The Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

for the performances. The works are site-specific and ephemeral, deliberately crossing boundaries between performance, music and art. They are also highly participatory, with audience members often invited to take up musical instruments, found objects or use their own voices. Their multifaceted project for APT8 is spread through the galleries as filmed intervention, with a series of workshops to take place throughout the exhibition, culminating in a large critical mass event. The activation of an architectural space, the creation of an immersive relationship between the participants and space and between the sound and audience, are ongoing concerns. MELATI SURYODARMO Born 1969, Surakarta, Indonesia Lives and works in Gross Gleidingen, Germany, and Surakarta Melati Suryodarmo’s I’m a Ghost in My Own House 2012 is a 12-hour endurance performance piece in which the artist crushes and grinds hundreds of kilograms of charcoal briquettes into powder and dust. Suryodarmo trained in Butoh dance with choreographer Anzu Furukana and in long durational performance with artist Marina Abramović. She uses this physical training to give enormous energy to her performances, which employ movement and gestures to reflect on themes of alienation and belonging. As the performance proceeds, her white dress becomes increasingly grey with dust and the residue of the charcoal piles around her. Suryodarmo chose charcoal as a significant material, as its passage from tree, to wood, to charcoal and to dust, serves as a symbol of life’s energy, of a process of ‘liberation, catharsis and death’. After her performance, the charcoal dust and her once white dress exist as a residual presence in the gallery. RISHAM SYED Born 1969, Lahore, Pakistan Lives and works in Lahore Risham Syed draws on the refined tradition of South Asian miniature painting. Since the 1980s, this genre has seen a revival in Pakistan as a number of artists have reworked the medium into new forms. Departing from the attention to the figure as a central motif, Syed concentrates on empty, in-between spaces around Lahore. Lahore is an ancient city, tracing its origins in pre-historic myths, and it has seen many transformations under Turkish, Mughal and British rule. Yet the last 15 years have seen increasingly rapid development and growth in Syed’s native city. In acknowledgement of this, Syed’s paintings from her ongoing ‘Lahore’ series focus on the backs of buildings that appear blank, faceless, indeterminate and will soon disappear. She deliberately chooses these spaces as they are sites that will be transformed by impending development and are not intended to be seen. They are temporary spaces, and by capturing and freezing them in these delicate paintings, Syed frames the space of change. MARIA TANIGUCHI Born 1981, Dumaguete City, the Philippines Lives and works in Manila, the Philippines Maria Taniguchi is best known for her ongoing series of large ‘brick’ paintings in which she arranges a consistent grid pattern into different surface configurations. Taniguchi emphasises the performative nature of these paintings, the way in which she first draws out a grid on the canvas and then paints in one brick at a time. Despite their predetermined composition, the surfaces of these paintings are not uniform or static. In works such as Untitled 2014 and Untitled 2015 gradations of shade are achieved by varying the amount of water and acrylic and become discernible as the viewer moves in front of the painting. The repetitive process of Taniguchi’s paintings can be viewed as a form of organising structure in the context of the densely populated urban environment of Manila. The paintings are exhibited leaning on the ground, affording them a sculptural quality and reinforcing their relationship to minimal art. CHRISTIAN THOMPSON Bidjara people Born 1978, Gawler, Australia Lives and works in London, UK Christian Thompson is an artist of Bidjara heritage, who works across video, photography, sculpture, performance and sound. Thompson is interested in the performative, and his works frequently present him adopting various personas created with costumes, adornments and disguises derived from history and tradition. Thompson grew up in an urban environment in the 1980s and 90s and he interweaves references to Bidjara culture (such as gestures and songs) with elements of pop culture to address issues of colonialism, sexuality and cultural representation. Thompson’s most recent body of work was inspired by an archive of historical photographs of Aboriginal people held at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. It constitutes a contemporary response to themes of the archive, spiritual repatriation and cultural hybridity. A suite of photographs from the ‘Polari’ seres is accompanied by a video of the artist performing in the Bidjara language. LUKEWILLIS THOMPSON Born 1988, Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand Lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany Luke Willis Thompson’s work identifies and recovers objects and instances of ordinary life that engender inequities of power, and crystalises wide-reaching complex moral or ethical problems. Thompson’s sucu mate 2012–15 arises from his ongoing relationship to a colonial cemetery in Lautoka, Fiji, which is racially and ethnically segregated in its arrangement. In it, a set of headstones marking the plots of indentured labourers are excavated and borrowed from the cemetery and replaced with a renovated set of grave goods designed by the artist and his studio. In the study of this particular genealogy, Thompson’s artwork represents an ongoing examination of society’s relationship to ‘the colour line’, and the various forms of racial categorisation and labour exploitation bound up within this term. ANGELA TIATIA Born 1973, Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand Lives and works in Sydney, Australia