Noelle Kahanu

University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa | UH Manoa · Department of American Studies

Curating Oceania at the Royal Academy of Arts by Nicholas Thomas An Internal Response to Oceania from the Royal Academy of Arts by Adrian Locke “Exhibiting Oceania”: Conversing with the Curators (or Truth-Telling in Real Time) by Noelle M. K. Y. Kahanu Océanie in Paris by Simon Jean Oceania Catalogue by Lagi-Maama

Throughout the Pacific, interpersonal encounters are characterized by a deep level of physical intimacy and engagement - from the honi/hongi, the face-to-face greeting, to the ha‘a/haka wero, acts of challenge that also serve as a celebratory acknowledgement of ancestral presences. In these physical exchanges, relationships are built, tended, and t...

What is the future of curatorial practice? How can the relationships between Indigenous people in the Pacific, collections in Euro-American institutions, and curatorial knowledge in museums globally be (re)conceptualised in reciprocal and symmetrical ways? Is there an ideal model, a ‘curatopia,’ whether in the form of a utopia or dystopia, which ca...

We visited the Humboldt Lab in early July 2015, shortly after the conference Positioning Ethnological Museums in the 21st Century organ-ised by the Volkswagen Foundation in cooperation with Deutscher Museumsbund, which set out to discuss 'the need for a critical appraisal of the past, present, and future of ethnological museums', 1 as well as our o...