11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

WIRADJURI, IRISH, GERMANHERITAGE BORN 1967, SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA LIVES+WORKS ONBUNDJALUNG COUNTRY INLISMORE, AUSTRALIA Cuddling bones (from ‘Disastrous’ series) 2022 / Mixed media / 124 × 124cm / Courtesy: The artist and STATION, Melbourne and Sydney NOTES 1 Daniel Browning, ‘Karla Dickens: Cover-Up’, Sullivan+Strumpf Magazine , June–July 2022, <issuu.com/sullivanstrumpf/docs/magazine_june- july_2022/s/15969642>, viewed June 2024. 2 Djon Mundine, ‘Conversations with a crow: Karla Dickens’, Art Monthly Australia , no.212, 2008, p.42. 3 Karla Dickens, email correspondence with the author, 31 July 2023. Karla Dickens is a magnetic storyteller and unapologetic provocateur. Through striking assemblages and installations, she melds and layers domestic detritus in confronting compositions that are piercing commentaries on Australian culture. As arts journalist Daniel Browning has observed, Dickens is ‘a creator of maximal environments, she re-presents found objects to expose their barely concealed history as once functional moving parts in the complex perpetual machine of Australian settler colonialism’. 1 For her installation, As above, so below 2024, in the Asia Pacific Triennial, Dickens brings together recent bodies of work: ‘Disastrous’ series 2022, ‘Hell or High Water’ series 2023 and Keeping it together 2023–24. As witty allegorical idioms, her titles offer insights into the complex gathering of works and their disparate materiality. The phrase, ‘As above, so below’ can be considered on multiple levels. A saying often deferring events to ‘God’s will’, it refers directly to the presence of the crow and astrological imagery in Dickens’s installation. The waagan (crow) is a recurring image in the artist’s practice, and one that holds deep significance, as she explains: For me I believe my ancestors are visiting if the crows appear. The crow gives me strength to fly above my shadows as I walk this life searching for connection and meaning. 2 The imagery calls on the enduring importance of the stars and constellations not only in the lives of Aboriginal people, but for people the world over. As above, so below also encapsulates Dickens’s ongoing critical interrogation of the continuing legacies of colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy, and their effects on post-contact Aboriginal experiences and the natural world. This is overwhelmingly evident in her ‘Disastrous’ series 2022, which confronts the breadth of environmental devastation across Australia, carried out by extractive and exploitative forces. Each collage-painting in the ‘Disastrous’ series explores a pressing issue affecting the Earth — rising temperatures, exploitation of resources, drought, extinction, floods and coral bleaching. Filled with arresting representations of death and destruction, the works unequivocally highlight the failure of political powers to address persistent signs of ecological emergency. An environmental activist for much of her life, Dickens is angered — and exhausted — by the failure of repeated calls for environmental and climate action. Since 2019, Dickens has experienced ravaging fires and record- breaking floods in her home in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales. Creating work is a way to process her experiences, bear witness and raise awareness — and, ultimately, inspire people to act. ‘Hell or high water’ continues this line of provocation by conjuring the catastrophic forces of hellfire and flood. The works are laden with symbols of alarm and environmental exploitation and distress — mining, drought, rust, fire and colonial expansion. Each panel is punctuated by her signature tongue-in-cheek text, steeped in puns, metaphor and black humour: ‘hell in a hand basket’, ‘drowning not waving’, ‘weather or not’. Across the series, star charts and images of the cosmos recur, while the inclusion of halved globes offers a visual cue to the third work, Keeping it together . The dual forests of globe poles — bound with fragile lacings of raffia and twine — symbolise the tenuous feeling of trying to hold the world together before it falls apart. Each pole balances a variety of found objects that speak to lives filled with consumption and waste, while signalling individual desires to address global concerns. The process of binding and wrapping the globes became a meditative practice for Dickens to ease her pervasive unrest, as ‘a subconscious attempt to keep my anxiety contained’. 3 Through these densely populated vistas, Karla Dickens entices viewers to reckon with difficult histories, systemic racism, transgenerational trauma, identity, and the destruction of the environment, and she invites audiences to explore the layers of meaning through dense assemblages, puns and innuendos. Dickens’s works embody both a statement on a volatile and vulnerable world, and an urgent call to action. SOPHIASAMBONO KARLADICKENS ARTISTS+PROJECTS ASIAPACIFICTRIENNIAL 80 — 81