This project is sited with Reclaiming Turtles All the Way Down and focuses on two turtle shell masks taken from the eastern Torres Strait in the nineteenth century. One of the masks was purchased by the Royal Prussian Kunstkammer ca. 1860 and is now on display in the Oceania exhibition of the Humboldt Forum (see image below) and the other taken during a scientific collecting voyage from Sydney to coastal New Guinea and the Torres Strait in 1875. For Torres Strait Islanders, masks such as these are recognized as ceremonially powerful objects that drew the human and the non-human together and connected the spirit worlds of the living with their ancestors. This project will combine object analyses and the histories of their taking with Indigenous knowledges to recover Islander understandings of the masks and their significance to the spirit lives of the human and non-human.
