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Artists Mere Nailatikau and AM Kanngieser have co-created a sensory installation that brings the landscapes, sounds and wisdom of the Pacific region to the Venice Biennale. By Kate Holden.
Artists Mere Nailatikau and AM Kanngieser
Into a world thundering with noise – not least the bellows of bullies and the shrieks of the opinionated – arrives an artwork that invites us to pause the relentless opining and listen. Listen to the world, its murmur under all this racket. Listen to people who are not heard enough, listen in a way that isn’t just an exasperated suspense before speaking again. Listen and you might learn something.
“Two ears, one mouth”, goes the ancient saying. A collaboration emerging from Fijian, Australian and Kenyan artists is soon to open at the Venice Biennale to demonstrate what that means.
Oceanic Refractions, which features at the Curators Pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition at the biennale, is an installation work that gives audiences a unique immersion in the encouragements of the Pacific. Listening, not interrupting. Asking, without arrogance. The work offers reminders, delights and warnings, and gestures to the rich thoughts of leaders across the Pacific, voices that are not often enough heard in Europe or even Australia. Exhibition visitors get a 30-minute slot in which to sit in responsive seats and fully dwell in a rare moment of contemplation.
Oceanic Refractions has already appeared in Berlin, where it sold out all 180 sessions of its run, and in Hawaii. In Venice it is the biennale’s first-ever Fijian representation, as part of the International Architecture Exhibition curated by Carlo Ratti, which opens in May with a theme of Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. The artwork’s project leaders and producers, Mere Nailatikau from Fiji and AM (Amer) Kanngieser from Australia and Germany, offer the artifice of Oceania re-created in a building on the other side of the world.
It combines screen projections of marine environments across the Pacific with the observations and reflections of elders, chiefs, artists on the coastal life they know well. It offers, through the craft of New Zealand olfactory designer Nathan Taare from Of Body, the fragrance of seawater and, from fabrication studio Studio Folder in Italy, seating that shifts, resonates and adjusts. Joseph Kamaru (Kenya/Germany) is co-sound designer and composer, and the project and website are curated by Elise Misao Hunchuck. “This whole entire work comes from a sensory experience,” says Kanngieser.
It also comes from conversations – talanoa, a Pasifika word for dialogue. There will be few other works at the biennale as meticulously devoted to the last term of the brief: this is a piece that derives from, pursues, embodies, produces and invites collectivity. It couldn’t be more timely.
Its concept is based on refraction, where a line of light – or thought – falls slowly through shallow waters, more quickly through the deep, ever running onwards. The tide of Oceanic Refractions has bounced off many shores, beginning with Kanngieser’s career in art practice, activism, geography and ethnography in the Pacific, and Nailatikau’s storied work in development policy and international relations, and their shared interests in education and climate justice.
They met in Fiji six years ago at a workshop on podcasting. In just a few years the two have run many workshops, made radio series – notably Listening Across Fault Lines for Deutschlandradio – a previous exhibition, and now, with fellow artists, mounted this work. “Things grew,” Nailatikau remembers over Zoom. Kanngieser says: “It’s already been going for a long time and it is continuing to go for a long time into the future.”
They had long been making and recording interviews with community leaders and elders, in a profound ethical practice of trust-building, consultation, permission-seeking, open-call invitation, pledges of accountability and a decolonising readiness to accept refusal. Nailatikau attended COP23, co-hosted by Fiji in Germany, and returned frustrated by the prevailing ignorance and overdetermined presumptions about Oceania and the environment. “For the most part it’s vulnerability, right?” Nailatikau says. “Vulnerability and crisis. And while we acknowledge that, we also believe that there are much more complex ways of conveying Pacific perspectives. We need to make people sit up and notice.”
The work is conceived most urgently as an experiential encounter. The artists wanted, Kanngieser explains, to bring Europeans and non-Pasifika people into a Pacific space “they could relate to beyond the kind of fantasies around tourism and idyllic islands” and other colonial shibboleths. They hope to physically connect individuals from and across different geographical territories. When feedback included reports of some psychic discomfort, the artists were pleased. “That’s what we were going for!” they say, laughing. “To wake people up to what’s happening around them. But also wake them up to the unexpected, but very real, connectivities we have.”
Some visitors complain that particular recordings are difficult to comprehend. Nailatikau tells of one essential interview that was carefully prepared and then transformed by a sudden band-practice session in the next room. But the effort to hear is part of the work’s device. It is, above all, a project operating through conscience and conscientiousness.
Western and English-speaking audiences, Kanngieser says, “always demand that people are articulate and legible in ways that we understand, use words that we understand, using the paradigms that we understand, like the climate-hero-victim kinds of narratives”. For them, one of the most crucial elements in the piece is the stimulus “of really asking yourself, ‘How well am I willing to listen? What effort am I willing to go to, to listen if I can’t hear a word or if I don’t understand what someone’s saying – do I immediately demand that they translate that for me into a way that makes sense for me?’ … That is, I think, really typical of the problems that we are facing right now.”
Conscience extends, in the thoughtful mode of traditional culture, to diligence. Kanngieser explains it’s not just nifty but integral to the work that, “for instance, if someone is talking from Kiribati, we also use sound recordings from Kiribati. We make sure that there are those consistencies there between communities, people and their environments”.
Nailatikau, too, has long contemplated the ethics of representation. In her international development and aid work she spoke with Fijian mothers and children after Tropical Cyclone Winston. “There’s got to be better and more dignified ways we can have these conversations that are multi-way, instead of just, you know, ‘please tell us about the most horrific thing that has ever happened to you, and we will promise somehow to share your story and somehow, um, you know, help contribute to making your life better.’ ” Now her questions begin with an inner questioning: “What is our intention here? Where is the mutuality? Where is the interconnectedness?” And importantly: “How can we make sure that, when we move, we’re bringing people along with us?”
A core element of the work is collaboration with local people, such as filmmakers Dave Lavaki and Tumeli (Meli) Tuqota, both from Fiji, and international colleagues, honouring both inside and outside connections. The first approaches to Fijian locals brought home, as it were, the need for Nailatikau’s axiom of listening across faultlines. Many initially didn’t comprehend the project. “When Amer and Mere announced, ‘We’re going to Venice’, I was like, ‘Congratulations!’ And then I had to google what the biennale was,” says Tuqota.
Explaining it to friends and family, they all recall with amusement, got a lot of reactions of: “So you’re trying to re-create the beach… which we see every day… for people in your video…?”
“Imagine me,” says Tuqota, who supplements his internationally acclaimed short films with commercial work, “when you were trying to explain to me – I was like, ‘So you want me to make a video: that’s it, right?’ And you said, ‘No, it’s this thing and it’s very interactive...’ I was like, ‘Okay, these are buzzwords that have no meaning to me.’ ” They all laugh. “Until everything came together, and then I was like, ‘I get it. I get it.’ ”
Tuqota and Nailatikau both live minutes from the sea. Its presence is bound deeply into their psyches, as it is for coastal Australians such as Kanngieser. For Nailatikau, Oceanic Refractions was a wake-up call “about how you can be used to a certain soundscape and it can shape you and your outlook”. Studying in Madrid years ago, she remembers, she soon felt distinctly odd. “I didn’t know if it was vertigo or low blood. And then it hit me. I was like, ‘I haven’t seen the ocean in almost a year.’ ” Her work still takes her around the world. “But for me, I think that’s why the sound of the sea, the changing tides, will always be something I appreciate, because I remember how it taught me that when it’s gone, my body responded in such a visceral way.”
To cherish the oceans and landscapes that shape us is, when one lives in a Pacific so urgently threatened by climate crisis, no longer enough. The region’s lessons and treasures must, it seems, be made to speak for themselves. Far across the world, if necessary. The Pacific has always been a world that’s voyaged outwards.
Nailatikau observes that the global nature of the team irrigated the project with expertise – for example, Kanngieser’s familiarity with public funding applications, and others with connections to the advertising world in Europe. Fiji itself has only a nascent arts infrastructure, and crowdfunding is usually the way, while obtaining travel visas can become an insurmountable difficulty until connections are made. Such resourcefulness – trading, meeting and exchanging ideas – has always been a Pacific strength.
There are plans to bring Oceanic Refractions back home to Australia and the Pacific, hopefully to coincide with COP31 in 2026. “We built the work to be modular and adaptable right from the beginning,” says Nailatikau, “because we knew that Pacific contexts are very different: if we want to show the work in a school or in a hall or in a civic centre, for instance. We know that the Pacific has very different circumstances, and so we wanted it to be something that can be buildable even in a miniature form somewhere.”
They’re very keen for it be shown in Australia too. “There are testimonies that are very important, I think, for people here in Australia to hear,” says Kanngieser. “The cultural knowledge around listening, around silence, and around relationships with environments is something that is so integral that people hear.” The artists noticed, as well, that children respond enthusiastically to the experience.
The piece is ready for the biennale, but the team will keep working on it. Now they’re considering “how to integrate the work that we’re doing, the testimonies that we have, the communities that we work with; and how to make that work accessible for people”. The artwork website, they explain, is designed to be functional in areas with limited internet access. Accessibility is everything: the conscience comes from the deep sense of custody, from understanding how, as Kanngieser says, “the knowledge that we have been entrusted with is really a core part of what we’re doing with this, outside of things like Venice”. The artists have set up a legal trust to contribute proceeds from the work to benefit experimental artists in the Pacific region who don’t have access to public funding.
At the exhibition in Berlin, Nailatikau and three of the team were able to run in ahead of the day’s opening and sit for 20 minutes in the rolling, resonating seats, surrounded by the shining oceans of their Pacific home while in the middle of Europe. “Being able to sit there with Amer, with Meli and Dave,” says Nailatikau, “sit on those pieces, feel the seats move as we all sat together… it really felt like [it answered] the question that we always ask, ‘Is this something that we feel reflects our community in a way that we can be … proud of?’” She glances away, thoughtful. “You’re always hoping that you can do your community proud, in whatever way.”
Kanngieser chimes in: “One of the questions that we always ask people is, ‘What do you want people to know? What [do] you want people to hear?’ And it’s such a great question to ask because they’re always like, ‘Well, what I want to tell people is this.’ ”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 3, 2025 as "It’s a shore thing".
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