18 Nias Masterworks in Global Museum Collections

Seated Male Ancestor Figures | *Adu Sihara Salawa*
© Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen | The Netherlands

18 Nias Masterworks in Global Museum Collections

Curated by Steven G. Alpert

Material culture from the island of Nias is well represented in Western museums and private collections. While some of this material often feels ubiquitous, as if it was the product of a long chain of tradition, reigning supreme over the body of surviving artifacts are iconic works of art that are nothing less than remarkable. This month, we are featuring our favorite Nias masterworks, unified by their aesthetic intelligence and flawless execution.

Nias is a jewel of an island. Along with the neighboring Batu islands, she lies near traditional Southeast Asian sailing lanes and trading routes. Mention of Nias and its inhabitants (the Ono Niha and their predecessors) was noted in Arab and Chinese annals, and perhaps even in the Greek writings of Ptolemy, where he named a cluster of five islands off the coast of Sumatra as the "Camphor Islands" of which Nias is the largest.

Camphor, diverse island produce, and enslaved people were exchanged for gold, textiles, weapons, and other items desired by Nias' fiercely competitive, warlike, well-entrenched aristocratic societies whose creative power and penchant for artful displays of prestige and power were celebrated in some areas until the early 20th century.

Today, standing before an impressively built chief's house (omo sebua) is still a marvelous, even humbling experience. In the south, great houses were fashioned by remarkable craftsmen from fine hardwoods erected above massive ironwood and teak pilings, some set at 45-degree angles that ingeniously rendered them earthquake resistant. Within these structures, figurative images of ancestors and those created for the well-being of the house's inhabitants populated shrines in the main rooms, cardinal points, or along the house's galleries.

A sampling of impressive large northern style ancestor figures, siraha salawa, is reproduced from the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, the Dallas Museum of Art, and Paris' Musee du quai Branly, whose most famous Nias statue formerly belonged to Helena Rubenstein. This carving was once the subject of a surrealist composition by Man Ray entitled "La lune se lève sur l'île de Nias (The moon rises over the island of Nias)." These figures were carved from luscious, tactile red palm wood. At its best, a statue should be elongated, bold, yet serene with fine even facial features. As seen in Elio Modigliani's photograph (1886), serenely sitting while gracefully balancing a large crown (saembu ana'a) on one's head for long periods of time must not have been an easy feat. The same is true for a statue's integration of the sum total of its parts. A thoughtfully carved superior image considers 'balancing' the parallelisms, or the equilibrium between the divisions of a figure's body; to include its posture from the back of the neck, to the shape of its head, to the nimbus of its ornate crown.

La lune se lève sur l'île de Nias (The moon rises over the island of Nias).
Man Ray, 1890 - 1976.

Wealthy nobleman, from the village of Tabeloho, North Nias, wearing the tuwu or saembu ana'a crown, 1886 (E. Modigliani 1890: XIX)

From central and south Nias, there are also emotive ancestor images (adu zatua), forked shrines (adu so bawa zion), figurative flat-backed torsos (adu hörö). These include the magnificent towering adu figure housed in Museum Nasional Indonesia in Jakarta, figures stewarded by Singapore's Asian Civilisations Museum, and numerous examples from Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen.

A Nias village's plat and the construction techniques seen in their finest houses rival any in the archipelago. Central and southern structures such as in Bawömataluo (In the north, traditional houses have roundish shaped roofs. Examples of these can be found in Hilinaa and Gunung Sitoli) were often surrounded by well-organized paths and networks of stone plazas, commemorative stone statues, ornately carved stone seats, dolmens, menhirs and other symbols that honored their chiefly class and the ancestors. One of Nias' most compelling surviving artworks is a stone statue of a mother and child that has long been housed in Leiden. Additionally, two ceremonial stone seats (osa-osa- si sara mbagi) of distinction are also presented here.

Old black and white images often showcase splendidly dressed warriors with their superb swords and in their finest regalia. Other photographs illustrate decorated and well-formed utilitarian items that were stored or hung in neat arrays. Two magnificent magic sword bundles, the finest warrior's torc extant, and an early storage box for jewelry and other valuables are also illustrated here. The ease of excellence and the humor of the box is such that it includes additional arms and hands to essentially close and lock itself. This once served as a sort of de facto warning not to interfere with the owner's property or prerogatives and is conceptually brilliant.

With the exception of stone monuments, jewelry, and weaponry — nearly all of the island's older in situ wooden statues disappeared or were destroyed long ago. During the final heyday of field collecting in the 1970s, only a few wooden statues surfaced from Nias (along with a small number of adu of lesser significance from the Batu islands). This was primarily due to 19th-century colonial pacification initiatives, including ardent and destructive missionary activity beginning in the north (1865), where arguably the most impressive class of wooden ancestor figures were once made. What has been described as "The Great Penitence" of 1916 saw a significant jump in conversions and a mass movement away from many traditional practices.

We look forward to expanding this gallery in the near future to showcase and increase our awareness of Nias' grand cultural heritage. In the interim, we invite our readers to enjoy the material culture displayed in Art of the Ancestors' Nias gallery and refer to the Nias artworks that one can access from the holdings of nearly forty of the museums that are listed or have appeared on this site.

— Steven G. Alpert, founder of Art of the Ancestors