Opening
Thursday, May 22, 2025
6 to 9 pm

Artist talks in the gallery:
Andrea Carlson and Tanya Lukin Linklater
Friday, May 23, 2025, starting at 3:30 pm

Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn, Stanley Inum, Fordy Inum, and Enoch Lun with translator Kireni Imwe Jean Sparks-Ngenge
Saturday, May 24, 2025, starting at 2 pm

RSVP by clicking here.

May 23 to August 2, 2025

Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn: When Water Embraces Empty Space

Rectangle and Square galleries

The poetic refrain in Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s title When Water Embraces Empty Space calls for a perceptual shift to imagine beyond the possibility of how water flows, fills, and occupies space. It suggests something more than just a passive filling, implying an intentionality, that a relationship and harmony between water and space exists. In relation to this body of artwork, the title imagines an embrace as affecting a reckoning, a rewriting, and a re-introduction. It is a title fitting of an epic tale, one that Nguyễn unfolds through a series of videos, animations with accompanying photographs, and sculptures that recount a story that begins with an over-century old canoe from Luf Island in Papua New Guinea.

The elaborately crafted canoe is an impressive 15 metres long, intricately decorated with both carved and painted motifs. A bold pattern of diagonal lines folding into spirals originally painted in red, white, and black repeats across the main body of the canoe symbolizing fish, with other reoccurring graphics of turtles, stars, and human figures appearing throughout the boat’s ornamentation. (1) The massive sails are woven from strips of palm leaves stretching 15 metres at their longest point. (2) The Humboldt Forum in Berlin where the canoe currently resides cites it as “the last boat of its kind.” The museum’s didactic panel suggests it is a war boat intended for battling neighboring peoples, but the people of Luf were unable to launch it because of a dwindling population due to disease, famine, and the result of “a punitive expedition by the German navy” in the late 1800s. But we learn from Stanley Inum, in his telling of the history of the canoe in the video The Encounter, 2024, that the canoe was actually made for the ceremonial burial of a tribal chief. Also, in contrast to the Humboldt Forum’s public messaging which implies a German trading company purchased the boat, Inum asserts that it was stolen from its inland boat house.

Stanley Inum is from Manus, Papua New Guinea, and one of the descendants of the canoe’s makers. Meeting Inum and his community is the substance of When Water Embraces Empty Space, and central to Nguyễn’s artistic process which draws from the histories and stories of colonialized and diasporic peoples. Nguyễn often uses objects as a connecting point and, for this body of work, reuniting the descendants of the original canoe makers with the boat was the germinating seed from which the exhibition grew, capturing three generations of people of Luf—Inum, his son Fordy, and nephew Enoch Lun—first physical experience of the canoe. The Encounter is a 72-minute video document of the descendants entering the Humboldt Forum, formally meeting three members of the curatorial staff, and walking through the museum’s large Oceanic collection which holds hundreds of cultural objects from Papua New Guinea, leading to an emotional encounter with the canoe, capturing the tension of Inum’s first touch and their concerning comments regarding the sails which, they whisper, are positioned incorrectly, imagining those with knowledge of sailing thinking poorly of their community’s seafaring skills. A final, scripted scene in the video depicts their at times perplexed recounting of their experience at the museum, its staff, and of the canoe itself, deliberating on how to bring it back home.

A central element in Nguyễn’s exhibition is the ethereal video installation Above the Sea, Against the Sky, 2024, a three-channel CGI animation of the to-scale Luf canoe floating in an illusory space, transforming and spinning, glowing and burning. This piece imagines the canoe’s intended purposes: to float out to sea, to spark into flames and embers that disintegrate into ocean. The collective and dedicated act of crafting such an elaborate canoe is as ritualistic as its burning, asserting values that defy colonial notions of utility, possession, and permanence. It is a passage between worlds, a vessel to enter the spirit world as a connection to ancestors. It is a demonstration of abundance, skilled craftsmanship, and a relationship to the material world that is transferred into the spiritual, ephemeral, and infinite in its meaning, in stark contrast to impulses to collect, classify, and control.

This liberation from the ethnographic museum is imagined and realized by Nguyễn in another video, When Water Embraces Empty Space, where an animation of the canoe floats out of the museum, passing through walls, across the Oceanic galleries, through the lobby, out into the courtyard and penetrating the building’s stone façade, floating into the sky as if into the Pacific Ocean, now released. Marked as a major mile-stone, the Luf canoe was transferred in 2018 from the Ethnological Museum in Dahlem to the Humboldt Forum before the building’s renovations were complete. In a media release, Hermann Parzinger, president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, is quoted: “large openings measuring approximately 4 by 6 metres were left in two walls of the monumental entrance hall specifically for this transport; these will subsequently be bricked up.” (3) The building’s walls were literally built around the canoe as a permanent holding. As the boat floats out of these confines, it is guided by a beautiful voice singing of longing and reunion. The voice as guide summons the canoe on a journey through material, space, and time to come home, while also beckoning audiences to imagine the possibility of the boat’s return.

Our three descendants, while visiting the intricate work of their ancestor’s, took detailed measurements of the canoe with the intention of creating a replica. As we present this exhibition, another Luf canoe is being built. The video A Boat is Back, 2024, gives us a glimpse into how the boat is being formed. Fordy works with an elder carpenter to hollow out a tree, which will eventually become part of the outrigger’s hull. They are working outside in the tropical rain forest near where the tree was felled. We are privy to a social, but focused and intent, labour. Four hand-carved sculptures are part of the exhibition, two of which are small replicas of the ornamental wooden curves adorning the bow and stern of the original Luf canoe. The other two are beautifully sculpted paddle blades produced in Papua New Guinea by Fordy for this exhibition. Nguyễn also shows us the present tense legacy of the canoe through two photographs: One is of Inum’s first touch of the canoe at the museum and the other is of a new tattoo on Enoch Lun’s forearm of the main repeating graphic motif on the canoe’s hull, which was also recorded as being tattooed on Darchoi’s arm, a Luf ancestor, in 1888. (4) These object elements convey the impact of the descendants experiencing their ancestral canoe and raises the question of the power of repatriation: What would it mean to have the canoe return home? Nguyễn’s work moves beyond documentation: he is not re-counting history but reanimating it, transforming dispossession into a site of agency and possibility, impacting the people of Luf while reckoning with colonial histories through meditations on memory, displacement, and return.

1. ↺ Götz Aly, The Magnificent Boat: The Colonial Theft of a South Seas Cultural Treasure, trans. Jefferson Chase (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2023), 105.
2. ↺ “In Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation records, [the Luf boat] was given item number VI / 231116a and soberly described as ‘wooden, carved, painted red, white, and black, bound together with rattan and coconut fiber, plant caulking, bamboo, plant fibers, feathers, cloth, sails woven from strips of palm leaves; height × width × depth: 960 × 1520 × 650 cm (total dimensions); width (with outriggers, without counter bridge): 380 cm; height (front mast): 780 cm; height (highest sail, tip): 960 cm; weight: 1358 kilos.’” Aly, 7.
3. ↺ Humboldt Forum, Large Objects in the Humboldt Forum, May 29, 2018, [PDF file], https://www.humboldtforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20180529_Grossobjekte_en.pdf.
4. ↺Aly, 107.