Answer to the Call
Taloi Havini
Taloi Havini
Answer to the Call, 2021
22-channel sound installation
Overall dimensions variable
Commissioned by TBA21–Academy and co-produced with Schmidt Ocean Institute, co-founded by Wendy Schmidt
Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection
Installation view: The Soul Expanding Ocean #1: Taloi Havini, Ocean Space – Chiesa di San Lorenzo, Venice, Italy, 2021
Photo: gerdastudio
- Date
- 2021
- Medium
- 22-channel sound installation
- Dimension
- 43 min 32 sec / infinite duration
- Credit
Commissioned by TBA21–Academy and co-produced with Schmidt Ocean Institute
TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection- This artwork is part of the donation and long-term loan from TBA21 to the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.
Details
Originally from the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, in Papua New Guinea, Sydney-based artist Taloi Havini explores Pacific epistemologies and narratives through video, installation, sound, and sculpture. The twenty-two-channel sound piece Answer to the Call uses an ancient compositional technique that produces a sonic dialogue through a method of call and response. Including her own Hakö language and instruments that conjure her ancestors’ navigation methods, Havini moves beyond a measuring of space and distance to assert the presence of a much deeper, cyclical understanding of the ocean.
The work results from the artist’s residency aboard the research vessel R/V Falkor in 2020, part of the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s Artist-at-Sea program. During her stay on the Falkor, Havini observed the mapping of the Great Barrier Reef produced with multibeam sonar systems that served to develop high-resolution cartography of the ocean floor. The artist responded to this scientific endeavor by opening up questions around ways of knowing from and with the ocean. The composition in Answer to the Call evolved to include archival sources, such as hydrophone recordings of sonar mapping taken on the Falkor, ocean traveling chants, and an instrumental piece composed by renowned Bougainville musician Ben Hakalitz.
In the face of the current global ambitions to map the world’s seafloor by 2030, Havini delves into the ways in which sound and other senses go beyond Western scientific frameworks as means of spatial measurement. By shedding light on alternative narratives from non-European cultures, she intends to prompt audiences to attune their senses and reevaluate existing knowledge of the oceans. She holds that the universe “also expresses itself sonically in the depths of the ocean and in our voices singing, like in the chants of our ancestors. We congregated on this island to be able to touch those sounds, to greet these phenomena, to become the answer to the call with our presence. Call and response is a bond.”
(Text written by TBA21 and used as a wall label for the exhibition "Remedios", C3A, Cordoba, 2023)