Gordon H Brown Lecture: Moonwalking, Making Radical Art Histories in the Pacific

Our art histories in the Pacific are far too important to leave to art historians alone. Artists, activists, curators, communities and scholars across the Pacific are all engaged in making art histories that carry the weight and urgency of our current times.

Over the course of her career as an art historian and curator, Nina Tonga has positioned art histories of the Pacific as being in a constant state of becoming through the analogy of moonwalking. To moonwalk is to orient yourself within an Indigenous temporality, where you face the past and walk backwards into the future.

Amidst the ongoing struggles for self-determination, sovereignty and social and climate justice in the Pacific, such an orientation for art history is eminently critical. To be moon-facing resists linear discourses of art history and embodies diverse and enduring ways of being and doing that materialize alternate worlds and futures. This lecture moonwalks across the Pacific to embrace radical approaches, diverse forms, and makers of art history.

Nina Tonga (PhD, University of Auckland) is a curator of contemporary art and Assistant-Professor of Pacific Art History in the Art and Art History Department at The University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. Nina is from the villages of Vaini and Kolofo’ou in the Kingdom of Tonga and was born and raised in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Nina has a long history as a curator and writer of Pacific art and visual culture. She curated the acclaimed exhibitions Pacific Sisters: Fashion Activists (2018–2019) and Mataaho Collective: Te Puni Aroaro (2022) at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and To Make Wrong/ Right/ Now (2019), the second international Honolulu Biennial. Her curated solo exhibitions include projects by Lemi Ponifasio, Nike Savvas, Chiharu Shiota, and Dame Robin White.

Nina Tonga. Photo courtesy of Nina Tonga

Takapau, 2022 at Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, The 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Photo by Ben Stewart

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