Air

The next chapter, Invisible , concerns aspects of air that do not always make themselves known. Air is not only what’s in the sky but also what gives us room to breathe. This grouping of works includes powerful images by photographer Rachel Mounsey taken at the height of the 2019 Black Summer bushfires, which devoured normally life-giving oxygen to fuel their destructive onslaught. Thu Van Tran and Yhonnie Scarce respectively explore the lingering effects of the military-based deployment of Agent Orange by US forces during the VietnamWar, and the British testing of nuclear weapons at Maralinga, South Australia, in the 1950s and 1960s. Metaphorically speaking, these traumatic stories seem to resonate with the anxiety writ large on the brow of Ron Mueck’s gigantic hyperreal figure In bed 2005, only to become airborne in Carlos Amorales’s elegant black clouds of butterfly and moth silhouettes, Black Cloud 2007/2018 — a no less touching reminder of the fragility of all life, regardless of its scale. The final chapter of ‘Air’ calls for Change in the form of Jonathan Jones’s swooping murmuration of bird-like objects and aural collage of language created in consultation with Dr Uncle Stan Grant Snr AM; in the form of Tacita Dean’s momentous Chalk Fall 2018 that renders the mammoth chalk Cliffs of Dover in the most friable of materials, chalk itself; and in the slow, inexorable change that occurs in Anthony McCall’s Crossing 2016, which makes air visible through shafts of light intersecting with smoke haze. Each of these works effectively situates us in a particular relationship with air: with air capable of supporting the miracle of flight; with air whipping up the waves that relentlessly etch into the English coastline; and with air we imagine we can touch and move through as if it were something else altogether. In each case, air invites us to pay attention to the changes occurring in and around it. For initiating and curating this exhibition with an urgency matched only by its conceptual clarity, I wish to acknowledge Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow, Curatorial Manager, International Art, together with members of her team, including Nina Miall, Curator, and Jacinta Giles, Assistant Curator, as well as former Assistant Curator Sophie Rose. A project of international ambition always requires manifold contributions from teams working assiduously in all areas of its planning and realisation, who are also gratefully acknowledged elsewhere in these pages. ‘Air’ is composed of five distinct but interlinked chapters. We open in the Atmosphere , entering the exhibition through a major new commission from Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno. Drift: A cosmic web of thermodynamic rhythms 2022 is a major statement embodying the optimism with which we must rethink the future. It contrasts with a more intimate but equally evocative series by Dora Budor, Origins I–III 2019, which evokes the primordial atmosphere from which our world emerged, permeated by the distinctive palette of Joseph Mallord William Turner’s Industrial Revolution–tinged skies of early nineteenth‑century England. The exhibition’s second chapter, Shared , is about how we cherish the peace and intimacy of sharing the air with organic life. Katie Paterson’s To Burn, Forest, Fire 2021 imagines the scent of Earth’s first and last ecologies, the burning of incense creating a new link between the most ancient rainforests and those of the future. d Harding’s breath channels their ancestors’ practice of creating negative impressions of objects by exhaling pigment from the mouth directly over them onto a surface. From the more recent past, works by Albert Namatjira and Lloyd Rees depict the flora that absorbs carbon dioxide and purifies our air. Similarly, artists Rosslynd Piggott, Jamie North and Oliver Beer provide different views on how we breathe the same oxygen. In Burn , the exhibition’s third chapter, we are presented with the sobering reality of the air warming around us, signified by Nancy Holt’s whimsical exposure of the ducting of heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems that are normally concealed — those unseen conduits of internal air circulation. At the same time, global heating is dramatically illuminated in Mona Hatoum’s neon-lit Hot Spot 2006, which depicts a world ablaze in perpetual ecological crisis. Conversely, Queensland photographer Charles Page’s sympathetic views of North Queensland mine workers highlight a different perspective on the human scale of the causes and effects of this worldwide challenge. 17 16 Foreword Foreword