If Haus Yuriyal's colours dazzle you, well, that's the point. The vivid greens, yellows, blues and more on the shields - known as kumans - created by the Papua New Guinea art collective create a bright, even hypnotising effect. In the PNG highlands, the kumans would be painted in shades of ochre, brown and black, and used by warriors to startle their opponents during attacks.
However, at the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art's Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, beginning on Saturday, Haus Yuriyal are deploying the same disarming tactic with a different meaning. "You can imagine 100 men coming at you, and each different design is bold geometry using colour," curator Ruth McDougall tells AAP. "The opponent gets dazzled and confused by all of these patterns.
"In this display, they've been changed to quite bold primary colours, and the artists are trying to dazzle their audience, to attract them and to send the message about their identity as Yuri people, being very solidly based in this tradition of shield-making." Rather than warfare, this exhibit reimagines the shields as items of community-building. "They're very explicitly trying to articulate the move from creating objects that are about inter-tribal warfare to ones of peace," she said.
"Outside of the space is a garden, created by one of the women contributors, growing sugarcane, which again, is broken traditionally in that process of reconciliation and negotiation around conflict. "So the whole of .
