In Pictures: Fiji Exhibition

Revealing stunning sculptures, textiles, ceramics, ivory and shell regalia, and a full-size sailing canoe, Fiji: Art & Life in the Pacific ran from 15 October 2016 to 12 February 2017 at the Sainsbury Centre.

The result of research collaboration between the Sainsbury Centre and the Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania & the Americas (SRU) at UEA, this was the largest and most comprehensive exhibition about Fiji ever assembled.

Focusing mainly on the nineteenth century, the exhibition showed the extraordinary diversity of Fijian art forms and their roles in indigenous culture.

It also showed how Fijian artists adapted creatively to stimuli and influences from neighbouring Tonga and from the arrival of Europeans in the region, first as voyagers, then as traders, missionaries, settlers and colonial administrators.

In 1859, Fijian chiefs asked for Fiji to be admitted to the British Empire. After an initial refusal Fiji became a Crown Colony in 1874, gaining independence in 1970.

The exhibition resulted from a 3-year Arts & Humanities Research Council-funded research project, led by Professor Steven Hooper of the SRU, which examined the wealth of little-known Fijian material in museums in the UK and overseas.

In the exhibition, visitors were taken on a journey through the art and cultural history of this remarkable South Seas archipelago.

Over 270 works of art, as well as European paintings and historic photographs, were loaned by exhibition partners Fiji Museum, the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology at Cambridge, the British Museum, the Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford) and museums in Aberdeen, Birmingham, Exeter, London and Maidstone.

Co-curated by Steven Hooper, Karen Jacobs and Katrina Igglesden of the SRU, the exhibition was opened by His Excellency the President of Fiji and came to the attention of Her Majesty The Queen, who made a visit in January 2017. She is pictured here with the Fiji High Commissioner to the UK, Jitoko Tikolevu, on a tour of the exhibition.

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II arrives outside the Sainsbury Centre for her historic visit of the Fiji: Art and Life in the Pacific Exhibition on 27 January, 2017. She was greeted with crowds of cheering people and traditional Fijian dancers.

The success of the exhibition led to an offer to host it by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the largest in the western United States, and it was toured there from 15 December 2019 to 2 May 2021, where it was opened by the Fiji Prime Minister. (Pictured The Sainsbury Centre)

A highlight of the exhibition was a full-sized double-hulled sailing canoe (drua), made for the exhibition by specialists in Fiji, where it was sailed on Suva Harbour before being shipped to the UK to feature first in HM The Queen’s 90th birthday pageant at Windsor Castle in May 2016, and then in the Fiji exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre.

She subsequently featured as an icon of carbon-free transport at COP23 in Bonn in 2017, when Fiji held the COP Presidency, and is now on permanent display at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. A second drua was built for the Los Angeles exhibition. (Pictured at the Sainsbury Centre)