11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Open City (In Suspension) (installation view, ‘Declaration: A Pacific Feminist Agenda’, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki) 2022 / Image courtesy: The artist / Photograph: Paul Chapman NOTES 1 Ane Tonga, ‘Jasmine Togo-Brisby: Open City (In Suspension) 2002’, in Declaration: A Pacific Feminist Agenda , Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Auckland, 2022, p.75. 2 ‘South Sea Islanders’, National Archives of Australia , <naa.gov.au/help-your-research/fact-sheets/south-sea- islanders>, viewed February 2024. 3 Tracey Flanagan, Meredith Wilkie and Susanna Iuliano, ‘Australian South Sea Islanders: A century of race discrimination under Australian law (2003)’, Australian Human Rights Commission , <humanrights.gov.au/our-work/ race-discrimination/publications/australian-south-sea- islanders-century-race>, viewed February 2024. 4 Tonga, p.75. 5 Derek Walcott, ‘The Antilles: Fragments of epic memory’ [Nobel Lecture, 7 December 1992], The Nobel Prize , <nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1992/walcott/lecture/ >, viewed February 2024. Brisbane-based Jasmine Togo-Brisby’s practice centres on research into the Pacific labour trade in Australia and the intersection with her own familial history as a fourth- generation Australian South Sea Islander. Created as a site-specific installation for the Asia Pacific Triennial, Togo-Brisby’s Copper Archipelago 2024 is a large boat-shaped structure that recalls the ornate pressed-metal ceilings made by the Sydney‑based Wunderlich family of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A symbol of colonial settlement, Wunderlich ceilings are now sought-after features in period homes and civic buildings in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. Little-known to admirers of this architectural filigree, however, is its connection to the slave trade — Togo-Brisby’s ‘granny’, her great‑great‑grandmother, was kidnapped from Vanuatu at the age of eight and taken to Sydney, where she was acquired as a domestic servant for the Wunderlich family. 1 Togo-Brisby’s granny and great-great- grandfather were only two of more than 62 000 Pacific Islanders who were tricked or coerced onto slave ships destined for Australia between 1863 and 1904. 2 The majority were indentured to labour in Queensland’s sugar plantations, and many died due to the inhumane working conditions and lack of access to medical facilities. Others were repatriated by the Australian government under the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 , also known as the White Australia policy, between 1906 and 1908, when the practice of dumping returnees in the sea or on different — and often hostile — islands was widespread. 3 As a result, very few ever returned ‘home’, and their descendants, the Australian South Sea Islanders, remain one of the most marginalised groups in Australia today. Bringing together two seemingly unrelated forms — the decorative ceiling we may associate with heritage architecture, and the imposing structure of a boat — Togo-Brisby highlights the idea that ships can be seen as the ‘homeland’ for her dislocated and dispersed people. The artist appropriates the embossed tiles of Wunderlich ceilings incorporating motifs relating to her own family’s history, including portraits of her matrilineage (mother, self, daughter) and the iconic form of sugarcane stalks. The experience of viewing this black and copper surface seeks to replicate that of Pacific peoples — especially children — who were lured onto slave ships through the promise of riches or shiny trinkets. Suspended in an intentionally confined space for the Asia Pacific Triennial, Copper Archipelago forces visitors to look up to be confronted by the commanding structure. This upward view, and the feeling of being contained, evokes the experience of Pacific peoples trapped in the holds of ships on months-long journeys across the ocean, during which they would lie down, only to see the dark underside of the deck above. 4 Jasmine Togo-Brisby’s arresting work renders visible a much overlooked people and their important intergenerational histories. Created out of love, Copper Archipelago provides a space for sharing and mourning, and recalls Caribbean poet Sir Derek Walcott’s (1930–2017) description of an archipelago as pieces broken off from the whole: 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 . . . This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their ancestral places. Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent. 5 RUTHMcDOUGALL AUSTRALIANSOUTH SEA ISLANDER BORN 1982, MURWILLUMBAH, AUSTRALIA LIVES+WORKS INBRISBANE, AUSTRALIA JASMINE TOGO-BRISBY ARTISTS+PROJECTS ASIAPACIFICTRIENNIAL 192 — 193