The Fourth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Brian What seems to me to be lacking in the asylum-seeker debate is the imagination. And while one should call attention to the problem of fetishising culture, it is equally hazardous not to take account of the differences in cultural perception. For example, an asylum-seeker holding his baby over the rail of a sinking boat may not be threatening to toss it overboard as authorities believe, but may be saying 'Save my baby', or 'Look at the threat to my baby', or 'Can't you understand our pain?'. Statements and gestures made by another in another language inhabit all kinds of cultural meaning. This is where art can matter. In effect, it reveals the indirect. But if there is no perception of that other culture, then only one view holds, which is either a stereotyped or an exoticised one. If one cannot take on the face of the other, the responsibility for the suffering of the other, then the whole notion of culture is bereft. As the Moroccan writerTahar Ben Jelloun says, Moroccan hospitality is almost prodigal, gratuitous. Because hospitality is a reinforcement of one's being, one is sceptical of receiving. 'Hospitality is a hunger for harmony.' Unless cultures can be argued for, unless they can be ascribed value and power and wisdom, then only one view would pertain. Hannah It is precisely because the kinds of art previously exhibited in the APT cannot all be traced directly or exclusively to a modernist genealogy that it is such an exciting and self– creating event. There are not always clear compass points, ways of reading or generalising about the art. Perhaps the intellectual tools that you mentioned, Nikos, are not theoretical but imaginative. I am thinking of Simryn Gill's most recent work, in which she photographed rooms inside people's houses in Malaysia.There are no people in the images but a wealth of information - depending on who is reading the image. Each photograph (Oalam, meaning 'deep and inside') is a short story, an encapsulated life, w hich is probably fully intelligible only to someone intimate with the cultures of Malaysia. Contrary to the deterritorialisation of our age, these works are about attachment to place, how our histories and indeed our selves reside in place (and at the same time about the transitoriness of place, of home: the houses we grew up in w ill eventually be pulled down). But they also beg the question of how systems of knowledge operate outside their field of recognition. One might be ignorant of w hat the details of each room signify - the rolled-up mat of the itinerant worker, the flower-bedecked shrine of the Hindu worshipper - but, to follow Brian's lead, they capture the imagination. Perhaps this freedom is the province of art - that an artist creates her own worlds in her own language, which, like a novel, need to be entered imaginatively. It is the nature of art that it may traverse categories without being bound by them .This seems particularly true in thinking about artists like Nam June Paik and Yayoi Kusama, who are so self-defining, such worlds unto themselves, they defy categorisation . 118 APT2002 Brian I think the interesting thing about Simryn's images is that they actually remove the notion of the 'other'. They open out a reading by transforming the inside of our imagination. I think that for this to occur the viewer must give up something, must give in to the image and erase dominance of perspective and legitimation of origins. So it's a two-way process. Actually, quite simplistically, it's a matter of destabilising our own identity. It's about hospitality and grace. Nikos I have not seen the work by Simryn Gill, and I have not been inside a house in Malaysia, apart from the official house which greets all arrivals and transit passengers, the airport. But still I can see a great deal of the deterritorialising forces in the very objects and processes of attachment that you describe. From theory I know that the world experiences mobility in the way commodities, ideas and people circulate. In my imagination I can see how itinerant workers, whether they are in Malaysia or Mexico, are at once trying to survive, hang on to old ways of being, and are also desperate to prosper and create new ways of belonging. The details inside the houses that you describe from Gill's photographs capture the paradoxes and contradictions of this deterritorialising process.The home of the itinerant worker is both similar to and different from the one he left.The Hindu shrine in Malaysia is, I guess, not identical to those in India. Which is the more authentic? A ridiculous and contentious question, I agree, but this is where identity politics starts and stumbles.This is also why it is absolutely necessary to get beyond the classic oppositions of identity politics. But we can't throw out the baby with the bathwater; we cannot simply transcend the contradictions and paradoxes of attachment and detachment in this age of heightened mobilities. I think the debates in the past have tended to focus on the question of difference and dislocation, without sufficient attention to the dynamics of continuity and relocation . So when I suggest that we lack the tools to understand this process, this is a comment more against the institutional and academic frameworks for representing the conditions and forms of invention in the present. The institutions are stuck w ithin inherited models of representation . However, the solution is not found in simply abandoning the old frameworks and then adopting the strategies of contemporary artists. Gill's photographs, from your account, offer us a view into a stranger's interior.This, in one sense, is what all artists do. It is also a phenomenon that is no longer exclusively linked to an artistic sensibility. We are all, to quote Latin American theorist Nestor Garcia Canclini, in a field of translation. Everyone is in the process of making sense of difference, whether this means decoding the communication systems of the new media networks, incorporating mass– produced objects of devotion into our lounges, or facing the moral and economic dilemmas of hospitality towards strangers. Like everyone else, the curator, the theorist, the writer and the artist are forced to think about w hat to select from this world, and how to place it into a space in a way that it makes sense for themselves and for those who come to look, read or attempt to understand. Simryn Gill Dalam from 'Dalam' series 2001 Six of 258 Type C prints 23.5 x 23.5cm Collection:The artist Courtesy: Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney