The art traditions of Oceania have long been highly renowned. They have fascinated generations of museum visitors, artists, art historians, and anthropologists. While the profound influence of Pacific art on European modernists has often been noted, in recent decades the great historic art practices of the region have also been vital to cultural renaissance, and much debate about culture, tradition and identity, across the Pacific itself. Over the same period, ways of thinking about indigenous art have changed dramatically, not least because Pacific artists, curators and scholars are now prominently involved in the debate. While new issues have been raised on many fronts, there is, most importantly, a deep awareness of how indigenous art practices have been shaped by history.
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MAA's new exhibition, [http://maa.cam.ac.uk/assemblingbodies|Assembling Bodies: Art, Science & Imagination] aims to challenge pre-conceived notions about the human body. This innovative, multi-disciplinary exhibition examines ways that bodies are constructed, known and transformed in various historical, cross-cultural and disciplinary contexts. It invites visitors to explore various technologies through which different bodies are known and made visible.
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Getty Images is a two year research project, funded by the Getty Fund, to catelogue the photographic collections from the Arctic and Africa.
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A major project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, 'Melanesian art: objects, narratives and indigenous owners' explores the relationships between a wide range of indigenous art and artefact forms, socially-significant narratives, and the indigenous communities from which historic collections of Melanesian art derive. Focusing on the important but largely unstudied Melanesian collections in the British Museum, this project aims to bring new perspectives to both the study of indigenous art, and the understanding of ownership, heritage, and relations between museums and communities.
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A joint research project of University of Cambridge (England), Fritz Lang Institute, FH St Pölten (Austria), and the Bauhaus University, Weimar (Germany)
directed by Frederick Baker & Christopher Chippindale. Prehistoric pictures are the most direct and lively kinds of archaeological remains. They offer today a record made by ancient people of how they themselves saw the worlds they lived in, with its animals, its people, its spirits, its actions, its symbolisms. At the same times they are obscured: we do not easily today recognize just what they are pictures of, whether the ‘anthropomorphic’ figures – those that take a human form – are indeed of human beings. Are they instead of spirits?The Prehistoric Picture Project explores making ancient rock-art visible with fresh appr
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Tene Waitere (1854-1931) was one of the greatest Maori carvers of the colonial period. He acquired his skills in a customary manner, and had a profound knowledge of carving traditions, but worked in a new world, in the decades following the New Zealand wars, that had seen Maori ways of life profoundly and permanently changed. Waitere was the first Ngati Tarawhai artist to produce a major corpus of material for European clients. He carved also for his whanau, his iwi, and for other Maori, but he made many important works, ranging from small pieces such as walking sticks to full-scale carved houses for individual tourists and other whites such as ethnologists, collectors, and hotel owners.
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Reconceptualizing Digital Objects is a three year project in collaboration with the A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center, UCLA and the Museum. The aims of the research are to study anonymously how the Zuni community views its original cultural objects relative to the ways in which museums typically classify and represent them. It is to understand and uncover a new model of describing cultural objects according to the original indigenous voices of the culture that created these objects.
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Rock Art is an ongoing research project exploring the range, chronology, forms and contemporary meaning of Australian Rock Art from Arnem Land, Norther Australia.
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This project involves work towards a major comparative history of the Pacific in the nineteenth century. While the historiography of the Pacific in the colonial age, and indeed of the colonial age in general, has oscillated between negative accounts that emphasize the devastation of indigenous lifeways, and more positive ones that stress indigenous agency, cultural continuity, and hybridity, this project aims to supercede these and other familiar antinomies, such as the binary oppositions between the West and non-West, and the local and the global. The book will not take the form of a historical survey, but will instead be made up of a series of fine-grained discussions of key episodes, embracing early explorers visits, missionary interventions and colonial violence. It will qualify and di
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