The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Meldibekov’s photographs, along with his series of enamel domestic pots hammered into the shape of Afghan mountain peaks, link individual and collective experiences of change. As his subjects age and have families, governments fall and rise. The momentous social, cultural and political transformations taking place throughout Asia and the Pacific have always been a major thread running through the APT — ‘tradition and change’ was the theme of the first edition in 1993. With APT7 marking the twentieth anniversary of the exhibition, it offers an opportunity to take a broad look at how artists respond to a restless and uncertain present, which is often expressed through reflections on history and time. One means of understanding history is through archives, and the collection and re-presentation of documents and images has emerged in recent years as a significant tendency in contemporary art. 7 Processes of documentation, research, selection and display enable artists to analyse and construct histories, either as a personal practice or as part of a collective effort. Artist-generated archives and independent research centres are a significant resource across Asia and the Pacific, with many being created over the past two decades in the absence of adequate official archives, or to provide critical alternatives to them. The 20-Year Archive is a segment of APT7 that features four artist projects, each interpreting different archives: Heman Chong’s sound installation derived from the APT archive; MAP Office’s ‘atlas’ of the Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; Raqs Media Collective’s display of materials from the Sarai archive, New Delhi; and {disarmed} imagining a Pacific archive, constructed by artist Torika Bolatagici, illustrator Mat Hunkin and poet Teresia Teaiwa, to explore the military history of the Pacific, particularly in Fiji. These projects are idiosyncratic and partial, rather than linear or comprehensive, envisaging the archive as an active, fluid process of knowledge formation. A number of other works in APT7 echo archival and research- based approaches, from ruangrupa’s display of paraphernalia from a fictional 1970s Indonesian band and Roslisham Ismail’s (aka Ise) cookbook of Kelantanese recipes sourced from local kitchens, to Dayanita Singh’s 30-year collection of photographs and Manuel Ocampo’s reworking of two decades of paintings, to Sopolemalama Filipe Tohi’s vast suite of drawings based on Tongan lalava (lashing) designs. Simultaneously creating and undoing structures of information gathering, each artist, in very different ways, uses the potential of the archive to question history, even their own. As Singh has said of her archival impulse: There is an ongoing desire to undo. That is problematic because the art world would like to feel that this is one definitive project or piece, but that’s not how I seem to be working. I want to be open. I don’t want to be bound by anything, by my gender, by my nationality, by my medium. 8 The desire to transcend definition, to occupy a wider world, is important to many artists. It does not necessarily mean leaving one’s identity behind; rather, it acknowledges that we are many things simultaneously, and have the potential to occupy other spaces. The Propeller Group’s large canvas for APT7 was created in collaboration with graffiti artists El Mac from Los Angeles and Shamsia Hassani from Kabul. Both artists travelled to Ho Chi Minh City to make the work as part of The Propeller Group’s ongoing Viet Nam The World Tour project, which looks for ways to ‘rebrand’ or ‘unbrand’ Vietnam that move beyond existing definitions of national identity. As the artists put it, ‘We don’t feel the need to cross borders, we crush ’em.’ 9 Set alongside the cosmopolitan approach of artists such as Singh and The Propeller Group, however, are contemporary works by artists who are deeply grounded in local traditions, forms and concerns. The display of masks, performance objects and architectural structures by artists from Papua New Guinea, for example, establishes a different kind of presence and temporality in the exhibition. These works — some created for performances and festivals, others commissioned especially for the exhibition and the Gallery’s Collection — combine expressions of kastom and the transfer and maintenance of local knowledge with a worldly engagement with global museum culture and the marketplace. They embody belief systems that are not entirely translatable to external audiences; at the same time, these vivid examples of current practice in Papua New Guinea are exemplary works of contemporary art. As Ian McLean has written of contemporary Aboriginal art: Because the constitutional differences of modernity no longer mattered, Aborigines initiated in tribal lore could also make contemporary art. That lesson, that difference was the opportunity for something more, is also the first prerequisite of globalism. In a straightforward historical sense then, Australian Aborigines were amongst the first to show an artworld, raised on the ethnocentric and historicist blinkers of European modernism, what contemporary art after modernism felt like. 10 The role of Aboriginal art in transforming the modernist definitions of the ‘contemporary’ has now become well established in Australia. This major shift in thinking provided the broadened perspective that has made 35