Taloi Havini

Taloi Havini is an interdisciplinary artist born in 1981 in Arawa, in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea. Working across sculpture, photography, moving image, sound and installation, she investigates how Indigenous histories, knowledge systems and relationships with land and ocean endure and resist colonial and extractive narratives. A descendant of the Nakas clan of the Hakö (Haku) people of northeastern Buka Island, Havini is currently based in Brisbane, Australia. Her practice is deeply informed by matrilineal connections to her homeland and explores cultural inheritance, representation and the contested histories of Bougainville. Havini’s work frequently develops through long-term research into the cultural heritage, environments and social structures of Oceania. It pays particular attention to the environmental and political legacies of resource extraction, including those associated with the Panguna copper mine in Bougainville. She collaborates with cultural practitioners and communities to create immersive installations that foreground Indigenous perspectives. Drawing on Indigenous Knowledge Systems, archival materials, lived experience and sensory forms of engagement, her practice questions Western cartographic and scientific conventions and proposes alternative ways of seeing, listening and connecting with land and ocean as complex relational spaces. Across these media, Havini creates works such as the multichannel video installations in her Habitat series, sculptures that draw on culturally significant materials and immersive sound works including Answer to the Call (2021). Commissioned by TBA21–Academy for Ocean Space in Venice, this 22-channel sound installation combines underwater recordings, instrumental passages and vocals to evoke Indigenous modes of knowledge, oceanic connections and perspectives extending across deep time. Havini’s work has been presented internationally at exhibitions and institutions including Sharjah Biennial 13, the eighth and ninth Asia Pacific Triennials of Contemporary Art, the third Aichi Triennial, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and Artspace in Sydney. Her work is held in public and private collections including those of TBA21, the Sharjah Art Foundation, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Victoria and KADIST. Through her practice, Havini invites viewers to reconsider how cultural memory, relationships with place and forms of storytelling persist amid histories of colonisation, extractive industry and environmental change.