The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

While this approach has been an important element of the APT, what has arguably given the exhibition its strength is the presence of thresholds: works that challenge our expectations or understanding of contemporary art; the introduction of new and unfamiliar ideas; the untranslatability of certain images and forms. It is in this liminal zone between our different experiences that the exhibition opens up new possibilities for conversation and coexistence. The critic Jan Verwoert has proposed that by inhabiting this zone, we have in art exhibitions the potential for a kind of cultural cross-fertilisation where ‘the demon of one modernity may instead pass from the body that hosted it before to a body formed from another modernity and speak through the mouth of that other body with a different voice’. 5 He admits that this process is messy and slow, which is one of the benefits of a periodic exhibition such as the APT: such engagements can take place in one location, with recurring audiences, over an extended period of time, revisiting ideas and responding to new developments. The artist collective Slavs and Tatars has been interested in precisely this process over the past seven years, taking as their area of research the region loosely described as ‘Eurasia’. Reaching from Eastern Europe to the western borders of China, the area has for centuries been the locus of numerous migrations, invasions, empires and trade routes, where contrasting cultures and beliefs have long existed side by side. Their work in APT7, PrayWay 2012, comes out of a series entitled ‘The Faculty of Substitution’, which explores the implicitly cosmopolitan idea of sacred hospitality by reading one narrative through another, as a way to ‘adopt the innermost thoughts, experiences, beliefs and sensations of others as our own’. 6 By reading the Iranian revolution through the Polish Solidarity movement, or translating a holy bookstand into communal seating, for example, the artists attempt to establish a state of empathy by bringing together disparate histories and indicating the deeper connections between cultures. Slavs and Tatars’ works are at the centre of a co-curated project that brings together works by seven artists from West Asia. Marking the first time that the APT has focused in depth on this region, 0 — Now: Traversing West Asia features works that emphasise its densely layered histories and landscapes. These include the stark photographs of Hrair Sarkissian, which document post-Soviet Armenia as a place of hidden trauma as it struggles to assert national identity; Wael Shawky’s recreation of a Crusader siege of a Muslim fort, enacted with a group of children from a town in Kenya where Christian forces are viewed as liberators from Muslim slave-traders; and Almagul Menlibayeva’s multi-channel video work Kurchatov 22 2012, which combines performance and documentary to convey the legacy of Soviet nuclear tests on the people and environment of north-east Kazakhstan. Erbossyn Meldibekov references similar territory, although from the perspective of the domestic sphere, using personal items that have been transformed through simple actions. His Family album 2011 pairs Soviet-era family portraits taken in front of heroic monuments — a Central Asian custom — with more recent images from the same location, where the monument has been altered or replaced with another figure to reflect the new regime. ERBOSSYN MELDIBEKOV Artist / Kazakhstan b.1964 NURBOSSYN ORIS Collaborating artist / Kazakhstan b.1971 Family album (detail) 2011 35 black-and-white and colour photographs bound in an album; 11 framed pairs of photographs; one framed set of three photographs / Purchased 2012. Queensland Art Gallery / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery 34