The Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Drawing on the tradition of Pakistani miniature painting, Risham Syed’s delicate works focus on the spaces between buildings. Inviting close inspection, her jewel-like canvases transport the viewer behind the scenes of contemporary Lahore, capturing the temporary spaces of the old city before they are occupied by development. Lahore is an ancient city tracing its origins to prehistoric myths. In more recent times, the city has seen a considerable influx of people fleeing political and social unrest. Bringing new investment, new housing schemes have emerged around the perimeter of the city, expanding Lahore’s boundaries and transforming the landscape and texture of life. Viewing these paintings, the empty, indeterminate spaces Syed frames resonate with history — the sound of voices, the smells of cooking — all invisible to the media coverage and outside representations of the city. Reading the ways in which a cemetery in Lautoka, Fiji, had been designed, according to the placement of different communities’ resting places on and around a hill, was the starting point for Luke Willis Thompson’s sucu mate 2012–15. With white settlers’ plots occupying the top of the hill and indigenous Fijians’ plots located directly below, the graves of the young Chinese men from Guangdong, who were brought to Fiji in the late nineteenth century to work on sugar plantations, were to be found at the very bottom. Thompson thus became interested in the layered histories embedded in this site. A project documenting the headstones, and therefore the communities at rest, in the Old Balawa Estate Cemetery revealed a hierarchy not only of position, but of ongoing maintenance and care; the gravesites of the young Chinese men presented compelling evidence of long-term neglect. While Chinese communities continue to grow in Lautoka today, they form part of a second wave of migration. Passing away young and without descendants, the history of the Guangdong men, their labour and life in Fiji, will, with the rapidly degrading gravesites, soon disappear. RISHAM SYED Pakistan b.1969 From ‘Lahore’ series: 1. Untitled 1 2015 2. Untitled 2 2015 3. Untitled 4 2015 4. Untitled 3 2015 Syntheticpolymerpaintoncanvasonaluminium / 10.2 x 15.2cm (each) / Purchased 2015. Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery 1 3 2 4