New | Niu Discoveries: Indigenous collecting, exhibiting and filming

Book Author Philipp Schorch and Vilisoni Hereniko
Rights Available World excl. NZ

What makes a collection an Indigenous collection? What makes an exhibition and its associated curatorial approach an Indigenous exhibition? And what makes a film an Indigenous film?

Tackling these questions head-on, the international contributors to this book have studied and deployed diverse approaches to Indigenous collecting, filming and exhibiting across the Pacific, Europe and the Americas.

Using the enduring and generative metaphor of the niu (coconut tree), New | Niu Discoveries introduces and reveals how Indigenous actors have engaged with and reappropriated these practices on their own terms. In these examples, collections, exhibitions and films are reimagined as portals to twenty-first century Indigeneity.

Contributing writers: Safua Akeli Amaama, Guido Alejo Mamani, Ruben Darío Chambi, Daniela Franco Pinto, Taloi Havini, Noelle MKY Kahanu, Leah Lui-Chivizhe, Diego Muñoz, Leonardo Pakarati, Paula Rossetti, Annika Sung, Nicholas Thomas, Jordan Wilson and Ida Yoshinaga.

About the Author
Philipp Schorch is Professor of Museum Anthropology at LMU Munich, Germany, where he leads an ERC-funded research project entitled ‘Indigeneities in the 21st Century’ (www.indigen.eu). He is also an Honorary Senior Research Associate at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, UK. Philipp’s research focuses on museums, material culture/history/ theory, contemporary art and (post)colonial histories, the Pacific and Europe, collaborations with Indigenous artists/curators/scholars, and (post)socialisms.

Vilsoni Hereniko is a professor, filmmaker, and artist whose work has shaped Indigenous Pacific studies and contemporary Indigenous media. He is a professor at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Hawai‘i and is widely recognised for bridging ancestral knowledge systems with innovative approaches to performance, film, and cultural analysis.