The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

29 architecture, dating from the seventh century to the present, have been inspirational to her work. But so too was the artist’s training in New York during the late 1940s, when she studied at the Parsons School of Design. She then spent 12 years living and working as a freelance designer for American Vogue magazine, and as a commercial artist and fashion designer for the department store Bonwit Teller. Her exposure to artist colleagues, gallerists and other art world luminaries at the time meant she observed the postwar flowering of the New York Avant-garde before returning to Iran in 1957. Working mostly instinctively, her shimmering works are testaments to modernist abstract principles as well as the purity of Islamic geometry. The one constant of the APT is dissonance. There is a certain impenetrability that such ‘noise’ engenders. An ordered consonance is not possible when the framework demands such broad scope. The voice of the Pacific — and for APT6, it can literally be heard in the drop beat of Pacific reggae — adds yet another pitch. Looking back at past APTs, it has been the Pacific artists who have challenged the structure of ‘seeing’. Perhaps this is due to the nature of contemporary practice on the many hundreds of islands, which also includes indigenous art-making forms. The inclusion in APT6 of powerful customary objects by North Ambrymese sculptors from Vanuatu encourages us to focus on the historical process of artistic creation and the engagement with tradition. In these circumstances, the act of separating oral, performative and visual art practices is both unproductive and uncreative. Why persist when such canonical definitions are of no concern in the local contemporary context? The work of these artists readily challenges assumptions about the stability of definitions within contemporary art discourses in the museum. For artists to alter the museum space is not a new phenomenon. It has a longer history growing from the restless dissent of the 1960s and 1970s, when artists in the West focused their energies on testing the conventional relationships between artist, audience, museum and market. Museum director and writer Sandy Nairne describes the burgeoning history of these phenomena: Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian Iran b.1924 Lightning for Neda (detail) 2009 Mirror mosaic, reverse glass painting, plaster on wood / 6 panels: 300 x 200cm (each) / Commissioned for APT6 and the Queensland Art Gallery Collection. The artist dedicates this work to the loving memory of her late husband Dr Abolbashar Farmanfarmaian / Purchased 2009. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery Opposite Pasifika Divas Shigeyuki Kihara in performance 2002 Produced by Lisa Taouma and the Queensland Art Gallery for APT 2002 / Photograph: Lukas Davidson