He Toi Ora. Beseelte Kunst der Māori. Auf den Spuren der Schnitzwerke im Museum Fünf Kontinente
In the organizer's words:
In the Māori worldview, all arts carry an everlasting relationship between the past and present: many carvings are also considered to be animated and are connected to the ancestors. Therefore, the descendants of the original makers or owners should be able to renew this important connection. He Toi Ora means: a living art.
But from which Iwi (tribal groups) in New Zealand do the museum objects that are now in the Museum Five Continents originate? The research quickly reaches its limits: Almost all the pieces were acquired in London between 1825 and 1914, where their trail is lost. The question of their origin can often only be approached through circumstantial evidence.
The search for clues begins with historical photos and documents. They provide information about the previous owners from whom the museum acquired the objects and their motivation for collecting them. Another piece of the puzzle is provided by wood analyses, which provide information about the different tree species used for carving.
The carving motifs can also be part of the provenance research and provide information on certain stylistic regions. However, indigenous knowledge is of central importance when classifying and tracing the pieces.
In close consultation with Māori experts, the exhibition was developed jointly by the museum's Oceania curator and David Jones from Iwi Rongowhakaata as Māori curator. It introduces the methods used to explore the objects and invites visitors to participate by using a microscope and recognizing carving patterns. At the same time, it introduces the Māori philosophy.
With 80 objects, it shows a large part of the Māori works preserved in the Museum Fünf Kontinente. In addition to figures with tattoos, there are jewelry boxes reserved for high-ranking individuals, precious greenstone jewels and valuable capes as well as figurative weapons and everyday objects.
Although there is usually only circumstantial evidence to indicate the exact origin, one object - the Tāwhaki post figurine - has been clearly identified as coming from a Māori meeting house near Gisborne. Accordingly, the last room is dedicated to the ancestor Tāwhaki and the Iwi Rongowhakaata. Films, interviews, a photo installation and modern art objects show the close connection between Tāwhaki and the people of his iwi living today.
The exhibition emerged from our museum's ongoing research project Thinking through Wood. This is part of the overall project Beyond the Nature/Culture Divide: Reimagining Human-Environment Relations in Museums at the University of Cambridge and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, funded by the Free State of Bavaria.
This content has been machine translated.Price information:
Visitors up to the age of 18: free Pupils: free
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