Dayak: The Art of Borneo’s Head-hunters at Museo delle Culture Lugano
DAYAK
The Art of Borneo’s Head-hunters
September 28, 2019 — May 17, 2020
This MUSEC exhibition is dedicated to the art and material culture of the the Dayak people from Borneo and is the result of multi-year research conducted by MUSEC, in collaboration with international scientific partners. This is one of the largest exhibitions in the world ever made on this subject and certainly the largest in the last forty-five years. The exhibition goes with an illustrated book by Paolo Maiullari (Arte dayak, Culture Arts & Books, Lugano 2019, 296 p.). Together they are the highest achievement of the study, valorisation and growth of MUSEC’s Borneo’s art collections; the project was started by the MUSEC fifteen years ago and led to the production of exhibitions and books, as well as cultural diplomacy actions in synergy with the Indonesian authorities.
The 170 works exhibited were produced for the most part between the beginning of the 19th century and the middle of the 20th century and come from the MUSEC, from four other Swiss ethnological museums and from Swiss and European private collections. They are representative of the major dayak art genres well known in the West: monumental wooden sculptures, masks, hunting magic sticks, paddles, shields and traditional weapons, fabrics, body ornaments, garments, skulls, tattoo matrices, baby-carriers, architectural elements, musical instruments, jars; basketry and other decorated objects.
The exhibition occupies fourteen rooms of the first and second floors of Villa Malpensata and has eleven thematic sections. There are two main themes: the first part focuses on the encounter between the Dayak people and the West, the early ethnographic research and collecting interest, which influenced the Western way of looking at Borneo and its native inhabitants. The second part of the exhibition, suggests a change of perspective and progressively leads the visitor to discover the meanings and values of the exhibited works, as expressions of the relationship between men, gods and natural phenomena in one of the last unknown lands of the planet.
At end of the 18th century, the first scientific and military expeditions began to explore the hinterland of the largest Indonesian Island, where they had to deal with the challenging access routes and the bellicose local people who defended their land. From that hard experience a double perception of the island emerged in Western imagination: on one side, the luxuriant forests and the uncontaminated beauty of its nature, which evoked the idea of a primordial Golden Age; on the opposite side, the native Dayak, represented in the literature and iconography of the time as cruel head-hunters. A distorted and limited perception of Dayak’s cultural tradition also concerned the objects produced by local populations, which were considered mostly as fetishes and primitive objects.
The knowledge conveyed by European and American ethnological museums and the ethnographic field research have progressively contributed to produce more accurate descriptions and to better understand the culture and art of Borneo. This knowledge was however exclusively shared between a restricted circle of specialists which only partially affected the vision of the native populations of Borneo and their art in the Western imagination. If approached with other eyes and explored in its profound motivations, the artistic production reveals instead the surprising socio-cultural depth and the mastery of the peoples who produced it.
The interest of Lugano’s Musem of Cultures for the art of Borneo was born with the appeal that the art of this part of the world exercised on Serge Brignoni (1903-2002), whose collection represents the founding nucleus of the Museum. Like many avant-garde artists of his generation, the Swiss artist’s collecting passion has always been oriented towards the traditional arts of the South Seas. Among the latter, Brignoni was particularly attracted by the large wooden sculptures coming from the Indonesian areas of Borneo: top sections of ceremonial poles depicting anthropomorphic figures with a remarkable expressive impact, accentuated by the action of the climatic agents, which carved and hollow the wood out. Brignoni’s intimate bond with this particular genre of works perhaps explains why, at the time of the donation to the City of Lugano in middle eighties, he decided to keep fourteen sculptures of Borneo for himself. Later on, Brignoni gave them to Bern’s Art Museum, which last year donated them to MUSEC. As a result, today MUSEC has one of the largest and most important collection in the world of monumental sculptures from Borneo.
For our italian speaking readers, click to explore the dossiers below.
“Il sentimento della morte nella nostra cultura” by Junita Arneld
“Progetto Patong” by Francesco Paolo Campione
“Un inatteso giacimento” by Bernard Sellato
Visit the Embassy of the Republic of Indonesia in Bern, Switerzland’s website here.
