Wonu Veys

Her topics of interest and expertise include Pacific art and material culture, museums and cultures of collecting, Pacific musical instruments, Pacific textiles, gender and material culture, missionary collections, and the significance of historical objects in a contemporary setting. Her fieldwork sites include New Zealand (since 2000), Tonga (since 2003) and Arnhem Land, Australia (since 2014). She is the main editor of the Provenance series published by the Wereldmuseum and is the president of the Pacific Arts Association Europe.

2024. ‘The Prism of Respect: Exhibiting a Raja Ampat Altar’. In Western New Guinea: Social, Biological, and Material Histories, edited by Dylan Gaffney & Marlin Tolla, pp. 384-395. Terra Australis. Canberra: ANU Press.

2024. ‘Purity, Beauty and Magnificence: Color and Sheen in Tongan barkcloth’. In Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of World Textiles (Volume 4: Color), Riikka Räisänen, Bharti Parmar, Nicola Stylianou, and Christine Checinska. London: Bloomsbury.

2024. ‘Nederland en Oceanië: een weifelende relatie - The Netherlands and Oceania: an erratic relationship. In The Lost Museum: Royal Cabinet of Rarities in the Mauritshuis / The verloren museum: Koninklijk Kabinet van Zeldzaamheden in het Mauritshuis, edited by Justine Rinnooy Kan and Sheila Reda, ‘pp. 136-139. Den Haag - Zwolle: Mauritshuis - Waanders Uitgevers.

2023. What a Genderful World - Thinking Through and Making of an Exhibition. Special Issue: Rethinking Gender in the Ethnographic Museum. Journal of Material Culture 28(4): 604-624

2023. Presenting Oceania in the Netherlands. In Zwischen „Südsee“ und „Sea of Islands“, Beispiele der Selbst- und Fremdrepräsentation Ozeaniens/Between the „South Seas“ and a „Sea of Islands“, Examples of Oceania’s Represenmtation – the Self and the Other. NOVARA. Beiträge zur Pazifik-Forschung/Contributions to Pacific Research, Österreichisch-Südpazifische Gesellschaft Band 10, Hannah Dittmer, Irina Eder, Elisabeth Worliczek, Igor Eberhard (eds), pp. 52-70. Wien: LIT Verlag.

2023. Peggy Guggenheim and the Pacific. Special issue: Swimming Against the Tide, edited by Natalie King and Francesca Tarocco. Lagoonscape: Venice Journal of Environmental Humanities 3(2): 305-320. https://edizionicafoscari.unive.it/en/edizioni4/riviste/the-venice-journal-of-environmental-humanities/

2023. “Tattoo the Women, but Not the Men”: Female Tattooing in Tonga. Pacific Arts 23(2): 25-37

2022. ‘Going Native’: Dutch constructions of the Pacific. In Paradise Camp by Yuki Kihara, edited by Natalie King, pp. 135-139. Melbourne, Australia: Thames & Hudson.

2021. The Rapa Nui collection at the National Museum of World Cultures. Archiv Weltmuseum Wien 70: 4-35.

2021. A Sea of Islands: Masterpieces from Oceania. Journal of Museum Ethnography 34: 69-89, with Erna Lilje.

2020. ‘White for Purity, Brown for Beautiful Like Us and Black Because it is Awesome.’ In Material Approaches to Pacific Barkcloth: Cloth, Collections, Communities, edited by Frances Lennard & Andy Mills, pp. 167-176. Leiden: Sidestone Press.

2020. ‘Peggy Guggenheim and the Pacific’. In Migrating Objects: Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, edited by Vivien Greene, pp. 45-55. Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim collection.

2018. Collecting in the South Sea: the Voyage of Joseph Antoine Bruni d’Entrecasteaux, 1791-1794. Leiden: Sidestone Press. Co-edited with Bronwen Douglas & Billie Lythberg.

2018. ‘Willful amnesia? Contemporary Dutch narratives about western New Guinea’. In Pacific Presences: Oceanic art and European museums, Vol. 2, edited by Lucie Carreau, Alison Clark, Alana Jelinek, Erna Lilje & Nicholas Thomas, pp. 229-234. Leiden: Sidestone Press.

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, pp. 127-168. Leiden: Sidestone Press.

2017. Unwrapping Tongan Barkcloth Encounters, Creativity and Female Agency, Textiles. London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

2017. Missionary Attitudes towards Tongan Material Culture. Paideuma 63: 159–181.

2017. De collectie van Alexander van der Leeden uit Numbulwar in Arnhem Land, Australia. Vereniging Vrienden Etnografica Jaarboek 5: 94-116.

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.      

2013. ‘Duty and multi-sensorial qualities of barkcloth during royal ceremonies in Tonga’. In Tapa – Kunst und Lebenswelten / Art and Social Landscapes. Made in Oceania, Ethnologica, NS 29, edited by Peter Mesenhöller & Oliver Lueb, 38-51. Köln: Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum Kulturen der Welt.

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.