The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

MICHAEL COOK Australia b.1968 Bidjara people QLD Civilised #13 (detail) 2012 Inkjet print on paper, ed. 5/8 / 100 x 87.5cm / Purchased 2012. Queensland Art Gallery / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery We have never lived in an ‘arrow of time’ with clear direction, but in swirls of contemporary, coeval times: histories going somewhere, separately and together. The concatenation cannot be mapped on a single plane. Curating in such times is a work of caring and connecting, remembering pasts and dreaming futures, giving and receiving, speaking and remaining silent, building weirs and then, in another season, letting them wash away. 1 JAMES CLIFFORD Biennales and Triennales are punctual, hyper-cultivated and stitched-up fields of international (global) art shows. Queensland Art Gallery’s APT, however, has a different temporality in that its shows are linked to a historical collection of contemporary Asian and Pacific art. Perhaps because of this twofold temporality, the QAGOMA event and its Cinémathèque together provide not only a well-cultivated field but also a place to perform that old- fashioned, humbling and at the same time sophisticated activity of gleaning (as in Agnes Varda’s ‘Gleaners and I’) and folding unstitched stuff. 2 LALEEN JAYAMANNE The Maori understanding of history, that the past is something you face, that it is the future that lies behind you, has come to determine how contemporary Maori art is defined. 3 JONATHAN MANE-WHEOKI These words, written by eminent authors from a range of disciplines, capture an essence, a certain spirit and an ethos that is at the heart of a remarkable project — the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT). With this seventh APT we mark a milestone as it celebrates 20 years. At the first APT in 1993, Jonathan Mane-Wheoki made his observation in relation to the Maori understanding of contemporary art in ‘contemporary time’. When we consider it now, it echoes a certainty that is remarkable. Twenty years on, there is something magnificent about this philosophical base that, even at the first iteration of the APT, its future was already seeded. What was to come was already ‘behind’, the ground prepared. According to the great Tongan anthropologist, Epeli Hau’ofa: Where time is circular, it does not exist independently of the natural surroundings and society. It is very important for our historical reconstructions to know that the Oceanian emphasis on circular time is tied to the regularity of seasons marked by natural phenomena such as cyclical appearances of certain flowers, birds, and marine creatures, shedding of certain leaves, phases of the moon, changes in prevailing winds, and weather patterns, which themselves mark the commencement of and set the course of cycles of human activity such as those related to agriculture, terrestrial and marine foraging, trade and exchange, and voyaging, all with their associated rituals, ceremonies and festivities. This is a universal phenomenon stressed variously by different cultures. 4 Likewise, the APT’s cyclical nature ensures that all of us — artists, audiences, curators, writers, administrators, educators and critics — can be involved regularly in registering difference, considering change, mapping regeneration while contemplating the significance of location within the broader context of a rapidly changing world. The recurrent aspects of the APT are one register of time; the project also allows the indexing of different temporalities and histories to come together in the space of the contemporary art museum. A project such as the APT is bound to deliberate on change as it casts its lines across the globe. It faces the complexities of migration and resonates with the impact of diasporic cultures on local ones as it takes into account the rise to global prominence of some cultures over others. It does this because our region has, over the past 20 years, been a place of immense transformation. As Caroline Turner, then Deputy Director of the Queensland Art Gallery, observed in 1999: . . . in many senses the Asia Pacific Triennial occupies the interstices of borders and time, dreams and hopes, continuities, discontinuities and uncertainties of a world changing before our eyes. The Asia Pacific Triennial has never been about certainties. 5 WHERE WE STAND: THE ASIA PACIFIC TRIENNIAL 20 YEARS ON SUHANYA RAFFEL 26