After focusing on Japanese, Chilean, Caribbean and Moroccan contemporary art, the new gallery of the High Marsh dedicated to the discovery of foreign artists and cultures, presented from January 8 to March 1, 2020 the work of the Puerto Rican artist Wylda Bayrón on the heroes and spirits of the islands of New Guinea.
The 193 Gallery's world tour continues in ever more distant and mysterious lands through this incredible series of 24 photographs presented in 2019 at the Musée de la Castre in Cannes.
Papua New Guinea is a little-known country in the north of Australia, belatedly explored by Westerners and still today surrounded by an aura of mystery. Its island territory, larger than France, is home to an unsuspected natural wealth and exceptional cultural diversity, shaped by 40,000 years of human presence.
A professional camerawoman and frequent traveller, Wylda Bayrón has travelled through this hard-to-reach region to meet changing tribal societies whose ancestral heritage is now threatened.
Adopted by her hosts, she has been able to attend sing-sing (festive gatherings) and more secret rites, from which foreigners are normally excluded. She has thus produced a series of portraits of beautifully dressed men, women and children, proudly posing in their ceremonial attire. This original work, exhibited to the public for the first time, reflects the essential role of the bilas: expression of beauty and prestige, a link between Man and his environment.
Other portraits, representing masked men, give a glimpse of the symbolic universe of Papuan myths, populated by ancestors and powerful spirits. A second part of the exhibition evokes, in a more intimate way, through five sublimated black and white photographs, the ritual scarification of young men and women from the region surrounding the Sepik.
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