Making sense of this world
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Biennales and Triennales are fraught. As this decade has worn on, the cognitive dissonance embedded in these events has only amplified. The contradictions of their proximity to state and philanthropic power, and the declarative statements of identity, decolonsiation, justice, equality, joy, care, resilience, that spring forth, are a well-worn path of criticism. There’s too often a curatorial vampirism where genuinely powerful artistic practices are turned into a spectacle for the luxury classes.
The 11th APT escapes this. It shies away from grand curatorial statements or a guiding theme, but holds within its geographic framing of the Asia Pacific some 500 artworks by 70 artists and collectives from 30 countries. It feels like a genuine and generative crossroads for artistic practices that centre our region— with the legacies of imperialism that have shaped so many of our lives at its core.
Brett Graham’s monumental sculptures in the foyer and central hallway of QAGOMA feel like the spine of the exhibition. Cease Tide of Wrong-Doing is a spire that stands nine-metres tall, reaching a pointed tip that looks as if it would draw blood, with eight arms extending out from it. Other largescale sculptures form a sprawling installation in the main vestibule that references the New Zealand Wars of the 19th century, and the severe escalation of violence from the British in the 1860s.
Cease Tide of Wrong-Doing is based off a niu pole, monuments that sprang up in Aoeteroa in the 1860s in a Maori led religion movement that sought to spiritually overcome British invaders once they realised they couldn’t defeat them militarily.
During the cultural pre-opening of APT11, artists, friends, families and people from the art community came together to be welcomed by local elders gathered around Graham's Cease Tide of Wrong-Doing. The artists were invited to respond to the idea of a ‘welcome’. Songs are sung, gifts are given, stories of solidarity are shared from artists whose practices are driven by the resilience, ingenuity and community that forms in the wake of the violence wrought upon this part of the world. It feels like a genuine and intimate exchange; a nod to camaraderie during a moment where the dystopic energy of 2024 feels like a continuation of 19th century Western imperialism, and its extractive economies.
APT’s commitment since the early ‘90s to the same region has allowed it to develop a discursive rigor and complexity that is severely lacking in other institutional exhibitions in Australia as they seemingly follow global art-world trends. There’s a poetic resonance across this exhibition that allows artistic and creative energy to expand out beyond didacticism.
Sarker Protick’s photographic series ‘লীন,Of Rivers and Lost Lands draws out a preoccupation with the Padma river in Bangladesh that has lasted 13 years; a constant return to photograph the changes of a body of water that crosses borders shaped by centuries of geopolitics. He poetically captures the resource extraction that goes on— smokestacks in the background of a sand dune with a singular excavator in the foreground; the back of a man on an eroded rock outcrop; a small boy in his Sunday best in the ruins of a house, the river running behind him. There’s an intimacy and emotional charge to each image, as photographs move in and out of sweeping landscapes and water. Capturing the erosion of the region, small human figures dot the image witnessing the decay.
Tokyo based artist Ishu Han’s video works Cultivating the waves and Not Ocean are mesmeric performances filmed on the Sunshine Coast, building off a body of work that brings together humour and futility in the face of climate change. In a singular aerial shot in Not Ocean, we see the body of the artist from above, doing a breast stroke on dry land, with an awkward soundtrack of his body scratching against the earth. Alongside it, Han films himself running into crashing waves of a Queensland ocean, hoe in hand, seemingly trying to control the flow of water.
These works and many around them all speak to dark themes that feel prescient—the ongoing extraction of resources from the earth, climate change, histories of violence - which are all beginning to feel more pressing as the world takes a dark turn to the far-right. Yet the overwhelming energy of APT11 is a buoyant one, that in the face of crisis there’s a creative energy that we can harness to come together to make sense of the world.
Two projects that work with external curators, Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago co-curated with Abraham Abmo Garcia Jr, and TAMBA co-curated with Hit Man Gurung and Sheelasha Rajbhandari, both bring a level of nuance and complexity to the cultural engagement with the Philippines and Nepal respectively, in a way that is rarely seen in an Australian context. Both projects move beyond the museological urge to reduce non-Western cultures to a monolith.
For Mindinao and the Sulu Archipelago, three distinct cultural groups in this Southern region of the Philippines are brought together. The indigenous Islamic Moro and non-Islamic Lumad groups, and ‘settler-root’ artists who have migrated from other parts of the Philippines, leading to a process of displacement, colonisation and armed conflict. The epic painting The Silent Witness by collective Piguras Davao narrates the long history and various cultures in the region. From Spanish Conquisadores, Islamic and Christian iconography, Arab and Chinese traders, a golden toilet and a child eating a hamburger with the arrival of the Americans.
TAMBA brings together seven artists from some 59 different Indigenous nationalities in Nepal, who navigate the complex histories of class, caste and Hindu monarchical rule which was abolished in 2008. Jagdish Moktan’s painting series Drifting Towards the Red Star tracks the history of his father’s engagement with communist movements in the early 90s, while Lavkant Chaudhary’s Batiya Herati Rakhana Akhni (Waiting for Lost Souls) uses terracotta to narrate the history of Tharu indigenous people who were on the receiving end of state violence during recent internal wars.
APT has faced a range of criticisms in the past, which rightfully questioned its level of genuine reciprocal engagement with the region across its various iterations, and its capacity to fall in to a curatorial mode that feels ethnographic. This sprawling APT11 brings together a range of contemporary and traditional works from around the region. It leaves open an abundance of experiences, opening up cracks in dialogue between artists and audience that can respond to the aesthetic and poetic resonance of the work, and dive deeper into the geopolitical histories that is a driving force for so many of these artists.