The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

211 ESSAYS By bringing together an intergenerational group of Gunantuna men and women with staff from the Gallery, culture was honoured and shared. Amply fulfilling its aesthetic role within ceremony — to mesmerise viewers — Tutana and Loloi negotiate both customary and commodity systems, and articulate the resilience and sophistication of contemporary Gunantuna culture, belief and people as they continue to engage, on their own terms, in a global community. The existence of indigenous systems of exchange and value in Papua New Guinea has been explored extensively over the past century. 6 One of the most influential ideas has been one that positions the objects produced by Papua New Guinean women as ‘women’s wealth’ — the materialisation of eternal values of women’s maternity and matriliny. 7 Women’s wealth is now understood through recent radical developments in scholarly understandings of gender and sexuality, as well as the contemporary conditions affecting women and communities in the Pacific. 8 The APT9 Women’s Wealth project explores the significance of women’s material culture in the context of today’s Autonomous Region of Bougainville, a society greatly affected by recent conflict and foreign economic interests, a history little known outside Papua New Guinea. 9 Working with archival footage for APT9, Bougainville-born artist Taloi Havini explores, in particular, the role of Australian interests in her latest iteration of the 'Habitat' video series. Havini’s work highlights that Bougainville society is predominantly a matrilineal one, where land and status are passed through the mother’s lineage, and women continue to be the fiercest opponents of the mining of natural resources on their land, as well as some of the strongest supporters of peace and reconciliation efforts. 10 Working closely with the Gallery on all aspects of the Women’s Wealth project, curator Sana Balai and artists Taloi and Marilyn Havini have mobilised deeply held values relating to people and place. With the upcoming referendum on independence in mind, all three saw an opportunity to honour the relational moral economy underlying women’s material culture by providing opportunities for Bougainville women to engage in new creative conversations and with a broader audience. 11 An initial workshop held in September 2017, attended by women from across the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, the outlying atolls, the Solomon Islands, as well as Australia, strengthened relationships and understandings based on commensurate values, experiences and histories. 12 The workshop encouraged conversations about how creative work expresses intentionality and collective agency, the way indigenous material culture expresses different social values, the importance of continued adherence to customary beliefs and protocols alongside newly acquired Christian beliefs, and ideas of collective copyright and ownership of customary forms, as well as the sharing of experiences of dispossession. Flowing out of conversations about making, value and relations, these women subsequently returned to their villages and engaged their communities in making new works for APT9 — Tuhu, Biruko , baskets, pottery, body adornment, mats and tapestries. Returning to the Autonomous Region of Bougainville in April 2018 to acquire many of these new works, we found North Bougainville artists busy creating Tuhu hoods. Made of perishable materials, these hoods are created for a particular person or circumstance. 13 Considerable physical effort is involved in collecting and preparing the pandanus leaves and wild banana bark for their construction, together with the roots, lime and salted water for dyeing. To create enough works for a ceremony, women come together in groups, feverishly working to give back to other clans a gift that has been given to theirs. As a custodian of the hoods (on behalf of the Gallery), the author was given a village name by lead artist Kiria Asike in a ceremony in her maternal village. 14 This ceremony — overseen by the clan’s male chiefs and involving all the women who made the Tuhu — authorised the creation of these sacred forms, as well as their movement from North Bougainville to a new location. This involved sharing food sourced and prepared by the women with the wider community (living and ancestral). The hoods — embodying the women’s knowledge and labour — could only travel to Brisbane to take their place in the Gallery’s Collection with the appropriate ceremonies and relational connections enacted by the community. 15