The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

In a year that has been one of the most turbulent in recent times for asylum seekers crossing national borders in our region, Tintin Wulia’s work for APT7 is a biting reminder of the cruel element of chance in life, and the inevitable contingency of identity. It centres on a small but vital booklet: the passport that confers national belonging. This is timely: no other contemporary political issue for this country — and for Australia’s neighbours — has caused as much debate and dissension as the question of how national borders are traversed by the flows of peoples who, impelled by war, political change or community-based persecution in their own countries, seek life in new lands. 1 Wulia compels her audiences to enter into these considerations by asking them to take part in a game. She playfully proposes life as a kind of lottery, equally composed of luck, ambition, energy, aggression, happenstance, or all of these. Wulia’s games arcade is filled with bright machines suggesting fun, excitement and the possibility that one can alter one’s own fate. Can you win by grabbing at a prize enclosed in this sealed glass box? Can you? Here is the scenario: visitors are invited to operate a claw machine, exactly like those encountered in games arcades all over the world. Inside the box are not the familiar fluffy toys and cheap gewgaws of the fun parlour, however, but piles of passports in a multitude of colours. Take the controls — see if you can pick one up. It’s enticing, but also frustrating: no matter how hard you try, they slip out of your grasp. And, alongside this visitor-operated machine, is a bank of others that are its ‘slaves’, mimicking its operations. It’s very simple: for every purposeful action one observes, multiple others are taking place elsewhere; by this simple device, Eeny Meeny Money Moe 2012 neatly alludes to the innumerable replicated individual actions that make up modern mass societies. When the prize is a passport, a document that guarantees one’s right to belong in a place and to traverse borders in an orderly fashion, one sees that this is a deadly game. Failure is not an option. But these are no ordinary passports: they are replicas. Each stands in for the life history of every individual who seeks a coveted passport, together with the possibility of the different life it may hold within its slim bindings. The disjunction between this fragile, tactile materiality and the ungovernable jerky action of the mass-produced claw-machine is, while understated, almost unbearably poignant. This strategy of telling juxtaposition is one of Tintin’s trademarks. Previous works, such as her ongoing project (Re)Collection of Togetherness , have featured multiple fake passports with squashed ‘mosquitoes’ on their pages, suggesting that while passports regulate mobility, mosquitoes are free to fly across any border, carrying with them the blood from people of all nationalities: the 2011 iteration of the project allowed gallery visitors to draw lots in order to select just one passport. Even tougher poetics were embodied in her installation Invasion 2008, where razor blades controlled by magnets were linked to kites fashioned from her own family’s identity papers. Given that her family has held papers issued by Chinese, Indonesian, Dutch and Japanese authorities over the last century, and Tintin herself lives and works in both Indonesia and Melbourne, it is clear that this theme of mobility, change and contingency is inspired by the artist’s family history. 2 Crucially, as members of Tintin’s audience, we are invited to participate in this scenario. Central to Eeny Meeny Money Moe is the idea of the complicity of every one of us in the work and the issues it conjures — our participation is assured no matter where we come from or how we happen to live now, and however the work may be configured in the specific social and exhibition context of APT7 in Brisbane. Tintin Wulia is alive to the rich possibilities for opening up topical dialogues residing in multimedia and multiplatform art practices, and, in one sense, her works have exemplified what theorist Claire Bishop has described as the emphasis in relational aesthetics in privileging ‘intersubjective relations over detached opticality’. 3 In this way, Tintin’s works are part of a broad international tendency that mobilises audiences, that impels us to be active. And, clearly, we are all in this together. Julie Ewington 1 As an indication of the most recent national turmoil surrounding unauthorised boat arrivals and the loss of life at sea, see ABC News , <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-08-15/lower-house-passes- offshore-processing-legislation/4200200>, viewed 15 August 2012. 2 See Jonathan Thomson, ‘Indonesian mythologies’, Asian Art News , vol.21, no.4, July–August 2011, pp.74–5; and Edwin Jurriëns, ‘Motion and distortion: The media in the art of Jompet and Tintin’, Indonesia and the Malay World , vol.37, no.109, November 2009, pp.277–97, especially pp.289–90, for accounts of these projects. See also Landing Soon #5: Tintin Wulia [exhibition catalogue], Cemeti Art House, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, 2008; and Carla Bianpoen, ‘Indonesian women artists make their mark’, n.paradoxa , vol.29, 2012, pp.66–76, especially. pp.74–6. 3 See Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and relational aesthetics’, October , no.110, fall 2004, pp.51–79, especially p.61. TINTIN WULIA Crossing borders 214