Oceania-mania: skulls and statues

Oceania is all the rage in Brussels at the moment. The Cinquantenaire museum (part of the Royal Museums of Art and History) has just opened its Mercator gallery, full of objects from Oceania - statues, jewellery, headdresses, weapons, tools, textiles, even skulls! And the ING Cultural Centre’s current exhibition is Oceania - Ritual Signs, Authority Symbols.

The centrepiece of the Mercator gallery is Pou Hakanononga, a 3-meter high stone statue from Easter Island. The statue was brought back on the Mercator, the ship that took the Franco-Belgian expedition of 1934-1935 to the island. A gift from the Chilean government to Belgium, it is one of only two complete Easter Island figures to be kept in Europe, according to the museum.

Other items to catch my attention were: 19th century Fijian textiles, known as tapa and made from tree bark; the tattooed faces of human heads that were “war trophies”; a ceremonial kava bowl from West Polynesia (kava is a plant whose root is used to make a drink known for relaxing muscles and inducing dreams); ivory and whalebone ear ornaments (ear-rings would not be the right term, given their size!) from the Marquesas Islands; and a headdress from the Austral Islands made of coconut fibres, tree bark, human hair, duck and albatross feathers (see photo).

One downside to the exhibition was the difficulty in finding where it started (signposts were few and far between...), but once there it was a fascinating journey through the islands of Polynesia and Micronesia. Oh and I learnt that the word tabu originates from Polynesian culture...