Wonu Veys

Dr. Fanny Wonu Veys

Wonu Veys is currently a Barbro Klein Fellow at the The Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS) for the spring semester of 2022. For this fellowship, she uses visual and textual sources to piece together the fragmentary historical and anthropological narrative of tattooing in the Pacific archipelago of Tonga.

Veys has curated What a Genderful World, first presented at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam in 2019 and then in the Wereldmuseum in Rotterdam in 2020; A Sea of Islands – Masterpieces from Oceania at the Volkenkunde in Leiden in 2021; the Mana Māori exhibition (2010-2011) at the Volkenkunde in Leiden and published a book with the same title. She co-curated the Australian Art exhibition with Dr. Georges Petitjean and a barkcloth exhibition Tapa, Étoffes cosmiques d’Océanie in Cahors in 2009 with Laurent Guillaut. Her fieldwork sites include New Zealand (since 2000), Tonga (since 2003) and more recently Arnhem Land, Australia (since 2014). Her topics of interest and expertise include Pacific art and material culture, museums and cultures of collecting, Pacific musical instruments, Pacific textiles, and the significance of historical objects in a contemporary setting.

Bio

Her fieldwork sites include New Zealand (since 2000), Tonga (since 2003) and more recently Arnhem Land, Australia (since 2014). Her topics of interest and expertise include Pacific art and material culture, museums and cultures of collecting, Pacific musical instruments, Pacific textiles, and the significance of historical objects in a contemporary setting.

Selected Publications

Books

2018. Collecting in the South Sea: the Voyage of Joseph Antoine Bruni d’Entrecasteaux, 1791-1794. Leiden: Sidestone Press (ed. with Bronwen Douglas & Billie Lythberg).
2017. Unwrapping Tongan Barkcloth Encounters, Creativity and Female Agency, Textiles. London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
2010. Mana Maori. The Power of New Zealand's First Inhabitants. - Mana Maori. De kracht van Nieuw-Zeelands eerste bewoners. Leiden: Leiden University Press.

Articles and Chapters

2018. ‘Papua collections in the Netherlands: a story of exploration, research, missionization, and colonization’. In Pacific Presences: Oceanic art and European museums (vol. 1), edited by Lucie Carreau, Alison Clark, Alana Jelinek, Erna Lilje & Nicholas Thomas. Leiden: Sidestone Press.
2017. De collectie van Alexander van der Leeden uit Numbulwar in Arnhem Land, Australia. Vereniging Vrienden Etnografica Jaarboek 5: 94-116.
2017. ‘Les livres tapa d’Alexander Shaw : le marriage captivant de l’objet et du texte’, in Tapa de l’écorce à l’etoffe, art millénaire d’Océanie de l’Asie du Sud-Est à la Polynésie orientale – Tapa from Tree Bark to Cloth: an Ancient Art in Oceania from Southeast Asia to Eastern Polynesia from southeast Asia to Eastern Polynesia, edited by Michel Charleux, Hélène Guiot & Fanny Wonu Veys, pp. 465-472. Paris: Somogy éditions d’art.
2017. ‘Capturing the ‘Female Essence’? Textile Wealth in Tonga’. In Sinuous Objects: Revaluing Women’s Wealth in the Contemporary Pacific, edited by Anna-Karina Hermkens & Katherine Lepani, pp. 185-210. Canberra: ANU Press.
2017. ‘Between the Cross and the Cloth’, in Tapa de l’écorce à l’etoffe, art millénaire d’Océanie de l’Asie du Sud-Est à la Polynésie orientale – Tapa from Tree Bark to Cloth: an Ancient Art in Oceania from Southeast Asia to Eastern Polynesia from southeast Asia to Eastern Polynesia, edited by Michel Charleux, Hélène Guiot & Fanny Wonu Veys, pp. 276-282. Paris: Somogy éditions d’art.
2015. ‘A feast for the senses: barkcloth during Royal ceremonies in Tonga’. In Made in Oceania. Proceedings of the International Symposium on Social and Cultural Meanings and Presentation of Oceanic Tapa, edited by Peter Mesenhöller & Annemarie Stauffer, 42-57. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
2013. Préserver pour la postérité: des anciens de l’ethnie bundjalung au musée national d’ethnologie des Pays-Bas. Journal de la Société des Océanistes 135: 63-76.
2010. Art or Artefact: Is that the Question? Pasifika Styles at the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and the Reinstallation of the Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Paideuma 56: 263-278.
2009. Materialising the King: The Royal Funeral of King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV of Tonga. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 20: 131-149.
2008. ‘Awakening Sleeping Objects’. In Pasifika Styles: artists inside the museum, edited by Amiria Salmond and Rosanna Raymond, pp. 119-123. Cambridge: Cambridge Museum with the assistance of University of Otago Press.