Beyond the Future: Papers from the Third Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

of the nineteenth century so-called 'un iversal' exhibitions that Marian Pastor Races invoked so usefully in her paper. This is intensely interesting. I do not regret the partiality of these arenas, but merely point out that each has a fascinating particular h istory that must be attended to, if one is to enter into a productive intervention with it, and if one wishes to create d ialogues between artists, writers and curators which enable better understanding across cultural and national boundaries. I now want to turn to two recent projects between artists from d ifferent origins which exemplify some of the subtleties of dialogues across national and cultural boundaries, and which will rem ind us of the specificity of the networks within which we exist and work. As you will see, both are resolutely local, yet have far wider implications. Ties between Indonesian and Australian artists Brahma Tirta Sari Studio from Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and Utopia Batik from the Northern Territory in Australia are exhibiting in APT3. This project is significant because it is the first time that these two well-establ ished batik studios have worked together on the same cloth . It was a generous project, on both sides, which took many risks, both artistic and financial . There had been already an establ ished working relationsh ip between the two groups, with workshops in both Australia and Indonesia in recent years. For e�ample, this slide shows Lena Pwerl and Agus lsmoyo working in Yogyakarta in 1 994. Working side by side, however, had by 1 998 mutated into a desire to experiment with working together collaboratively, and the Indonesian studio proposed this new relationship to Utopia Batik for APT3. The project brought Brahma Tirta Sari to work with eight members of Utopia Batik in Alice Springs in March , 1 999, with the assistance of funds from the Northern Territory Government, and from the APT - and yes, this is an example of artists suggesting a project which works to the exhibitionary brief of the major exhibition . The fin ished work was included in the APT. What I want to emphasise here is that this project explores, in an international arena, certain very particular relationships. Utopia Batik continues to explore the dialogue across culture and language that was first engaged with their adoption and adaptation of the Indonesian technique of batik in 1 977; and both groups also pursue their work on these cloths with a profound sense of the long-standing sacred images and bel iefs that sustain them. For the imagery that they have shared and blended on these cloths derives from both sacred knowledge of country of the Anmatyerr and from the traditional beliefs and motifs of Javanese Kejawin spiritual ity. Local knowledge and practice, then, is now engaging deliberately with others, in an enterprise that negotiates across language, place and culture, and which is enabled by the arena of the international exhibition. This is now not only a local expression or project, but explores one very particular set of relationships, between artists from neighbouring countries, sharing the same techniques but sustained by fundamentally distinct and d ifferent beliefs. Yet the idea of 'the global' hardly answers to our sense of this achievement. It is, precisely, the negotiations across a particular set of possibilities, in this region of the world, that gives this project its purpose and its value. The Timorese and their art in Australia ' Tuba-rai metin: Firmly Grippi ng the Earth' - was an exhibition project in 1 999 that was shown in four venues around Australia. This work grew from Sydney curator Anne Loxley's invitation to Albertina Viegas, a young Australian artist of East Timorese origin, to work together on a project. But it was not as an ind ividual that Albertina responded to Anne's invitation. She unexpectedly replied that she wanted to work with the Timorese community i n Darwin , particularly with weavings, perhaps with pictorial elements relating t o recent historical events. I n her turn, Albertina was surprised by Dona Veronica Pereira Maia, a very senior member of the Darwin Timar community, because she wished to weave an experimental tais - the trad itional weft ikat cloth . This would contain text, most precisely the names of all those who had been the victims of Indonesian aggression, with the names of those killed in the massacre at the Santa Cruz cemetery Dili in 1 991 at the heart of the work. This idea was all the more astonishing because, despite her great learning and seniority, Dona Veron ica does not read or write in any language. 1 08