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

Salima Hashmi , Professor of Fine Art at the National College of Arts in Lahore, began our session . Sharm ini Pereira, curator arid writer based in London, discussed Sri Lanka and Chaitanya Sambrani, who is engaged in doctoral research at the ANU on twentieth century I ndian art, spoke on contemporary Indian art. 1 . South Asia as a geographical region implies cohesion . Although there are shared concerns and issues in the region , in terms of the contemporary visual arts, the d ialogues and activities to date between the countries of this region have been minimal. I ndeed , the pol itics of the region are such that proximity does not allow for this. Rather, an event such as the Triennial , by bringing groups of ind ividuals together, allows for regional communication otherwise not necessarily easy. This issue of proximity was touched on by all three speakers on various levels and in various gu ises . 2 . Interventions into mainstream tradition , especially as they are seen in Pakistan and India, in terms of the State-sanctioning of particular types of visual arts. Contemporary artists who have adopted and then inverted , invented and appropriated these trad itions as a way of radicalising and contemporising the visual arts. 3 . The issue of who represents the contemporary was raised and framed i n terms of the recogn ition in the APT of rural tribal artists and of u rban popular visual culture as being contemporary. Where to next in this particular debate was left as a question and as a challenge. I ncluding the artists Sonabai and Daroga Rham here in Australia begs the question of where this thread will lead . Aspects of this issue are by nature exclusive, but need to be addressed . This issue widened to include comments on how art schools themselves teach , and what they include in their curricula. 8.3: Australia i n Context Chair Charl es Green This session concentrated on one specific issue for much of its time. It concentrated on the efflorescence of art in recent times by the Ind igenous people of Australia foregrounded in the APT's Australian presentation. We wanted to enqu ire into and ask what this tells us, this efflorescence, given the small percentage of Aboriginal Australians in the population as a whole as well as the history of discrimination against this sector of the community. 1 . Speakers Brenda L.Croft and Deborah Hart emphasised very strongly the need to be immensely respectful of others' address forms, of others in every presentation we make, and in our inclusion of others - that we a re not over race or gender let alone class. 2. Speaker Rex Butler asked why it is that writers on post-colonial art (and of course Aboriginal art is now considered within the general rhetoric of post­ colon ialism) seem so often compelled to characterise the western art? They oppose it in such simplistic terms as unambiguous, as unreflective, as falsely universal ist embodying the unified Cartesian ego and bel ieving in the myth of originality when it is just this lack of complexity they condemn in previous understandings of post-colonial art itself. Why in order to construct its own rhetorical space, does much of the discourse that we deal with here have to erect a straw man Modernism so that it can knock it over? Were things ever as straight-forward as th is would suggest? 3 . Whilst Ind igenous artists and many speakers from the floor in particular themselves did not wish to reify an ever so slightly different canon or simplify and polarise a complex art world, many speakers and many people from the audience on the floor felt that the Australian curatorial establishment too often projects Australian art through a canonical and safe image it has constructed of what difference and the contemporary mean , and that this image is over-literal . 4. Med ia culture and the real loss of memory experience except as nostalgia has wiped out a subject's abil ity to claim a truly authentic constitution of his or her identity exclusively through ethnicity, family, race or class: in other words by 1 40