Kanak art.

This exhibition at the Quai Branly Museum, the largest organised over the last twenty years on Kanak culture, brings together more than 300 exceptional works and documents from public collections in Europe (Austria, Switzerland, France, Germany and Italy) and New Caledonia. It will show a host of spectacular pieces on show for the first time among the great classics of the world of Kanak art: carved doorframes from the Great houses, jade ceremonial axes, carved rooftop spires and a wide variety of statues and ornaments.

The exhibition is inspired by two main principles: firstly that the Kanak people speak for themselves. The Kanak people themselves provide the visitor with ways of understanding their world and their vision. They comment on the key aspects in the first person, inserting them in history and distinguishing between the timeless and the factual. Secondly, the Kanak people and Europeans exchange gazes. The exhibition attempts to reconcile two points of view; that of the Kanak people watching these visitors from another world and that of the seafarers, colonisers or European missionaries on the Kanak life and word.