the space between tides: a river, a boat, a seabird
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The gallery is curtained by a torrential, pre-summer deluge. Outside, the Maiwar River churns beneath its overspill. I am not disappointed by the prospect of being sequestered within Queensland’s Gallery of Modern Art until the rain subsides, taking my time to explore the Asia Pacific Triennial’s vast and thought-provoking offering. This unexpected watery soundscape provides a serendipitous backdrop for an exhibition in which watery themes make such a strong appearance. Oceans and rivers, boats and seabirds, and the ebb and flow of tides, create ripples between each gallery space.
This year marks the eleventh iteration of QAGOMA’s Asia Pacific Triennial, featuring works by over two hundred artists from Australia, Asia, the Pacific and their diasporas. With over five hundred artworks occupying both of Meanjin/ Brisbane’s state galleries, the Triennial takes on a labyrinthine sprawl. Following any one of its pathways, you will encounter a multiplicity of stories and artistic forms.
Throughout the exhibition, there is a thread that follows current biennale ‘trends’ engaging with art that transcends despair over environmental challenges, and looks instead to generating “new, more sustainable relations with the natural world.”[1] These works address the indelible entanglement between climate and the ongoing effects of colonial capitalism that disproportionately affect First Peoples and inhabitants of the Majority World.
Many pieces show a deep engagement with the archive, where art serves as a conduit between past and future, wrestling with the ambiguities and complexities sustained through the effects of colonialism and displacement. But, there is also power in the reclamation of these archival narratives, and restoration through the continuance of vital cultural practices. There is a strong emphasis on collective and community driven art making, and stories that seek to mend the rifts in communities fragmented by forced migrations.
There is a river in the heart of the gallery. Entering the cool dark of Aotearoa-based collective AWA (Artists for Waiapu Action)’s installation, He Uru Mānuka, He Uru Kānuka (2024), I have the feeling of being submerged. At once, I am immersed in the rolling, aquatic, sonic landscape by Maree Sheehan. On the furthest wall, a large screen displays a video by Alex Monteith, filmed underwater. A hand reaches beneath the surface, stirring up the sediment below which swirls in nebulous plumes. Within this dark, womb-like sanctum, the viewer is suspended within the amniotic lull of the river current. The centre of the room is occupied by a life-sized pā tauremu (stone fish trap), built from mānuka stakes and brushwood, fitted with a kupenga (woven fishing net) by Ngāti Porou tohunga whakairo (master carver), Lionel Matenga. The construction is nestled in a riverbed of argillite, basalt, quartz and coarse sand. This work, titled He pā tauremu - Ngā Mīmiro Moemoeā o Tūmanako: A stone fish weir – The Binding Dreams of Hope (2024), speaks to the impetus of community collaboration that underpins so many of the works in APT 11.
In her recent publication, The Hydrocene: Eco-Aesthetics in the Age of Water, Dr Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris speaks to the relational, hydro-artistic methodologies of working with bodies of water, and the way in which artists can “care for and think with rivers: as vibrant sites of cultural knowledge, as memory holders and as instigators for the urgent renegotiation of human-river relations in the face of the climate crisis.”[2]
This work presents a multidisciplinary engagement between photographer and scholar, Natalie Robertson, and tohunga taiao restoration ecologist, Graeme Atkins. Both artists share whakapapa to Ngāti Pōkai people, and speak to the importance of revitalising cultural practices in restoring and re-storying cultural and environmental relationships to their ancestral Waiapu River.
The installation engages with archival documentation of a 1923 ethnographic expedition hosted by Ngāti Porou scholar, Sir Apirana Turapa Ngata, who constructed a pā tauremu in the lower Waiapu river, and unknown to them at the time, caught the last recorded upokororo (New Zealand grayling), that was once endemic to the region.[3] Robertson describes the archive as a “speaking ancestor”, as she and Atkins take lessons from the documentation from this historic trip to inform their practice. He Uru Mānuka, He Uru Kānuka mourns the devastation of the Waiapu river due to colonial clearing of its surrounding mānuka forests in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and increased floods and rainfall causing widespread erosion. But, through evoking Ngata’s passion for “keeping knowledge alive in the face of rapid change,”[4] AWA also finds hope for future generations, by drawing attention to the vulnerability of the Waiapu river ecosystem, and engaging community members in the building of pā tauremu and biodiversity monitoring. The river is both archive and ancestor, inextricable from the whakapapa of the Ngāti Pōkai: a conduit between past and future generations that holds the region’s histories in its sediment-laden bed.
Haji Oh’s Seabird Habitats (2022) similarly excavates the archive to explore the complex entanglements between indentured Korean labour within the colonial histories of the Asia Pacific, the threat to natural environs due to ongoing extractive industries, and her own family histories.
In a woven cyanotype, the rich blue of deep water, Oh continues a body of work that draws upon archival photography from Australian naval records, primarily depicting indentured Korean and Taiwanese labourers engaged in the guano and pearling industries against imagery of the eucalypt forests near her home in Wollongong. Within this history, Oh considers the journey of her own family and the complication of their identities as a part of Japan’s Zainichi Korean community. The work is suspended from the ceiling using a construction of traditional knots and lines weighted with fishing sinkers, bringing to mind the rigging of a ship and nautical journeys, which engage with the projection of cartographer Aaron Arrowsmith’s 1798 Chart of the Pacific Ocean that spreads beneath it. This complex layering of imagery and duality of meanings resonates throughout Oh’s work, which speaks to many stories, places and temporalities at once.
Within these narratives, the evocation of seabirds, whose environs were devastated through extractive guano mining, conjures stories of migrations and questions the vulnerabilities of freedom. Despite the birds’ freedom to roam, their home is ever shifting and under threat by continued development; just as the archival photography depicts landscapes that no longer exist due to climate change.
The materiality of Oh’s weaving practice resonates with the complex narrative threads that she intertwines, and their inextricability from one another, building a layered picture that oscillates between past and future. There is also an intense physicality to Oh’s weavings, using a backstrap loom in an embodied process where the warp is fixed to the body of the weaver, requiring the artist to hold the tension of the loom in her body. This is metaphoric of the tension and weight that Oh bears as a vessel for these archival stories. Through her work, Oh aims to reconcile the imagery of past and present into one united landscape.
Positioned across from Oh’s work, Jasmine Togo-Brisby’s Copper Archipelago (2024) continues this dialogue of migrations and displacement. As in Oh’s work, Togo-Brisby breaches the gulf of history in a tidalectic rhythm, ebbing between past and present, and the spaces between disparate shores.
Togo-Brisby’s work asserts a monumental presence, creating a space for untold stories, stillness and reflection. I am drawn into the dark room that Copper Archipelago occupies. The floor empty, the warm lights above draw the gaze upwards to the glittering copper panels within them, configured in the shape of a ship’s hull.
In a moving discussion panel during APT’s opening weekend, Togo-Brisby spoke of the need to create a new origin story based upon her own experience as a member of the South Sea Island diaspora, whose ancestors were kidnapped and brought to Australia on slave ships between 1863 and 1904. Dispossessed of home, their community was in the dark holds of these vessels. The work demands the viewer’s embodied participation to experience its true gravity, shifting the audience from passive observers to command engagement and accountability.[5] The act of looking up mimics a gestural tether to the experience of those Pacific peoples borne across the ocean, looking to the deck above.
In the embossed copper panels of the ship, Togo-Brisby appropriates the form of the pressed ceiling designs fashioned by the Wunderlich family in the late nineteenth century, by whom her great-great-grandmother was acquired as a domestic servant. Togo-Brisby reclaims these panels with motifs that tell her family’s history: portraits of her matrilineage, blackbirds in flight, alluding to the Pacific slave trade, and, around the rim, a pattern of sugarcane stalks.
The work takes its title from an address by St Lucian poet, Derek Walcott, who deploys this archipelagic thinking to give shape to shattered histories: “Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.”[6] Copper Archipelago serves as an act of remaking, dissolving the space between histories.
While APT 11 captures diverse stories and practices from across the Asia Pacific region, there is a common thread that runs through them like a river, connecting narratives of community, care, climate justice, and memory keeping that branch from its central channel like tributaries. In Fenner’s Curating in a Time of Ecological Crisis, she considers the capacity for biennales to embody not only the present social, political, and ecological climate, but also to “advance new and collaborative models for a more empathetic and gentle inhabitation of the Earth.”[7] In their reckoning with the effects of the current ecological crisis, and the intergenerational ripples of colonialism, these works speak to both history and provoke questions for what shape our futures may take should we listen to these ancestral voices.