The Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

ABDUL ABDULLAH Australia b.1986 The wedding (Conspiracy to commit) (from ‘Coming to Terms’ series) 2015 Chromogenic print, ed. 1/5 + 2 AP / 100 x 200cm / This project has been supported by the Government of Western Australia Department of Culture and the Arts and ARC@UNSW / Image courtesy: The artist and Fehily Contemporary, Melbourne We are the reporters of our people and are communicators to the outside world. Art is our weapon. Culture is a form of resistance. Shirin Neshat Social discourse and criticism have been at the heart of contemporary art movements throughout the past half century in the Asia Pacific, and some of the region’s most celebrated artists are also its leading social activists. In parts of East and South-East Asia, the assertion of democratic rights and civil liberties have inspired artists to navigate pathways for freedom of expression, articulating political criticism through their works. In greater Central Asia, as the dissolution of the Soviet Union gave birth and re-birth to new nations, artists began exploring collective memory and new national identities. In Australia and the Pacific, post colonialism, migration and indigeneity have been recurring topics. Meanwhile, throughout the world, themes relating to shifting economies, globalisation and migration remain tangibly apparent in contemporary artistic practices. Of course, art has recorded and constructed images of our societies throughout history. Much recent art, however, is marked by what could be called the social body, where the figure is depicted in the context of complex social structures, and messages are conveyed to a collective rather than individual audience. Increasingly, as the impact of political and economic development is expressed in overtly social rather than individual emotive responses, art has become an apparatus to not simply depict those around us, but to act for social change. Through symbolic and metaphoric representations of the collective consciousness, APT8 artists scrutinise and challenge prevailing ideologies. Working with a range of artistic devices, their practices investigate belief systems, routine and ritual, labour, mass migration and experiences of marginality, continually analysing what shapes our communities and how they interact with each other. 120—121 THE SOCIAL MEDIUM