Air

We have taken our wars to the air in competitive technology-driven cycles of escalating violence. It has become increasingly challenging to anticipate the implications of new weapons and to mark the limits of the battlefield. In the 1950s, Australia’s British allies sought a location for nuclear weapons tests. They settled upon Maralinga in South Australia, but the Maralinga Tjarutja people did not consent to their Country being used. First Nations peoples who had nurtured this land over tens of thousands of years were treated as invisible. Radioactive dust clouds and debris have caused generations of ongoing health impacts for the people of Woomera, where Kokatha and Nukunu artist Yhonnie Scarce was born. Scarce replicates the rising blast of a nuclear explosion in her work Cloud Chamber 2020. The sustaining form of the bush yam is translated into blown glass to represent a cloud of bodies. When suspended, these forms make visible the generations of souls impacted by past decisions, now living with scarred lungs, uncommon cancers and shortened lives. We do not all breathe the same air. The structural invisibility and the poverty of opportunity experienced by so many became glaringly evident during the global disruption caused by the pandemic, and with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, tragically encapsulated in the final words of George Floyd, a victim of fatal, pointedly applied police violence. If not filmed, Floyd’s words ‘I can’t breathe’ would likely have disappeared. Instead, people took to the streets across the United States and the world, demanding change. Los Angeles and Brisbane–based Palawa artist Jemima Wyman captures the turmoil of these acts of resistance, along with many other instances of protest, in her work Plume 20 2022. Wyman seeks out images of protest and civil unrest from a range of online sources, and then prints, cuts and collages them into a larger picture of unease. In Australia, Wyman’s country of birth, this vast and rising column of smoke calls to mind recent bushfires and pyroclastic storms, as well as local movements against racism and structural inequity. Plume 20 brings the high-key colour palette of flares lit by protestors together with tear gas, the spray of water cannons, the smoke from buildings set alight and the acrid black fumes of burning tyres. We share one atmosphere, but our lives are vastly different. For many across the globe, the beginning of the pandemic was a time of numbing sameness: forced confinement, home-schooling, remote work on online platforms, home deliveries, or perhaps a retreat to bed while streaming TV. United Kingdom–based Australian artist Ron Mueck describes the apprehension and anxiety that can arise in the context of apparent safety. Mueck plays with viewers’ sense of scale to heighten our self-awareness. When we encounter In bed 2005, our body suddenly becomes small, as if we’ve walked into a strange dream. Why has this pale, oversized woman drawn her knees to her chest and taken shelter under her doona? In these unsettling times, our relationships with each other and the natural world seem dangerously out of scale, perhaps even permanently disrupted. The signs of this disorder stretch back in time. Studying them is frightening but necessary to create change. Carlos Amorales conceived Black cloud 2007/2018 after the death of his grandmother. It reflects on not only her life but also the life cycle and the long, and increasingly perilous, migration of monarch butterflies travelling between North America and the artist’s native Mexico. Amorales brings the silhouettes of butterfly and moth species cut from black paper into the gallery, where they journey towards and gather around us. The populations of so many of these species — including bogong moths in Australia — are collapsing. What path will we take in response? Ron Mueck / In bed (detail) 2005 (opposite) Jemima Wyman / Plume 20 (detail) 2022 39 38 Do we all breathe the same air? Do we all breathe the same air?