstone neck ornament). Te Moana Nui — the Polynesian term for the Pacific Ocean — evokes the historical travel of people across vast waters, and the movement of cultural beliefs and values. Research shows that people have been journeying across the Pacific Ocean to the southernmost islands of Polynesia for more than 5000 years. 1 Contact and migration has stretched from the Philippines and Taiwan to settlements in Aotearoa in the southern Pacific Ocean. Te Moana Nui refers to this and to the subsequent ‘Coming of the Light’, when Europeans brought Christianity to the peoples of the Pacific. The daguerreotypes are installed across a background painting that features the traditional patterning seen in the interiors of Māori wharenui (meeting houses); the work, therefore, underscores the intersections between the human, natural and the spiritual worlds for Māori in Te Moana Nui. Tylor uses his art as a means to learn more about his culture — studying Nunga language, carving traditional objects, and researching and cooking Indigenous foods. 2 His recipes combine Indigenous and European ingredients in ways that highlight the Kaurna nation’s relationship to the ecosystems of the Adelaide plains in South Australia. 3 Similarly, Tylor’s photography is a critical interrogation of the past in order to look to the future. Reclaiming ethnographic photography for new ends, ‘Te Moana Nui’ evokes a narrative of movement, contact and cultural exchange that flows from James Tylor’s need to understand and re-contextualise history so that we might better share the land and seas we inhabit. Zara Stanhope Endnotes 1 Atholl Anderson, The First Migration, Māori Origins 3000BC–AD1450 , Bridget Williams Books, Wellington, 2016. Movement extended to Norfolk Island in the west, Rapa Nui in the east and Hawai’i in the north of the Pacific. 2 These traditional objects included hunting objects, vessels, grinding stones, tools and necklaces. 3 Tylor’s research into the histories of Indigenous foods and their manifestation in new cuisine follows from his Kaurna Mai Recipes developed for his ‘Un-resettling’ exhibition, held at Vivien Anderson Gallery, Melbourne, in 2017. JAMES TYLOR