In his video When Water Embraces Empty Space, the Vietnamese-American artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen imagines a boat from Papua New Guinea sailing out of Berlin’s Humboldt Forum.Toni Hafkensheid/Goldfarb Galler/Supplied
A 19th-century boat from the South Seas is now sailing virtual waters, all the way from Papua New Guinea to Toronto through Berlin.
The 16-metre dugout canoe with two sails and an outrigger was made on the Island of Luf around 1890, intended as the funerary vessel for a chief. Taken by German colonialists soon after it was built, the impressive craft now sits in Berlin’s Humboldt Forum, which houses Germany’s ethnological and Asian art museums.
The boat is the largest artifact in the collection. When the Humboldt was reconstructed from the old Berlin Palace in the 2010s, the new museum was built around the boat, which was placed inside a half-finished gallery before a wall was completed. Museum officials are in contact with the descendants of the Luf islanders who built the boat, but for now, the physical object, fragile and damaged by termites, is bricked into a gallery and not going anywhere.
Yet in the imagination of Vietnamese-American artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen, the Luf boat will escape this prison and sail home. Using CGI, he has created a fantastical video in which the boat breaks through the walls, floats through the Humboldt galleries and finally sails out the classical front entrance into the sky.
When Water Embraces Empty Space is now showing at the Goldfarb Gallery at York University, part of an exhibition devoted to Nguyen’s work about the Luf boat. In a second video, titled Above the Sea, Against the Sky, which is projected on a horizontal screen the size of the boat, Nguyen designs both watery blueprints and physical representations, imagining the craft from all sides, including from underwater.
In Above the Sea, Against the Sky, Nguyen recreates the boat built by Luf islanders in Papua New Guinea around 1890 on a video screen as large as the 16-metre craft.Toni Hafkensheid/Goldfarb Galler/Supplied
In the end, the boat is set on fire, as it was intended as a water-borne funeral pyre for the chief.
Connecting Luf islanders with the boat at the Humboldt was Nguyen’s idea.
“It was a very simple gesture: to connect descendants to an object stolen by the German navy,” he said at the show’s opening, the first exhibition of his work in Canada. “When it comes to colonial trauma, it’s hard to fill that void. Sometimes repair is not an option but imagination can fill the space.”
Nguyen’s work, featuring suites of videos and installations, has dealt with issues of colonialism, displacement and diasporas. Previously, he had considered the situation of the Senegalese soldiers who had fought for the French in what is now Vietnam. But he has always been interested in boats.
“I was called a boat person growing up,” he notes, referring to the refugees who came to North America at the end of the Vietnam war.
Having seen this boat in Berlin, Nguyen set out to locate the Luf islanders. He made contact with Stanley Inum, a fourth-generation descendant of one of the boat builders. The German museum has sometimes represented the boat as a war canoe, and the information on its website of what happened on Luf varies from the account Inum makes in a documentary that Nguyen also shot and which is showing at the Goldfarb.
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Inum tells the story, handed down through the generations, of how the Luf islanders retaliated against German sailors – who had arrived to trade but raped Luf women – by boarding their ship and murdering them. When the Germans eventually discovered why the merchant ship and all hands had disappeared, the Imperial German Navy intervened and killed most of the islanders. The survivors intermarried with people from other islands and Papua New Guinea mainlanders, but the Luf language and culture, including boatbuilding skills, were lost.
Today, Inum, his son, Fordy Stanley, and nephew, Enoch Lun, are part of a team building a new boat based on the measurements and photographs they took during a visit to Berlin. Nguyen’s documentary footage shows the emotional moments when they are welcomed to the Humboldt to see the boat. A museum official explains that Germans had believed all the Luf islanders were wiped out, so they are delighted to welcome these descendants.
The curators in charge of the boat note it is very fragile and has been treated with pesticides because of termite damage, before the islanders are then permitted to examine it. (The boat has both sails and paddles, and the islanders refer to it as a canoe. Nguyen has also filmed them back home felling a tree and painstakingly hollowing it out to build the new boat.)
Inum, Stanley and Lun all attended the opening at York, where the show also includes a few samples of paddles and decorations for the new boat, making the connection physical. The exhibition was co-commissioned by Edith-Russ-Haus in Oldenburg, Germany and The Showroom in London, but Goldfarb director Jenifer Papararo felt it was a particularly good fit for her gallery in Toronto because it is also the custodian of a collection of 39 objects from Papua New Guinea.
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Those are historic masks, figures and shields donated to York by University of Toronto architectural historian Thomas Howarth in the 1970s and intended as a teaching collection. Today, the Goldfarb is left with the puzzling question of how to curate these objects unrelated to its collection of Canadian art, but is currently showing them as an open-vault display to accompany Nguyen’s work.
The story of the Luf boat, also told by German historian Götz Aly in The Magnificent Boat: The Colonial Theft of a South Seas Cultural Treasure, is not yet a story of repatriation. In Nguyen’s documentary, Inum, Stanley and Lun hold a fascinating discussion about what might come next. They wonder: Would the Humboldt accept the new boat as a trade? If the islanders were given the old boat, how would they care for it?
Stanley suggests they would set it alight and push it out to sea. After all, it was always intended to be burnt.
When Water Embraces Empty Space continues at the Goldfarb Gallery at York University until Aug. 2.
