Newell Harry
Trade Delivers People (sometimes): Vignettes for N.J., 2017

Two-part installation
Part 1: 20 framed Lambda prints on Fuji Lustre paper, typed texts on parchment paper with artist's stamp, 65 x 45 cm each
Part 2: vessel of pulped Port Vila Daily Post newspapers (collected 1999-2011), concrete pot planters, various found/ made/ collected/ gifted artifacts, pencil, artist's stamp, artist designed acrylic and steel structure, 169 x 35 x 35 cm
Overall dimensions variable

An Australian-born artist of South African and Mauritian descent, Newell Harry examines the transformations of cultures and traditions in the South Pacific resulting from the movements of humans, objects, and knowledge through global industrial transport, tourism, migration, and displacement, or through slavery and colonial expansion. On the invitation of TBA21–Academy, Harry participated in three expeditions to Papua New Guinea and French Polynesia, following the centuries-old exchange tradition of the Kula Ring, a system of ceremonial gift exchange among a number of communities inhabiting the Trobriand Islands in PNG’s Milne Bay Province. 

Trade Delivers People (sometimes): Vignettes for N.J. consists of framed black-and-white photos, notebook transcriptions, and a sculptural element. The title references a work by the Australian artist Narelle Jubelin (Trade Delivers People, 1990–98), an assemblage of found objects of different origins that maps a web of relations around ideas of currencies—hard, symbolic, or human systems of exchange. Harry explores similar terrain, combining photographs with written travelogues, at times related to the photographic images, and in other cases unrelated to them. The resulting vignettes grapple with the task of registering what is lost and what is found in each encounter or exchange, and attempt to give prominence to the overlooked and undervalued. Although viewers may be tempted to see the vignettes as documentary narratives, they are drawn from diverse travels and time periods spanning twelve years and thus the relations between them do not cohere into a single narrative.

This disjunctive storyline is further enhanced by the randomness intrinsic to notebooks and travelogues as receptacles of memories and experiences. This moment of chance is signaled also by the discrepancy of the dates of the images and the texts. Completing the installation is a sculptural assemblage, an almost totemic structure made of different objects of unknown provenance and crowned by a small sculpture of a palm tree.

CURRENT LOANS

Group show: Remedios
Venue: C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Córdoba
Curator: Daniela Zyman
Exhibition 14 April 2023 -  March 2024

Born in Sydney, Australia, in 1972. Lives and works in Sydney, Australia and Vanuatu, Republic of Vanuatu. 

Interview with Newell Harry on the occassion of the exhibition All The World's Futures - Biennale Arte 2015.