Taloi Havini
Reclamation

Presented by Artspace and Sydney Festival, Reclamation is the first Australian solo exhibition from Taloi Havini. This body of work centres on acts of resistance and self-determination, using form and material to assert a speculative space of collective agency. Employing processes of collaborative creation, Havini’s work traces the significance of shared knowledge from land tenure and customary designs to temporal architectures.

Havini probes intersections of history, identity, and nation-building within the matrilineal social structures of her birthplace, the Autonomous Region of Bougainville. Reclamation considers the resonance of locality, ceremony, and material culture defined and translated through contemporary practice.

Reclamation looks to destabilise dominant narratives of place as well as colonising practices of documentation and mapping. She creates an embedded perspective of how land is represented that incorporates Indigenous Knowledge Systems and lived experience. Havini weaves together the tensions of precarity and resilience, vulnerability and activism.

The exhibition includes a new iteration of Havini’s Habitat series, an immersive multi-channel video and sound installation. This is an ongoing investigation exploring the legacy of resource extraction and Australia’s fraught relationship in the Pacific.

Havini’s new site-specific installation, Reclamation, was created collaboratively with her Hakö clan members. The sculptural works lean and suspend into themselves as a form of collective map-making. Underlying the ephemeral installation of cane and earth, are questions about the ways in which we relate within temporal spaces; how borders are defined and claimed as well as the value of impermanence and embodied knowledge over fixed historical understandings.

Reclamation considers both personal and political narratives at a time when communities across the globe find themselves at the tipping point of environmental and social change.

Join us on Sunday, 19 January, for a day of public programs including an artist talk and a series of talks exploring the exhibition and discussing the history and the future of Bougainville, as the world's newest nation state. Full schedule here.