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

Artists The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 66 (opposite) Errantucation (mist opportunities) (detail) 2021 Performance improvisations filmed at QAGOMA on 23 June, 31 August and 30 September 2021 / Three-channel HD video, 16:9, colour, sound, 15 minutes (approx.) / Commissioned for APT10. Purchased 2021 with funds from the Jennifer Taylor Bequest through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / Image courtesy: The artist The intimate performative work of Brian Fuata is informed by theatre techniques, particularly frameworks of improvisation. Fuata works across a range of sites of presentation, including theatres, galleries, mobile phone text messages and email. In each instance, the intent of his work is its engagement with an audience rather than the traditional representation of a pre- existing narrative. The blank sheet — often understood as a space of ambivalence and absence — is a recurring motif and allegorical symbol, manifesting in different contexts that include emails, paper, SMS texts, concrete, film and, in the case of his 20-minute live performances, a blank bed sheet. In these live ‘ghost’ performances, Fuata, covered in a white bed sheet, moves between different performative modes, re-contextualising the physical space of the gallery from a known space to a moving theatrical stage of subjectivity and persona. Most recently, Fuata has begun creating films that document these performances, featuring subtitles that reference his email art practice; spoken words; animated writing notes on gestural language; discussion of his improvisational methodology; and image-based narrative associations. The text opposite is a work Fuata has created specifically for APT10. Ruth McDougall An open curtain is the psychic fabric for expositing abstraction Set a timer for ten minutes. Wherever we are when the alarm rings is where the performance will end. Time starts now O O O is a r’n’b trill are ad libs All night all night Low light Low light Hold tight Hold tight O: O O is a time code A page is a plane entangling fact and fiction where narrative hooks hang in the air on the floor in bodies of blood and water snagging energetic props. I enter my designated space and draw out objects, features and feelings in the room to make content for improvisation that will then be filmed that will then be stamped with written language that will then be installed in stages that is then spoken about to you off this page of catalogue. OBJECT(I’VE)S AS CONTENT In November 2020 a constellation of things set in motion my return to Brisbane having migrated to Sydney from Kingston in 1999 when I was 19: In the kitchen the boring noise of language until a surprise tune of two guitars and then the love songs and the laughter, pause, food was brought to the table. We ate and there was no stopping the spirit who found a Pacific bird flying one thousand miles across Tagaloa before going back to the house in Liku, inspected the gardens, pulled out the weeds, watered the talo field, and, before entering the house, climbed the tree that grew through the roof upwards, and I know I know I know I could feel my name, urgent pulse in my body, secular visions lasting a second, but it was never forever. I heard my name. I went out, past the woodshed, across the tracks, through a wire fence, onto Broadway. There was my house I rented for 11 years that was finally dated for demolition in March; there was of course COVID-19 fissured state borders between Qld and NSW and there was the impulse to reconnect with family. I write this now on Yagera Country (Redbank Plains, Ipswich) in the home of my youngest sibling Judith and her husband Zeb. My daily train into the city is leading. The Open Studios is part of the Gallery’s Learning Centre where an artist pixelates their practice into small units perhaps for educational tools. One such tool is for said artist to pick from the Gallery collections relevant works or practices to then speak from, find lineage connection, fixed or otherwise. I take from them and add to it. Impulsively ahistorical a white sheet over my body moves me towards works that feature hands. Being a corporeal ghost means my hands do a lot of work. My hands levitate objects. Conduct energy. Manages tone. Gesticulates pointed signage on walls, on an audience T-shirt, announced on an intercom, shouted from a screaming child, massaged from a message in Grindr. ‘What I’m interested in regarding these hand works, is how they are both literal document, relic and representation of their correspondence in much the same way as my ghost hands demonstrate and create the illusion of ghost phenomena like the levitation of a chair, one leg is seen to be held while also floating in supernatural glory, their hands are at once visual because of their biography but also great actors in the epistolary stage of their 30-year relationship. It’s me, who in the comparative distance of art form, locality, community, history draw out of them a different script entirely one collaged from my own shifting personal and artistic self.’ 1 With these hands is a passing subject formation: Perhaps like mist, Perhaps like alluvium, Perhaps like concrete aggregate, Perhaps like saying yes to everything, Perhaps like saying no to some things to ease my wandering ambition, Perhaps like no not a thing, no content but the room, nothings Ray J says ‘G’day’ (this refers to my email performances) Here then is the atmospheric conditions of a diasporic method of: sampling / collage / juxtaposition / correspondence / call and response / a flattening of some things into no things I leave a video message for Pule asking if he’s okay to talk about his delinquent text from 1992, he avoids the question Erring Umming I was stone and in deep forest Here then is this page plane, conjure spatial, zonal atmospheres for content production Content as objects • Zai Kuning and his Untitled Performance uploaded on QAGOMA YouTube channel • Robert MacPherson Hand Spaces made for Peter Tyndall • John Pule’s The Shark that Ate the Sun • Ray Johnson’s Nothings • Kathleen and Leonard Shillam’s Pelicans • IMAGE BANK • Popular song • Brian Fuata • Destiny Deacon’s Forced into Images • Robert Ashley’s Maneuvers for Small Hands • The QAG building material of concrete aggregate dug from the building and ground into dust • The lamps that stood in front me at State Library Qld • The hands of Liliana at GOMA disinfecting the moving rail of the escalator • On Melbourne street dressed all in black, her head wrap merges tightly into a body stocking, cloaked by a three- quarter length puffer jacket, her white face flushed red with spirits. She moves from tree to tree placing her entire body as plant and human are deeply listening. Her hands are large and hold both her and the tree up • Lutz Bacher and Peter Currie’s lecture performance, Show and Tell • + more Endnote 1 I said to one of the QAGOMA librarians and Robert and Peter expert Jacklyn Young. AN ALLUVIAL LOGIC FOR THREE POST-IMPROVISATION FILMS and their screen Curtains Open Up (this is a reference to my email performances) Brian Fuata Born 1978, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand Lives and works in Brisbane, Australia