By postcourieronline
Copyright postcourier
An Exhibition at the National Museum and Art Gallery
While many of the official 50th anniversary of independence celebrations are over, we are very fortunate that some of them remain for people to appreciate.
The National Museum and Art Gallery (NMAG) is hosting Piksa Bilong Taim Bipo: PNG’s Recent Past through Photography.
This exhibition is co-sponsored by the NMAG and the National Cultural Commission, both under the Ministry for Tourism, Arts, and Culture. It can be found in the NMAG Theatrette. The exhibition will be on display until the end of the year.
The exhibit contains over 200 historic photographs, from 1875 until the early 1960s, although most predate 1940, after which time photography became much more widespread and available to the public. All of today’s provinces are represented.
Most of the images in the exhibition have never been publicly displayed before. They show the ancestors of present-day Papua New Guineans, preparing food, feasting, dancing, fishing, sailing, hunting, fighting, etc. Many images are of activities that are very familiar, while some show things that are less commonplace today.
Although many of the people photographed are anonymous, some of them are named. The exhibit asks viewers to consider whether some of them might be your own ancestors.
Some photos show regional differences while others reveal great similarities between all parts of PNG – unity in diversity.
The photos also show the work of early missionaries and the colonial government at work in different parts of the country.
Photography was invented in France in 1826/27. Fifty years later, after numerous technical improvements, the first photos were made in PNG by members of the British Challenger Expedition, when they visited Manus in 1875, as part of an important four-year expedition that established oceanography as a scientific discipline.
Norwegian researcher Jan Hasselberg has been investigating early PNG photographs for decades and has organized the NMAG exhibition. He is also the author of the book Beautiful Tufi: Between the Past and the Future (2013), and is involved in a photo repatriation project involving different parts of the country.
The original photos in Piksa Bilong Taim Bipo have been supplied from 29 archives and libraries in Australia, Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Papua New Guinea, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and the USA.
These photos serve as an essential part of the cultural heritage of Papua New Guinea and illustrate how important archives are to documenting this heritage. Through the efforts of libraries, archives, and their staff, we can all benefit from these documents more than a century later.
This exhibit will stimulate much reflection about our nation’s past, and how these invaluable images resonate with people today.
Jan Hasselberg will be at the exhibit on Tuesday, 7 October, to provide further explanations to those interested.
