The Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Thompson’s sucu mate project seeks to acknowledge these workers. It has particular resonance for Queensland audiences if we look back on the violent history of indentured labour that allowed this state’s sugar industry to prosper, and a general lack of acknowledgment of the black-birded Pacific Island peoples, their labour and their sacrifices. The history of indentured labour in Fiji in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century — initiated to provide a workforce for foreign-owned sugar plantations — continues to play out in complex, and at times disturbing, ways in contemporary Fiji. With indigenous Fijians having sole access to the ownership of land, migrant communities whose connections to Fiji now extend across generations find themselves disenfranchised or dispossessed; often the only land they can possess is that in which they are buried. Engaging with this site, sucu mate invokes a long history of sacred sites, rich with community history, across the Asia Pacific region. Throughout APT8, conscious examination of change frames a clear sense of the importance of landscapes as records of the past. But just as artists like Brook Andrew and Rosanna Raymond work with institutions to alter inherited systems and structures, the possibility of a new cultural landscape emerges. Even where the experience of transformation manifests as an invocation of atmospheres of destruction, as in Desire Machine Collective’s filmic documents of abandoned industrial spaces in Assam, India, they occur alongside a commitment to working through traumatic histories using processes of community engagement. Consciously basing their practice in their native state of Assam, a region of India with a history brutally affected by conflict over the control of natural resources, Sonal Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya seek to confront image-making traditions that perpetuate violence. Rather than directly representing the violent history of their region, Desire Machine Collective often work with communities, and with sound, space and the moving image to create an atmosphere in which the sensation of destruction and feelings of loss and fear are palpably evident. Cumulatively, these artists present a vision of the future that dissects universal aesthetics, and instead institutes a historical understanding that recognises the vast differences between cultures and histories, a corporeal knowledge of the intersection of the physical, the spiritual and memory, ultimately expressing the idea of healing, and social engagement, bodily alienation and performance as tools for transcendence. Their offerings provide audiences as much cause for optimism as the picturesque landscape of R Godfrey Rivers’s Under the jacaranda . Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? (Collection: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) is the title of Paul Gauguin’s 1897 painting created in Tahiti as a visual manifesto on the nature of life. Samoan artist Shigeyuki Kihara adopted this title for her 2013 photographic tableaux set in contemporary Samoa. My thanks are extended to Shigeyuki for this inspiring historical conversation.