Exposition d’art des Ömies de Papouasie Nouvelle Guinée : “Unseen Secrets of the Mountain Rainforest:
Ömie Women’s Art of Papua New Guinea”

 
A la galerie Aboriginal Signature Estrangin : 101 rue Jules Besme, 1081 Bruxelles.

Vernissage sur RDV le mardi 17 Janvier 2023 de 11h à 21h30.
A 20h - discours de Bertrand Estrangin, directeur de la galerie et drink.
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“Unseen Secrets of the Mountain Rainforest: Ömie Women’s Art of Papua New Guinea”

La galerie Aboriginal Signature est honorée de présenter en Belgique notre deuxième exposition des grandes artistes femmes Ömies de Papouasie Nouvelle Guinée. Artistes célébrées internationalement, elles viennent de la région de l'Oro, un territoire éloigné qui rassemble de petits villages coiffés par le volcan sacré Huvaimo (1680 m). Leur culture préservée est parvenue jusqu'à nous grâce à leurs étoffes d'écorce, ornées des motifs ancestraux et des symboles des tatouages utilisés lors des cérémonies. 

Plus de 28 œuvres exceptionnelles en étoffes d'écorce ou tapa, ont été réalisées par 19 artistes femmes Ömies sur ces 11 dernières années. Toutes artistes de premier plan, elles sont également duvahe (chefs), ou seniors au sein de la communauté. Nées entre 1919 et 1987. de mère en fille, ces femmes portent haut la mémoire de leur peuple, et révèlent à travers les tapas, toute la résonance spirituelle de leur montagne sacrée. Leurs signes y expriment avec subtilité et fluidité les tatouages corporels et les mythes liés aux lieux de création. Dans une complexe intimité avec leurs lieux traditionnels, elles nous révèle la culture d’une civilisation préservée et un monde inconnu où probablement la plupart d’entre nous ne se rendra jamais.

Essai de Brennan King, exhibition manager du centre d’art Ömie

Unseen Secrets of the Mountain Rainforest: Ömie Women’s Art of Papua New Guinea

What must it be like to deeply know a place? Not simply to see its outer appearance, but to see beyond the apparent, visible world… and into unseen worlds contained within? Ömie women reveal the layered, inner worlds of their rainforest home in the inland mountains of Oro Province, Papua New Guinea, through their painted barkcloth textiles known as nioge. This time-honoured tradition has been practiced since the first female Ancestor, Suja, created the first barkcloth by the Uhojo River—as detailed in the Ömie creation story.

Just as the Uhojo River began as a drop of rain on the sacred volcanic mountain, Huvaimo—gathering volume and force along the way—so too did Ömie women’s creative vision and wisdom, flowing down through the generations in an unbroken lineage with ever-increasing dynamism. Barkcloth knowledge is passed on by way of the matrilineal line, from mother to daughter. Over time, the Ömie women artists have come to know their world so intimately and to such a degree that they have fine-tuned their senses to perceive their world with remarkable refinement.

And what an extraordinary place the world of the Ömie is to know! It is one of breathtaking natural beauty, a remote paradise that seems as if it were dreamed up. The mountains extend to the horizon in every direction and are often cloaked in cloud and mist that drifts gently through the densely forested valleys, over the peaks. Ancient, narrow pathways of the Ancestors wind through the verdant green of the forests, which burst with flowers, fruits, birds, butterflies and mysterious creatures in a spectrum of splendid colours. Observations of this natural world—one of the most biodiverse on Earth—are the central facet of Ömie barkcloth painting designs. Within the primarily abstract, organic, geometric symbolism of their paintings, the outer world and more subtle inner worlds harmoniously mingle.

Upon the barkcloth, mountains become expressive zigzag designs (as seen in Aspasia Gadai and Mala Nari’s paintings)—condensed signifiers of the mind’s perception of the physical experience of traversing these mountains… up, down, up, down. Bare tree branches (as seen in Jean Niduve’s painting) and crooked tree trunks (as seen in Celestine Warina’s painting) become inspiration for energetic arrow designs that, when repeated, create dazzling rhythms and movement within the paintings. Such designs are particularly insightful as to the conceptual origins of Ömie barkcloth painting designs.

They point to how the first women painters looked towards the natural environment to uncover geometries and abstract motifs, as if an internal logic or system is hidden within nature. Through keen observation, the artists discover and uncover patterns and energies within nature’s multifarious forms. Through these designs, the paintings become activated with the experiential feeling of the landscape and environment, rather than simply remaining a representation of it. The beauty of place comes to life through the paintings.

The Ömie women not only look to the outer world that is most commonly seen and experienced, they look within the natural world. The mysterious world of the forest offers bountiful inspiration—the intricate pattern of tree bark or a leaf; the unfurling curl of a fern or vine; the pointed shape of the Papuan Hornbill’s beak; the spreading of the Moustached Treeswift’s tail-feathers as it manoeuvres during flight. For example, Elvina Naumo conveys the hip-bones of the mountain frog as a dense body of conjoined, concentric circles. It is not the outer world that she captures, but its inner world—as if she is looking right inside the natural world, to the secrets hidden within that lay beyond sight. The short, successive lines seen in Celestine Warina’s painting represent the eggs of the Giant Spiny Stick Insect that it carries in its rear pincers. Not even the minutest detail of the environment escapes the acute vision and vast wisdom of the Ömie! These designs, that portray the microcosmic details of the natural world, seem to hold a far deeper and profound kind of knowledge.

It is this enchanting world that has proliferated upon and come to beautify the Ömie’s barkcloth skirts and textiles. Through the conceptual, artistic continuum of barkcloth painting, the Ömie’s inimitable sense of cultural identity—one closely informed by their connection to, and inseparability from, the natural world—is affirmed. Unequivocally, this is their (sacred) place and they belong to it. It is no wonder then that many of the painted barkcloth designs, which are based on the natural world, were also body designs tattooed onto the skin during the sacred Ujawé initiation rite (as seen in the works of Fate Savari, Dapeni Jonevari, Dyna Jonevari and Pauline-Rose Hago). Nor does it come as a surprise that ancestral stories and jagor’e (customary Ömie law) are embedded within the designs as a sort of living and accrescent archive. This is the knowledge the Ömie women hold—a place known deep in the bones.

The Ömie weave their multitude of geometric shapes, symbols and patterns together in every possible variation and indeed, this is what characterises Ömie women’s barkcloth paintings—the extraordinary diversity. Notably, the painted compositions never remain static but are constantly evolving and being reimagined by the artists with infinite adaptation.

Artists develop personal styles that are highly distinctive, and often come to be renowned within their respective communities and clans for their individual painting talents and accomplishments, ultimately as Duvahe (Chiefs). For over a decade, a new generation of artists have been training intensively under the tutelage of experienced master painters, as Ömie jagor’e (law) instructs—remaining true to their culture and rightly respecting their Ancestral inheritance. These exciting artists are now leading this painting tradition into the future with innovative developments, but with the vital sensitivity in their approach that firmly upholds its sacred origins, and ultimately, holds their precious world together.

As one of the most ancient forms of art created by humanity, barkcloth painting is a fundamental component of art history. As a cultural artform of the world’s indigenous peoples, which developed over thousands of years, it reveals a richer and broader story of art than more well-known and documented art histories, and is one deserving of our attention. The Ömie are among the last peoples on Earth who maintain this rare medium as their primary artistic custom and cultural heritage and, as Nicholas Thomas of Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, states, they are its “most brilliant living exponents”[1]. Indeed, in a rapidly changing world, it is nothing short of miraculous that this ancient artistic practice has survived until the present day to be celebrated as a living and thriving painting movement of global significance. Ömie Artists Inc., in association with Aboriginal Signature Estrangin gallery, warmly invites you into the secret worlds of the Ömie women through this very special exhibition of their elaborate and compelling paintings.

Brennan King (Exhibitions Manager, Ömie Artists Inc., Papua New Guinea), December 2022

 QUOTES:

“There is a great world art tradition that is still scarcely known to people beyond the region that produced it. Right across the Pacific, from New Guinea to Hawai’i, Islanders have painted barkcloth, occasionally figuratively, more commonly out of a dazzling, irregular, organic geometry. Though the art has been created for centuries, very likely for millennia, it is very much alive today. Its most brilliant living exponents are the women of Ömie, of Oro Province in Papua New Guinea. Their practice is at once based deeply in ancestral aesthetics, varied in its stimuli, and relentlessly experimental.” ~ Professor Nicholas Thomas, Director of Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, UK, 2012

“In the old times our ancestors were living in villages deep in the forest. When I was a small girl growing up in the old village of Sidonejo, before it was destroyed by the volcanic eruption, I stayed with my mother all the time, watching her and I learnt how to paint all of her barkcloth designs. She taught me how to mix the yellow, red and black pigments for painting. She taught me everything and now I’m painting so that my culture will not be lost and so that my memory will live on.”  ~ Fate Savari (Isawdi), Gora village, Papua New Guinea, 2014

UNE CULTURE HONORÉE AU NIVEAU INTERNATIONAL

La réalisation des œuvres sur Tapa est accompagnée par des chants harmonieux des temps les plus anciens et célèbrent en écho la puissance magique de fécondité des femmes.

Leurs histoires anciennes et chants sacrés sont transmis de génération en génération comme une part intégrante de la création des étoffes d'écorce Ömies. Leur art contemporain devient un vecteur de mémoire précieux et honore leur culture à travers la finesse des signes partagés sur des matériaux organiques.

Depuis leur première exposition en 2006 à Sydney, les artistes femmes Ömies sont célébrés au niveau international par de nombreuses institutions comme la National Gallery of Victoria qui organisait en 2009 : "Wisdom of the Mountain: Art of the Omie", ou sont entrées dans les collections prestigieuses du British Museum, du Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (University of Cambridge), National Gallery of Australia (Canberra), Museum Fünf Kontinente (Munich), le Fowler Museum at UCLA (Los Angeles)…

En 2023, les artistes Ömies sont honorées par une magnifique exposition actuellement au Musée Ian Potter de l’Université de Sydney en Australie : Ömie barkcloth: Pathways of nioge.

Nous vous invitons à découvrir à Bruxelles comment la sensibilité féminine des Aborigènes d’Australie et de leurs cousins génétiques Papous traduit depuis la nuit des temps en peinture, la spiritualité et l’énergie invisible qui émane des immenses territoires désertiques et des forêts tropicales.

Bertrand Estrangin
Directeur de la galerie

Découvrez les peintures disponibles à Bruxelles durant l’exposition :