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Newell Harry
Born in 1972 in Sydney, Australia  / Lives  in Sydney, Australia

Adriano Pedrosa: Tell me about the ongoing Untitled Gift Mat series that you are exhibiting in Istanbul.

Newell Harry: Gift mats are a traditional form of tribal currency in Vanuatu, in the South Pacific, where they are exchanged or gifted at special ceremonial occasions: christenings, birthdays, weddings, and burials. I am interested in notions of currency, value, and exchange, and in alternate economic modes. Mats have aesthetic and utilitarian qualities, but they are also hard currency. My mats are commissioned from a group of elderly aunties related to my close Ni-Vanuatu friend Jack Sivui Martau, a young community leader.

AP: And the sentences you are using, or weaving: What (or how) do they mean?

NH: They come from many sources, but they mostly take their linguistic influence from pidgin and creole dialects, paralleled with hip-hop rhyming and the anagrammatic wordplays and phonetics used in argots such as Verlan. Assonance, rhyme, pun, alliteration, homonym, and metaphor are features with which I try to imbue the phrases. The subjects are loaded and incorporate references from Cargo Cult leaders such as the vigilante Prophet Fred to alcohol or racially suggestive double entendres, for instance “White Whine / Clean Skins” or “Cape Malays / Cape Malaise.” There is also the imperfect anagram “Acrolect/Afrolect.” Since 2004 I’ve lived and worked between Sydney and Vanuatu, and on my first trip to Vanuatu I was struck by the poetic vernacularity of Bislama, which is a Melanesian creole and the lingua franca of Vanuatu, one of the most linguistically diverse areas in the world, with more than 120 tribal dialects in addition to French and English. For example, “condom” in Bislama is Plastik blong blokem pikinini, meaning “plastic that stops babies.” It’s a poetic truncation of language that incorporates English (“plastik” and “blong” as in “belong,” possessive) and French and Portuguese (pikinini).

AP: It is interesting how conceptual linguistic plays, which are typically dry and dematerialized in contemporary art, can be associated with craft, traveling from Vanuatu to Sydney to Istanbul. There is a political dimension to all this.

NH: The work literally and materially speaks of the “interwoven” quality of the cross-cultural discourse (good and bad) that results from globalization. The use of this material as “ethnic” artifact and contextual reference has been a strategy to depart from the overbearing linguistic connections of the 1960s and 1970s (as in the work of Joseph Kosuth and Bruce Nauman). It also attempts to shed the now standardized, globalized canon of Conceptualism. A return to traditional making was an attempt to do this while giving a heads-up to the context where the pieces are made. As the mats are commissioned, there’s a tongue-in-cheek reference to minimalism and its industrial, hands-off fabrication. In the islands this is inverted, as it’s quite “hands on.” Secondly, the use of “gap languages” such as pidgins and creoles, as opposed to European languages, speaks in encoded forms and away from the pomposity of those languages—or for that matter Latin, as used by Kosuth.