The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Artistic work in this area is therefore a key component of the 20-Year Archive, with contributions from Heman Chong, MAP Office, Raqs Media Collective and the cumulative work of Torika Bolatagici, Mat Hunkin and Teresia Teaiwa under the rubric of {disarmed} imagining a Pacific archive. These projects survey artistic positions, lived experience and contemporary life in Asia and the Pacific, along with the corpus of text produced by, alongside and in response to the Triennial. Their inclusion is intended to multiply the voices, perspectives and histories that it covers, decentring, or at least destabilising, the Gallery’s authority as a mediating institution. Their invitation stems from considering how to appropriately contextualise the 20 years of the APT and its subject — the production and reception of art in the Asia Pacific, viewed from Australia’s perspective, the point at which the two great regions overlap. Additionally, the 20-Year Archive responds to certain conditions of knowledge specific to the region it addresses. Throughout the Asia Pacific, entire societies have evolved largely independent of the guarantee of the institutionalised culture and knowledge that underwrote the development of civil society in the West. Archives and related forms of research, such as recorded and transcribed oral histories, have been instrumental in registering the passage of time in contexts where European-style universities, libraries and museums are not the primary sites of cultural consolidation and analysis. In certain instances, like New Delhi’s Sarai, these archives have developed within existing research centres, consolidating resources to concentrate emergent creative and intellectual energies. Sarai’s activities are profiled for the 20-Year Archive by Raqs Media Collective, who helped establish the initiative in 2000. Others — such as Hong Kong’s Asia Art Archive, whose residency program enabled MAP Office to realise the research featured in the APT — have evolved into dynamic cultural institutions in themselves, through fundraising activities and generous community support. The vast majority, however, are sustained by personal dedication alone, operating variously through bursts of energy, disciplined long-term commitment or, simply, lifetimes of curiosity. Regardless of official status, the work done by all of these archives remains vital given the relative paucity of established infrastructures for recording what is and what has been. The case put collectively by Torika Bolatagici, Mat Hunkin and Teresia Teaiwa through {disarmed} imagining a Pacific archive is compelling in this regard. For their respective work in photography/video, illustration and poetry, these three independent practitioners draw on episodes within the historical and contemporary militarisation of the Pacific. In their case, the artistic process is itself the means by which living memory finds its articulation. Though it persists in the absence of a major archive, it also proposes alternative forms — oral, visual, performative — that such an archive might accommodate. This fascinating aspect of current practice deserves to be appreciated not only for its appropriation of archival techniques, but for the nuances the general archival category might accumulate by being incorporated into the contemporary art field. Even within APT7, the convention of coming to terms with the present by reinterpreting the past is by no means restricted to the 20-Year Archive. It is crucial to the works of Atul Dodiya, Manuel Ocampo, Sopolemalama Filipe Tohi and Dayanita Singh, whose excavations of histories of personal and community practices were created with explicit reference to the Triennial’s twentieth anniversary. It also underpins the varied disturbances of official history and conceptions of time undertaken by artists such as Michael Cook, Cevdet Erek, Almagul Menlibayeva, Wedhar Riyadi, Hrair Sarkissian, Greg Semu and LN Tallur. Heman Chong’s contribution to the 20-Year Archive illustrates this complexity, spatially and perceptually. As an installation, his Asia / Pacific / Triennial 2012 constructs a space around the GOMA library, complicating the threshold between the ACAPA archive and the exhibition space and, by implication, incorporating the library into the gallery. As a sound work, it breaks a body of texts selected from the ACAPA archive by Gallery staff into fragments, read across 20 channels by a dispassionate voice. As words from across the 20-year history of the APT tumble disjointedly from the speakers, their apprehension by the viewer is dictated by the laws of chance, bodily positioning, knowledge, memory and personal curiosity. Chong’s work emphasises the open-endedness and individuation of archives, their quirks and specificities when compared with more institutional techniques of consolidating information and making it public. This specificity is important, especially in a region for which archives, in the absence of other means, have such significance as repositories of collective experience. Memory is always contested ground, but its part in producing the future is beyond question. As the collective memories of the Asia Pacific, what role might archives play in the creation of a distinctive regional public sphere? Will this be a reprisal of what the great museums, galleries and libraries did for the development of knowledge in the West? Or will the very form of the archive, in its myriad manifestations, create idiomatic divergences, new interpretations? What kinds of knowledge might all this produce? What new imaginings, what new desires will it engender? MATHEW HUNKIN New Zealand b.1977 The Beach/The Block/Fire/Sky (details) 2010 Ink, watercolour, archival photographs, maps / Images courtesy: The artist 255