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Sacred Gods from Polynesia

This magnificent exhibition brings together about 90 sacred Polynesian artefacts frommuseums and private collections all over theworld, fromSt Petersburg toBelfast – representative of the art forms of most of the major island groups of Polynesia with a few exceptions. Credit for this exhibition must go to Dr Michael Gunn, senior Pacific art curator at the National Gallery of Australia and president of the Pacific Arts Association, who has been identifying these objects since 1995 and who has taken about a decade to prepare the groundwork for the exhibition. This is the first time most of the sacred objects have been brought together in the southern hemisphere, though a similar exhibition, Pacific Encounters: art and divinity in Polynesia 1760–1860, was mounted at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, in 2006 and again in Paris at the Musée du quai Branly in 2008. These two exhibitions were largely organised by Steven Hooper, director and professor of visual arts at the Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. Both the Hooper and Gunn exhibitions were arranged strictly according to island groups, but whereas Hooper moved from the more sophisticated cultures of Hawaiʻi and the New Zealand Māori to the west, Gunn has followed a more logical progression from west to east, roughly following the original routes and settlement patterns of the original Polynesian navigators over several millennia. Of course the Polynesian gods or atua did not conform to these patterns and crisscrossed the Pacific as a result of cult expansion, exchange voyages and reverse migration. Attempts to plot the movement of the major god cults are fraught with difficulties. It is good to see the museums taking the lead in re-evaluating the sacred objects of Polynesia, though for a period these artefacts were undervalued and even culled from collections on the grounds that they were not truly Polynesian. Feather gods and objects covered with feathers had deteriorated in the London Missionary Society Museum, and when items in that collection were loaned to the British Museum in 1890 and finally bought by the museum in 1911, they continued to be undervalued. Some of the sacred objects sent to London by the missionaries seem to have disappeared. Were some destroyed and others sold? Where for instance is the sacred maroʻura (red feather girdle, insignia of royalty) of Raiatea? And where is the Latin manuscript in the British Museum’s Polynesian collection describing the fertility practices of the ʻArioi Society in Tahiti?