Jim filled a big hole in the New Zealand and Pacific arts community as an artist, curator, friend and mentor. Of Rarotongan heritage, Jim Vivieaere was born on the East Coast of New Zealand in the small but beautiful Hawkes Bay town of Waipawa. He spent much of his life raising awareness about emerging contemporary forms of Pacific art, all the while nurturing numerous other artists and curators along the way. After his funeral at the Fale Pasifika at the University of Auckland where hundred gathered to say their final farewells, Jim made his final passage across the sea once more, this time to Rarotonga, the home of his ancestors, where his ashes were laid to rest at Black Rock.
The following extract is taken from an article written by Kathy Zhang for ArtAsiaPacific (http://artasiapacific.com/News/JimVivieaere19472011)
Image courtesy of Ema Tavola.
Vivieaere’s curatorial work in the groundbreaking “Bottled Ocean" (1994), the first survey exhibition of Pacific Island contemporary art that opened at the City Gallery Wellington, and then travelled around New Zealand, subverted institutional conventions that categorized Pacific artists as merely exotic indigenes. “Pacific cultural origins and traditions can be made a source of creative possibilities rather than constraints,” he wrote in the exhibition catalogue.
In addition to his breakout “Bottled Ocean,” he recently co-curated the exhibition “The Great Journey: In Pursuit of the Ancestral Realm” at the Kaohsiung Museum in 2009, which explored the cross-cultural connections between Taiwan’s indigenous and Pacific Islanders, and featured New Zealand artists Lisa Reihana, Shane Cotton, Virginia King, Greg Semu and Michel Tuffery.
Hundreds gathered at the Fale Pasifika, at the University of Auckland, where funeral services were held on June 12, 2011. Before his death, Vivieaere had been planning an autobiographical installation Oceans In Us that would represent a personal voyage over water, bringing together all the cities he had visited and the people he had met over the years—sadly, an unrealized project. Yet, as friends and loved ones spoke about him, and Pasifika artists danced in commemoration of a leader in the Aotearoa and international art community, the funeral memorialized the artist-curator’s lifetime achievements, while bringing together people who had shared his life’s journey—much in the way he wished Oceans In Us would.
