The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

This year saw the most recent occurrence of the Transit of Venus. This rare astronomical event has, over the centuries, helped scientists measure the dimensions of the solar system, literally mapping our place in the cosmos. The 2012 transit aided research into ever-more distant planets, while inspiring reflections on previous observations. For Australia, this was the 1769 transit in particular, which drew scientists and explorers across the globe — including Captain James Cook who travelled to Tahiti for the observation before secretly going on to search for the Great South Land. He mapped the east coast of the future Australia and the entire coast of New Zealand, claiming both territories for Great Britain. Cook’s voyage represents two different yet related aspects of the Enlightenment project: the search for scientific knowledge, and the introduction of European thought into non-European cultures, often in tandem with colonialism. The quest for deeper understanding of our world is the great human endeavour, but it’s often said that the more we learn, the more we realise we don’t know. Cook’s Pacific voyage, among others, sparked a transformation in Western thought; as art historian Bernard Smith wrote, ‘the opening of the Pacific provided a new world for the philosophers of nature . . . to be numbered among those factors contributing to the triumph of Romanticism and science in the nineteenth-century world of values’. 1 Yet these forays also exposed certain limits in this thinking. The encounter with the peoples of the Pacific (as well as Asia, Africa and the Americas) was framed by the prevailing classical and evangelical Christian concepts of the noble savage and heathen, and the emerging anthropological sciences in turn treated people as objects for empirical study and classification. As the European empires expanded their territories and introduced their belief systems, much indigenous knowledge was dismissed or overlooked and, in some cases, lost altogether. Now, in 2012, the legacies of these encounters continue to play out, and they involve all of us. The world is now fully mapped and densely interconnected, with information from almost every corner available to anyone with internet access. Through the great movement of people over the twentieth century, many of us now live in multicultural cities. And as formerly colonised countries become more economically and politically powerful, their middle classes travel more widely, and their cultures circulate more broadly and visibly, opportunities for different belief systems to meet — and sometimes clash — have grown significantly, constantly generating new forms of knowledge and social relations. The postcolonial world, as curator Okwui Enwezor has observed, should not be considered one of ‘vast distances and unfamiliar places, strange people and cultures’, but rather ‘a world of proximities. It is a world of nearness, not an elsewhere’. 2 The challenge of this proximity is how to locate ourselves in these complex spaces, and how to share them. How can we communicate across thresholds of difference and their mutual limits of understanding? The ancient Greek concept of cosmopolitanism (being a ‘citizen of the cosmos’) — revived during the Enlightenment — with its inclusion of all humanity in ethical constructs of community and human rights, and its encouragement of engagement with other cultures, has found new significance in discussions of contemporary globalisation. In his book on cosmopolitanism, philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah writes of it as a process, to be continually negotiated: ‘In the human community, as in national communities, we need to develop habits of coexistence: conversation in its older meaning, of living together, association’. 3 This world of proximities forms the ground for ‘The 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT7), which, like its predecessors, brings together works by artists from across the Pacific, Asia, and Australia. Since its inception in 1993, the APT has aimed to generate a range of conversations about our changing region, speaking across cultural borders through art works that arise from very different histories and knowledge systems. Over the past 20 years, the increasingly international nature of the art world has resulted in many artists becoming ‘aesthetic cosmopolitans’, working through ‘a productive tension between a globally oriented approach and locally grounded practices’. 4 This process of cultural translation has become a significant mode in contemporary art, where specific local forms and narratives are conveyed in ways that connect to broadly familiar global tendencies, which are perhaps most visible in large-scale international exhibitions such as biennials and triennials. COSMOLOGIES AND CONVERSATIONS RUSSELL STORER DANIEL BOYD Australia b.1982 Kudjla/Gangalu people QLD/NSW Untitled 2012 Oil and archival glue on canvas / 256.5 x 162.5cm / Purchased with funds from the Renshaw Bequest 2012 / On loan from Sydney University Art Gallery / Collection: The University of Sydney / Image courtesy: The artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney 32