The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

42 Promised lands Jose Da Silva and Kathryn Weir Yael Bartana’s video A Declaration 2006 opens with a man rowing in the Mediterranean Sea. He anchors alongside Andromeda’s Rock in Jaffa Harbor, where he substitutes the Israeli flag planted on the rock with an olive tree. Seen within the context of Israeli–Palestinian relations, the man’s actions are a bold intervention into the territory staked by the flag. The olive tree’s symbolic resonance also imbues the gesture with sacred significance, representing not only a peace offering and a call for an end to conflict, but also a celebration of strength and the capacity for renewal. Promised Lands, a major cinema project for APT6, features artists and filmmakers who similarly find opportunities to rethink the past and imagine the future. As in Bartana’s poetic statement, their work draws on the historical roots of contemporary experience, bringing the past to life in the present to transform our understanding of then and now. Promised Lands profiles cinematic and geopolitical relationships throughout the Indian subcontinent (Bangladesh, India, Kashmir, Pakistan, Sri Lanka) and across to West Asia and the Middle East (including Afghanistan, Armenia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Kurdistan, Lebanon, Palestine and Turkey). In the context of the APT, which seeks to question the cultural and geographical frameworks of the Asia Pacific region, Promised Lands offers an opportunity to open up a deeper conversation with West Asia and the Middle East. This discussion underlines the need for a more specific awareness of distinct histories and genealogies within these regions, while also acknowledging interactions and shared influences across borders. Through the process of bringing political geographies and histories into question, the opportunity arises to reflect on how the region’s complex and diverse cultures and artistic practices contribute to new and more nuanced understandings of ‘Asia’. Promised Lands includes five programs of film and video that consider local politics and individual lives within a larger context. Each program has an autonomous curatorial framework: responses to civil war in Sri Lanka (The Road to Jaffna); the legacies of partition across the Indian subcontinent (Cinema of Partition); dissent and the affirmation of cultural identity in a climate of political intervention in West Asia, as well as the fraught nexus of religious fundamentalism and national politics (The Tree of Life); the traumatic histories linking Armenia and Turkey (Return of the Poet); and fault lines throughout the Middle East in response to conflict and territorial incursions in Israel, Palestine and Lebanon (Eating My Heart). Several broad themes appear across these strands, in particular the intersection of daily life with relationships to land, religious affiliations and cultural histories. Artists and filmmakers across the Indian subcontinent have given expression to the consequences of partitioning British India into the states of India and Pakistan following the country’s independence from colonial rule in 1947. This imposed geographic division along religious lines caused profound physical, social and emotional scars for Muslim, Hindu, Mahmoud al Massad Jordan b.1969 Production still from Ea’ Adat Khalk (Recycle) 2007 / HD video, colour, Dolby SR, 78 minutes, Netherlands/ Jordan, Arabic (English subtitles) / Image courtesy: Wide Management, Paris