The Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

around the world. For APT8 Wong travelled to Darwin and Yogyakarta, fascinated by the connections between these two cities. Working with local performers, Wong’s new work for APT8 draws on the community dynamic within Yogyakarta’s queer performance scene. YAMASHIRO CHIKAKO Born 1976, Naha, Japan Lives and works in Naha Yamashiro Chikako’s photographs, videos and films dramatise lesser-known aspects of Okinawa’s contemporary reality, while questioning dominant historical accounts of Japanese and American occupation of the islands. The site of fierce battles between the US and Japan at the end of World War Two, Okinawa still has a high concentration of American military bases, occupying around 20 per cent of the land — despite the wishes of many of its indigenous inhabitants. Yamashiro’s practice engages with its political and social histories to create provocative and haunting works, drawing on oral accounts and often utilising her own body. AWoman of the Butcher Shop 2012, a three-channel video installation, continues her fascination with marginalised narratives and histories, telling the story of a woman who runs a meat shop at a black market on the fringes of one of the island’s many US military bases. The story is poetic and non-linear in form, allowing Yamashiro to reflect on the social construction of gender relations and the symbolic potential of meat. HAEGUE YANG Born 1971, Seoul, South Korea Lives and works in Seoul and Berlin, Germany Referencing modernist art history, literature, and social and political events, Haegue Yang transforms spaces through light, colour, objects and movement so that they are constantly shifting and directing our experience. Sol LeWitt Upside Down—Open Modular Cubes (Small), expanded 943 times 2015, uses everyday domestic materials — in this case over 1000 Venetian blinds — to create a formal, immersive structure. For Yang, abstraction is highly metaphorical, alluding to multiple narratives. Her blinds partially block sight, but they also delineate and draw attention to a space, providing boundaries and articulations, and implicating viewers through their transparency and domesticity. In her early sculptures she used IV stands, then clothes-racks on wheels. Like the blinds, these industrially produced items were deliberately evocative of anthropomorphic forms, while also emphasising a sense of movement and the imminent possibility of change. ZHOU TAO Born 1976, Changsha, China Lives and works in Guangzhou, China Zhou Tao’s non-linear and highly poetic videos occur in fascinating settings — a crumbling village amid towering skyscrapers, lush wetlands, a public square under citizen occupation — and conflate the human and topographic, while simultaneously confusing artistic and quotidian gesture. Blue and red 2014 immerses audiences in experiences that take place in two different cities, weaving together sequences of night-time spectacles in the public spaces of Guangzhou (where Zhou lives) with footage of the 2013–14 Occupy Bangkok protests that took place while he was visiting the city. In both cities, Zhou concentrates on public spaces as collective experience, highlighting the areas and their occupants in washes of colour, particularly the electric blue of LED light, which he contrasts with the surface of a third space, the toxic red run-off of a heavy metal mine in northern Guangdong province. ‘FILIPINO INDIE’ ‘Filipino Indie’ is a survey of independent and experimental film and video from the Philippines co-curated with leading Filipino artist Yason Banal. The project considers the artistic practice of experimenting with documentary realism, and the creation of hybrid forms of fiction and documentary alongside the pioneering use of digital filmmaking. A complete list of works and program notes are available at qagoma.qld. gov.au/cinema. YASON BANAL (Co-curator, ‘Filipino Indie’) Born 1972, Manila, the Philippines Lives and works in Manila Yason Banal is an artist who explores installation, photography, video, performance, text, curating and pedagogy. In addition to his studio work, he teaches film studies at the University of the Philippines Film Institute. ‘POP ISLAM’ ‘Pop Islam’ is a cinema project reflecting on the ways Islam is lived and experienced throughout the contemporary world. The project covers a vast region — from Australia and South-East Asia to the Indian subcontinent, Central and West Asia and North Africa — and features works exploring the complexities of faith in both orthodox and secular states. A complete list of works and program notes are available at qagoma.qld.gov.au/cinema. KHALED SABSABI (Co-curator, ‘Pop Islam’) Born 1965, Tripoli, Lebanon Lives and works in Sydney, Australia Khaled Sabsabi, the co-curator of ‘Pop Islam’, is an Australian artist working in video and installation. Since the late 1980s he has engaged communities to develop projects that reflect the complex nature of culture and identity in particular, the global connections between people and places facilitated by history, migration and technology. Special projects YUMI DANIS (WE DANCE) COLLABORATIVE PROJECT MARCEL MELTHERORONG (Co-curator) Ni-Vanuatu Born 1975, Noumea, New Caledonia Lives and works in Port Vila, Vanuatu NICOLAS MOLÉ (Artist) Born 1975, France Lives and works in Noumea, New Caledonia Yumi Danis (We Dance) is co-curated with Ni-Vanuatu songwriter, musician and author 258—259 ARTIST PROFILES