Air

Foreword Chris Saines CNZM Director, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art When we assign contemporary art the power to address the global issues confronting us today, we make a case for the agency of artists to change the world — by changing the way we choose to look at it. Perspective is everything, and seeking to understand the perspectives of others is critical to social development and our sense of belonging to a common humanity. The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art embraced this maxim with 2019’s exhibition ‘Water’, an equal parts serious and exuberant look at the many ways that water enables and intersects with almost every dimension of life — an approach we extend upon now, above the water line, in ‘Air’. In March 2020, ‘Water’ closed one month earlier than planned, much like the rest of the world did, due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Suddenly, our shared source of oxygen carried a new invisible threat, one that would fundamentally change how we live and interact with each other. The air, always essential to life, was now loaded with the potential harm of an unseen viral threat. This exhibition is a further contemporary exploration of the Platonic elements that have been a cornerstone of philosophy, science and medicine since the Classical era. Following ‘Water’, ‘Air’ lifts us from the primordial ocean into the vast borderless firmament that intimately and ultimately connects every human. Insisting that we give closer regard to the critical issues of our time, ‘Air’ is by necessity an international survey spanning time and space. It includes works of art that inhale the millennia-deep history of Australia’s First Nations people; that catch our progress toward the precipice of immense weather-related change; and that reveal the effects of the Anthropocene with clear-eyed determination and undimmed hope inspired by artists’ capacities to find innovative ways of illuminating and confronting the world’s most wicked problems. While the gathering of scientific data and its analysis is one thing, entirely another is the power of artists to unlock our imagination and open new pathways to understanding. Tomás Saraceno / Aerocene 5 and Aerocene 3 2019 (installation view, ‘Tomorrow is the Question’, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark 2019) 15 Foreword