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

The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 22 Fangas Nayaw Amis people Taiwan b.1987 La XXX Punk (still) 2021 Four-channel video: 16:9, 30 minutes (approx.), sound, colour / Courtesy: The artist and Taiwan Indigenous Peoples Cultural Development Centre Subash Thebe Limbu Yakthung people Nepal/United Kingdom b.1981 NINGWASUM (still) 2020–21 Single-channel video: 16:9, colour, sound, 40 minutes (approx.) / Purchased 2021. Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Introduction Questions of what the future might look like and, more fundamentally, who will participate in creating it, are closely related to the idea of the contemporary across APT10. In seeking to broaden ideas of what might constitute ‘contemporary art’, we try to work from a conception of the contemporary not as a genre that represents the culmination of a particular modernism, but in the literal sense of ‘at the same time’ — the time we inhabit together, all at once, through which we navigate. Here, we must acknowledge the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic: human movement has taken on new connotations, provoking the question of how we can now meaningfully connect, given the centrality of migration experiences to artists in the Asia Pacific. Similarly, the spaces we inhabit, those we have come from and those we dream of have taken on a heightened relevance, with profound effects on livelihoods and artistic production. The Māori proverb, ‘Ka mua Ka Muri’ — meaning to ‘walk backwards into the future’ — is a conceptual framework for Shannon Te Ao’s new work and an idea that resounds through projects in APT10, as artists re-imagine their histories and cultures for new generations, as well as prosecute the non-absolutes of historical thinking. 1 This is a fervent motivation for Waanyi artist Gordon Hookey’s work — made on the Aboriginal lands in and around where APT10 takes place — which presents a broad story of creation and history in a way that asks how, for whom and for what reasons such histories were written. These rewritings are central to ideas of indigenous futurism as artists draw on materials, techniques and knowledge for new social conditions and broad audiences, conjuring ways in which cultures carry agency ahead. Subash Thebe Limbu, for example, sees his work as an act of indigenous futurism, which gives Indigenous writers, artists, filmmakers and other creative practitioners agency to imagine and carry out thought experiments and see themselves in the future practising Indigenous knowledge and ideas along with science and technology. 2 The sentiment similarly resonates with the ‘indigenous punk’ contributions of Amis choreographer Fangas Nayaw. While noting that time is not linear, but rather composed of multiple concentric circles, Nayaw proposes a ‘code of action’ based on the condition that the future will be better than the past. 3 Aspects of how we navigate and express our place in the world, and the influence of past encounters that hold meaning today, are embedded in objects, language, teaching and song that carry knowledge across communities and through generations. Filipino-Pohnpeian scholar and writer Vicente Diaz argues that the capacity to imagine a journey beyond the horizon is dependent on embedded knowledge of where you embark from. 4 APT10’s Air Canoe project is centred around the histories and cultures of the reefs, islands and waters that inform local art-making throughout the islands and atolls of Northern Oceania, where understanding history relies on landscape and seascape literacy, and navigational knowledge is an important aspect of cultural practice. 5 Similarly, exchanges over waterways, and the encounters across them, become embedded in forms of art over time, such as knowledge of the winds, clouds and waters that underpinned exchange between the voyagers from Macassar in Sulawesi to the beaches of north-east Arnhem Land, and are told through the objects and materials influential in this pre-colonial history. Within itinerant stories are laments for homes left behind, as well as hope for new circumstances. Among journeys of both encounter and loss, artists investigate experiences in between cultures and places — as epitomised by Salote Tawale’s reimagined bilibili (watercraft), conceived to inhabit a fluid space between two lands, and in a series of images created by Edith Amituanai that tell stories of unrequited aspirations of trans-Tasman travel and take on new connotations during a time of unprecedented restriction. Elsewhere, artists are challenging extant forms of mapping and impositions of colonial and military borders as lines of control. Pala Pothupitiye and Chong Kim Chiew seek to reclaim lands and cultures by interrogating the structures and histories that established boundaries of ownership, alluding to what Air Canoe co-curator Greg Dvorak describes as the ‘mythmaking of mapping’. 6 The ownership of land, the vulnerability of environments and the displacement of peoples are ideas that underpin contemporary art in the Asia Pacific region as artists relay narratives that flow through generations, and form ways to reclaim stories, artforms and erasures.