The Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Artist profiles ABDUL ABDULLAH Born 1986, Perth, Australia Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia Abdul Abdullah’s ‘Coming to Terms’ series 2015 is a group of unusual wedding portraits taken in Malaysia, his mother’s birth country, and inspired by a nineteenth-century novel Zofloya or The Moor . The brides and grooms in these photographs are shown in Malaysian or Westernised wedding attire against typical studio backdrops, but their features are masked by close-fitting balaclavas and their gazes are direct and sometimes menacing. Abdullah frequently works within the genre of portraiture to confront negative cultural stereotypes of Muslims prevalent in the Australian media. In these compelling photographs he makes visible the fears that are projected onto individuals and cultures, contrasting the joyous occasion of a wedding and the dehumanising masks associated with criminality and terrorism. Abdullah’s works speak on the complex feelings of displacement and disconnection that can affect migrants or people from diverse backgrounds. ANIDA YOEUALI Born 1974, Battambang, Cambodia Lives and works in Chicago, USA and Phnom Penh, Cambodia Anida Yoeu Ali’s The Buddhist Bug, Into the Night 2015 extends from her ‘Buddhist Bug’ series of photographs, videos and live performances. In these works, the artist playfully inhabits a sinuous, caterpillar-like costume whose colour references the robes of Buddhist monks. Ali’s bug was inspired by her fascination with Buddhism as a Khmer- Muslim, and the exploration of diasporic identities. The project developed when Ali returned to her birthplace of Cambodia as a means of inhabiting and recording Cambodia’s changing rural and metropolitan landscapes, and of negotiating her culturally mixed background as ‘Khmer-Muslim, Cambodian-American, Cham minority and Malaysian’. In a series of social encounters in locations around Phnom Penh, Ali’s bug impassively occupies central stage among communities, schools, cinemas, restaurants, bars and urban and rural landscapes undergoing rapid change and development. Its lengthy coils wrap around tables, are poised with grace and improbability on a bicycle, and infiltrate karaoke bars. Her video for APT8 documents these engagements with Phnom Penh at night time, staging the nocturnal bug as a ‘powerful place for encounter, habitation and reinvention’. RHEIMALKADHI Born 1973, New York, USA Currently works in Stuttgart, Germany Rheim Alkadhi’s practice investigates the potential of art as a public platform rather than a private process, allowing her to develop new ways of looking at society and relating to the world. For APT8, these interests are developed through a performance entitled The Eye Theatre Closes Its Doors, and Opens ThemAgain 2015. She draws inspiration from the Living Newspaper, a form of dramatic production, based on current social and political events, that developed in the 1930s. As a member of the Iraqi diaspora, she is dependent on newspapers for information of her homeland and simultaneously deeply aware that they are not impartial news sources. Using images that the artist has taken in the Persian Gulf, Palestine, and North Africa, the performance focuses on the inherent theatricality that exists within photography. This theatricality — or possibility for exaggeration — also extends to our retinas, raising questions on our reliance on vision as a vehicle for perceiving the world. BROOK ANDREW Wiradjuri people Born 1970, Sydney, Australia Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia Brook Andrew’s Intervening Time 2015 takes the form of an intervention into the Queensland Art Gallery’s Australian art collection. Referencing the chevron pattern that Wiradjuri people paint on their skin, or carve into trees, Andrew recreates the design on the galleries’ walls. Existing as a background against which the collection is then rehung, the pattern decisively asserts its presence in the narratives that form Australian history with regard to its landscape, culture and people. It places an Aboriginal body as central and foundational to such narratives and builds a more layered, complex conversation concerning the encounters between indigenous and settler cultures. Andrew’s 2012 work Time , a suite of six large-scale screenprints on canvas that draws on archival images, is installed among the Australian collection as a process of reordering and recontextualisation. BAATARZORIG BATJARGAL Born 1983, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia Lives and works in Ulaanbaatar NOMIN BOLD Mongolia b.1982 Labyrinth game 2012 Syntheticpolymerpaintandgold leafoncanvas / 160 x 103cm / Purchased 2015 with funds from Ashby Utting through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery