The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

The 20-Year Archive places within the body of APT7 a collective consideration of the event’s historical context. It gathers material from across the APT’s two-decade history, putting it in dialogue with artist interpretations of documents drawn from archives throughout the Asia Pacific region. Installed across two locations in QAG and GOMA, positioned at the northern- and southernmost points of the exhibition, the 20-Year Archive functions as physical and discursive ‘bookends’ to APT7. As both a point of rest and a platform for ongoing audience enquiry in both venues, it provides an opportunity to reflect on the framework of the exhibition itself, whose history coincides with a period of pronounced social, cultural and economic shifts in the two vast, overlapping geographical regions that make up its field of reference. In doing so, the 20-Year Archive documents the Triennial and its context, past and present, enriching the field of possible interpretations of its current iteration and emphasising memory’s role in imagining the future. Appropriately, the 20-Year Archive’s two physical locations have their own histories as archival storage and display sites. At QAG, the archive is housed beneath the mezzanine that exhibits highlights from the Gallery’s collection of European art to 1900. With its low ceiling and intimate atmosphere, this space has regularly functioned as a resource hub, hosting presentations of works on paper, videos, documents and publications in a manner that might be described as traditionally museological. This presentation mode encourages direct physical and intellectual audience engagement, enabling viewers to closely examine the vitrines’ contents, view film and video footage on small screens, and leaf through bound research material. The third- level concourse at GOMA, meanwhile, contains the Gallery’s reference library, which houses a significant repository of documentary and research materials, the archives of the Australian Centre of Asia Pacific Art (ACAPA), a rich by-product of the APT. For the 20-Year Archive, a multi-screen video presentation in the space outside the library hosts artist interviews conducted for the APT since its inception, reproducing the hushed, close-quarters mode of spectatorship that tends to operate within the walls of the library proper. Such histories of site-specific displays are helpful when considering how the production and presentation of archives differ from other display modes, as well as their purchase in recent artistic practice and their relevance in the Asia Pacific. Put broadly, archives are mechanisms for accumulating, conserving and retrieving knowledge. They are generally open-ended in structure, and can be accessed through any number of possible points. In this sense, their presentation is distinct from more didactic modes. For example, chronologies, documentaries and lectures tend to be more authoritative in tone and impact, offering clear interpretative frameworks while being necessarily exclusive in structure — facts and events are included for their capacity to influence or be indicative of broader trends. The act of making a chronology is an act of editing, of cutting away the preponderance of lived history; the more authoritative the compilation, the greater the chance that an omitted moment will be excluded from future accounts. While by no means exhaustive, archival presentation at least implies its own relativity, the existence of material outside itself. Archives generally offer a mass of material to navigate, allowing different users to create multiple paths through documents. Whether personal or collective, independent or institutional, they can be highly idiosyncratic, often differing radically in agenda. This individuation is reciprocated in the interpretation of knowledge they encourage, which is highly dependent on the viewer’s curiosity. In contrast to art exhibitions, which traditionally tend to pace works in order to stage encounters and direct viewer movement, archives privilege a more static, committed mode of engagement, often providing comfortable and convivial environments in which information can be explored and discussed. Recently, however, archival presentation has entered the technical repertoire of contemporary art exhibition-making. This is thanks to the rise of artistic activity within the field and its subsequent institutional validation; to the physical and stylistic requirements of recent installation, with its tendency toward documenting actions, performances and events, rather than art objects in the more traditional sense; and to the demand for contemporary art institutions to provide greater access to interpretative and educational material for growing audiences. Art’s embrace of archival practices — selecting, regulating and representing knowledge for various publics — has accordingly become more complex, operating in dialogue with institutional agendas, as well as broader mechanisms for communicating and interpreting information, most notably the internet. THE 20-YEAR ARCHIVE: AN ORIENTATION REUBEN KEEHAN DAYANITA SINGH India b.1961 File room 5D (from ‘ File room ’ series) 2011 Pigment print / 46 x 46cm / Image courtesy: The artist and Nature Morte, New Delhi 252