Trade Delivers People (sometimes): Vignettes for N.J.
Newell Harry
Newell Harry
Trade Delivers People (sometimes): Vignettes for N.J., 2017
Two part installation
Part 1: twenty framed Lambda prints on Fuji Lustre paper; selected images from the artist's archive (2007-2017); hand-typed texts on parchment paper, artist's stamp. 65 x 45 cm (each, framed)
Part 2: culptural elements: vessels of pulped Port Vila Daily Post newspapers (collected 1999-2011), concrete pot planters, various found/ made/ collected/ gifted artifacts, pencil, artist's stamp, artist designed acrylic and steel structure. 169 x 35 x 35 cm
TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection
Photo: Jessica Maurer | Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Australia
- Date
- 2017
- Medium
- Two-part installation Part 1: twenty framed Lambda prints on Fuji Lustre paper; selected images from the artist's archive (2007-2017); hand-typed texts on parchment paper, artist's stamp Part 2: sculptural elements: vessels of pulped Port Vila Daily Post newspapers (collected 1999-2011), concrete pot planters, various found/ made/ collected/ gifted artifacts, pencil, artist's stamp, artist designed acrylic and steel structure
- Dimension
- Part 1: 20 Lambda prints, 65 x 45 cm (each, framed) Part 2: 169 x 35 x 35 cm Overall dimensions variable
- Credit
TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection
- This artwork is part of the donation and long-term loan from TBA21 to the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.
Details
An Australian-born artist of South African and Mauritian descent, Newell Harry examines the transformations of cultures and traditions in the South Pacific resulting from the movements of humans, objects, and knowledge through global industrial transport, tourism, migration, and displacement, or through slavery and colonial expansion. On the invitation of TBA21–Academy, Harry participated in three expeditions to Papua New Guinea and French Polynesia, following the centuries-old exchange tradition of the Kula Ring, a system of ceremonial gift exchange among a number of communities inhabiting the Trobriand Islands in PNG’s Milne Bay Province.
Trade Delivers People (sometimes): Vignettes for N.J. consists of framed black-and-white photos, notebook transcriptions, and a sculptural element. The title references a work by the Australian artist Narelle Jubelin Trade Delivers People, 1990–98, an assemblage of found objects of different origins that maps a web of relations around ideas of currencies—hard, symbolic, or human systems of exchange. Harry explores similar terrain, combining photographs with written travelogues, at times related to the photographic images, and in other cases unrelated to them. The resulting vignettes grapple with the task of registering what is lost and what is found in each encounter or exchange, and attempt to give prominence to the overlooked and undervalued. Although viewers may be tempted to see the vignettes as documentary narratives, they are drawn from diverse travels and time periods spanning twelve years and thus the relations between them do not cohere into a single narrative.
This disjunctive storyline is further enhanced by the randomness intrinsic to notebooks and travelogues as receptacles of memories and experiences. This moment of chance is signaled also by the discrepancy of the dates of the images and the texts. Completing the installation is a sculptural assemblage, an almost totemic structure made of different objects of unknown provenance and crowned by a small sculpture of a palm tree.
(Text written by TBA21 and used as short text in the booklet of the exhibition "Remedios", C3A, Córdoba, 2023)
