Taloi Havini and Michael Toisuta have collaborated to create Dengung Hyena (Hyena Resounding),2020. Unable to travel to their respective communities in light of the imposed travel restrictions of the pandemic, Havini to the Autonomous Region of Bougainville of Papua New Guinea and Toisuta to the Republic of Indonesia, both artists developed this collaboration remotely in Australia drawing upon their respective archives as source material.

By combining Havini's video footage of a ritual practiced along the coastal areas in Buka Island— an event whereby her community witness and celebrate the full moon ushering coral spawning — and Toisuta’s sound recording of his exploration of a Banyuwangi gamelan set, the artist's highlight the connectivity and communality of ritual practices throughout the Asia-Pacific. 

This methodology borne from necessity has opened new paradigms and perspectives for collaborators — affording them the idea to define history not as a sequence of events acted out by individual agents, but as the simultaneity of separate but contingent social frameworks. The work suggests that profound historical understanding  (if not objective knowledge) can be achieved through various kinds of sharing of cultural material; rejecting traditional  artistic and cultural hierarchies. By fragmenting, deconstructing and reconstructing their recorded material, the artist's fracture the narrative fluidity of their archival material; resisting anthropological tendencies. Instead the artists offer a meditation of co-existence. 

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. In 2024, she won the tenth anniversary Artes Mundi prize.