11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

deliberately posit inquiries into how cultural practices inhabit institutional spaces. Hierarchies of built and public space are subjects of fascination in Yeung Tong Lung’s paintings, which offer perspectives and glimpses of everyday Hong Kong vistas seldom represented in media imagery, while the architectural features depicted in Katsuko Ishigaki’s landscapes with military bases (shown in QAG’s Watermall) carry complex connotations of warfare, control and sovereignty. The intertwining of built environments with politics, memory and nature is also explored in the work of Muhlis Lugis, Joydeb Roaja and Varunika Saraf. Coded visual languages referencing divinity, faith and creation stories are evident across this Triennial, including motifs and symbols encapsulating systems of knowledge, from geometry to botany to folklore. These concepts resonate with artists focused on repeating forms, symbolic patterning, light, space and architecture, and provide linkages between the ways artists experiment, interpret, decode and create new visual languages. Preoccupation with spatial and formal devices occurs in the works of Szelit Cheung, Shahla Hosseini, Mit Jai Inn, Abolfazl Harouni and Albert Yonathan Setyawan, and manifests elsewhere through evolving cultural symbols and techniques in works by Bernice Akamine, William Bakalevu, Mele Kahalepuna Chun, Madina Kasimbaeva, Zac Langdon-Pole and Darrell Sibosado. Ancestral connections and intergenerational memories offer another web of narratives present in the exhibition. In Timor-Leste, woodcarving represents a long-held practice of honouring ancestors and ensuring their spirits are ever-present. Cultural resilience and continuity are expressed through reinvigorating inherited knowledge systems in the face of generational displacement. The tensions and ambiguities of families moving between cultural contexts is the subject of Nadiah Bamadhaj’s and Jeremy Leatinu’u’s works. Similarly, Mai Nguyễn-Long creates her visceral ceramic figures around the enticing proposal that, in the face of disconnection from language and culture, contemporary art can draw on folkloric strategies to open up spaces for suppressed, hidden and new stories — beyond diasporic trauma — to emerge. The effects of colonial oppression, particularly as a result of forced migration and slavery, appear in projects that uncover and rewrite narratives of indentured labour from different parts of the region. Jasmine Togo-Brisby’s familial history as an Australian South Sea Islander, Sancintya Mohini Simpson’s as a descendant of indentured Indian labourers to South Africa, and the diasporic experiences of Haji Oh and Alexander Ugay — whose Korean grandparents were forcibly transmigrated to Japan and Kazakhstan, respectively —manifest in evocative material explorations. Artists included in the TAMBA project, from communities such as the Tharu, Yakthung and Tamang in Nepal, draw attention to labour and the disparities that have oppressed former generations. Ana Estrada, Nasrikah and Okui Lala, Hema Shironi, Kawita Vatanajyankur and Pat Pataranutaporn foreground the stories of minorities and the marginalised, the nuances of cultural exchange, and create dialogue and advocacy for the oppressed and disadvantaged. As an ongoing series, the Asia Pacific Triennial functions as a small window into the rapidly evolving art contexts of this contrasting region, demonstrating how an exhibition — with a defined locality and institutional structure — can reflect and support its artists. In facilitating dialogues between works and audiences, the Asia Pacific Triennial is an opportunity to develop critical frameworks around them, and to continuously reconsider the project’s CAMP working still, CCTV camera on 34th floor in Worli, Mumbai, filming Bombay Tilts Down in 2021 / Image courtesy: The artists ASIAPACIFICTRIENNIAL 36 — 37 CURATORIAL INTRODUCTION