Newell Harry / Pernod Ricard Fellowship 2018

In residency from September 2018

Newell Harry is an Australian-born artist of South African and Mauritian des­cent.
For over the past decade his pro­jects have drawn from an inti­mate web of recur­ring travels and con­nec­tions across Oceania and the wider Asia-Pacific, to South Africa’s Western Cape Province where the artist’s extended family con­tinue to reside. From Pidgin and Creole lan­guages to modes of exchange in the ‘gift economies’ of the South Pacific, Harry’s inter­ests often cul­mi­nate in cul­tur­ally ‘entan­gled’ instal­la­tions con­flating more linear atti­tudes to lan­guage, col­lec­tion and mate­rial.
An open studio is organ­ized the Saturday, November 24, 2018 from 4pm to 7pm.

Notable exhi­bi­tions include: Known/Unknowns, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney (2017); Tidalectics, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna (2017); All the World’s Futures – 56th Venice Biennale (2015), Suspended Histories, Museum Van Loon, Amsterdam (2013); Rendez Vous 11 & 12, Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne, France (2011) & South African National Gallery, Cape Town (2012); (Untitled): 12th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul (2011) and The 17th Biennale of Sydney: The Beauty of Distance, Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age, Sydney (2010).

Harry Newell, (Untitled) Unmarked Graves, Hiva Oa, Marquesas Islands, 2017
35mm black and white documentation

Statement

“I have recently under­taken an expe­di­tion through the Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia. There, on the remote island of Hiva Oa, I had the for­tune to chance upon Gauguin’s grave and a small museum housing nothing but locally painted copies of the artist’s work and a recon­struc­tion of the hut where he lived and painted. The ten­sion between a site of such ‘weighty’ his­tor­ical fact in con­trast to the naïve copies has since left me per­plexed. But so too have the more prob­lem­atic issues of value, authen­ticity and the hang­overs of colo­nial authority and own­er­ship.

With this in mind, I have begun to wonder what archival mate­rial in Paris exists on Gauguin. More specif­i­cally, I find myself fas­ci­nated by the thought that the research/work be inter­woven with my own archive of South Pacific pho­tographs, col­lec­tions of arti­facts and per­sonal diaries of Pacific travels from the past decade. Such mate­rial may cul­mi­nate as an artist’s book, as part of a broader ‘faux archive’ that mir­rors the his­tor­ical “re­con­struc­tions” I wit­nessed on Hiva Oa.”