Taloi Havini (b, 1981, Arawa, Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea; lives and works in Brisbane, Australia) is an interdisciplinary artist working across a range of media including photography, audio, video, sculpture, installation, and print. A descendant from the Nakas clan of the Hakö (Haku) people of northeastern Buka, her research practice, shaped by her matrilineal ties to her land and communities in Bougainville, focuses on deconstruction and the study of Indigenous Knowledge Systems. Her often immersive and site-specific experiences draw on ideas of heritage, transmission, mapping and representation in relation to land and architecture. Often engaging with cultural heritage projects, she most recently worked collaboratively with her Hakö clan members to create wall-bound sculptures investigating impermanence, and the embodied experience.

Havini’s artwork is held in public and private collections including TBA21–Academy, Sharjah Art Foundation, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, National Gallery of Victoria, KADIST, San Francisco, CA, USA. She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions and has exhibited with Artspace, Sydney, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Sharjah Biennial 13, UAE, 3rd Aichi Triennial, Nagoya, 8th & 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art Queensland Art Gallery | GoMA, Brisbane, and was recently commissioned by TBA21–Academy with Schmidt Ocean Institute at Ocean Space, Campo S. Lorenzo, Venezia for her solo at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, 2021.

Banner image courtesy of Artspace. Portrait of the artist by Zan Wimberley, courtesy of Artspace, Sydney.

The Habitat series are multi-channel video installations exploring intersections of history, the environment and nation-building within the matrilineal social structures of her birthplace, the Autonomous Region of Bougainville. Havini’s Habitat series is an ongoing investigation exploring the legacy of resource extraction and Australia’s fraught relationship in the Pacific.

Habitat: Konawiru, 2016 is a single-channel 16:9, HD, colour, sound, 3:43

Habitat, 2017 is a three-channel, 16:9, HD, colour, 5.1 surround sound, 10:40 mins digital video installation and was originally commissioned for The National by the Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney), adapted for her Pavillon Neuflize OBC residency solo exhibition, Palais de Tokyo (Paris) in 2017.

Habitat, 2018 - 2019 HD, colour, black & white, 5.1 surround sound, 10:33 mins
Presented as part of the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial, Women’s Wealth project and exhibition, supported by The Australia Council for the Arts. Archival footage was sourced from the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), including footage from personal family archives, Moses Havini and Marilyn Taleo Hatukul Havini.