The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT10) Catalogue

Artists The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 110 Artist research photo, Vasavilan, Jaffna District, 2021 The absence of the next door (details) 2021 Ink on paper / 15 sheets: 38 x 95cm (each) / Installed dimensions variable / Commissioned for APT10. Purchased 2021. Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Jasmine Nilani Joseph’s distinctive drawings interrogate the ways land is demarcated, divided and inhabited. Through these renderings, the artist contemplates a sense of belonging and reflects on experiences of absence in her life and the community around her. In a seemingly endless arrangement of detailed ink-drawings, Nilani Joseph constructs snaking features of buildings, fences and structural and natural boundaries. In her work, these motifs act not only as symbols of division, displacement and loss in the recent violent history of Sri Lanka but also as signifiers of new homes and new futures. Nilani Joseph was born in the middle of the Sri Lankan Civil War (1983–2009), in the Northern city of Jaffna, at a time of renewed violence in the conflict. At the age of five, her family moved to a refugee camp in Vavuniya where her parents later settled and built a house. At this time, Nilani Joseph witnessed her family and their neighbours moving between their homelands and new territories, crossing borders of conflict and settling within new fence-lined zones. Gradually the artist observed her family become part of new communities which continued to evolve and adapt throughout a long subsequent period of instability. The absence of the next door 2021 centres around events in Nilani Joseph’s experience, in particular the government release in 2017 of land in Jaffna, including the site of her ancestors’ village, previously maintained as a high-security zone. At the beginning of 2018 the artist’s family was finally able to visit their old home and see the forest that had grown around the abandoned houses over more than 20 years. Nilani Joseph felt a longing to return There where it is we do not need the wall: He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’ Robert Frost, ‘Mending Wall’ (1914) 1 and tend to the land and houses, but her parents compelled her to question the relationship between place and community, saying ‘there is no meaning to live in a place without our old neighbours. The empty land looks like another planet without our people’. 2 Grappling with this tension inspired the artist to further delve into the motifs and objects that have signified neighbours and community throughout her life. Her drawings ruminate on the collective memories an abandoned house or neighbourhood might carry, conjure stories embedded in the scarred landscapes and contemplate how transience can shape a sense of belonging. Nilani Joseph’s works construct a unique picture of the rural and village landscapes of Northern Sri Lanka. Trails of fences meander across her compositions, switching perspective and morphing from one set of structural styles to another. Although devoid of figures, her compositions imply stories of everyday life and human habitation. Buildings symbolic of personal histories reappear throughout her work, such as the church under construction around which her family and a small community lived in 1990. Integrated into the architecture and landscape are cooking utensils, farming implements and crops — signifiers of shared activities. These everyday objects are evidence of people turning a plot of land into a neighbourhood. Local fauna, such as Bougainvillea, coconut and palmyra trees contribute a sense of attachment to a particular environment; abandoned and upturned buildings convey the displacement of resettlement; and spaces left around graves signify people lost. 3 Within these landscapes carrying the memories of war and abandonment, Nilani Joseph creates an image of survival and adaptation. Her works represent the building of new communities capable of healing the trauma of past loss. The artist draws attention to how — unlike borders and security fences — the walls between homes are the site of meetings and exchange. The importance of individual homes becomes evident through their relationship with surrounding buildings. Over neighbours’ walls and fences conversations happen, food is exchanged and trees share their fruit. Tarun Nagesh Endnotes 1 Excerpt from Robert Frost, ‘Mending Wall’, David Nutt, Boston, 1914. Jasmine Nilani Joseph names this poem as an influence on The absence of the next door 2021. 2 Jasmine Nilani Joseph, email to the author, 2021. 3 Nilani Joseph, artist statement, 2021. Jasmine Nilani Joseph Born 1990, Jaffna, Sri Lanka Lives and works in Jaffna