The Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

LIUDING China b.1976 1989 2015 Oil on canvas / 180 x 230cm / Image courtesy: The artist and MOT International, London and Brussels document the artist deliberately dropping an urn from the Han Dynasty (206BCE–220CE), a period in Chinese history which is so entwined with narratives of Chinese identity, are a provocative statement about value and national cultural heritage. Heritage knowledge passed down through individual and collective memories is often referred to as a necessary continuation of customary practices. The APT has always sought to engage with these as a vital expression of contemporary practice. This is the location where individuals are processing past and present and wanting to communicate it in different ways. As Abigail Bernal observes in her catalogue essay, this APT addresses the prevalence of the vernacular in recent practice. Here, this slippery word is lauded to encapsulate all that globalism is not, and also to illustrate how our everyday is affected by the movement of information and knowledge through global networks. Works like Gunybi Ganambarr’s Ngaymil 2015, which shows the application of traditional Indigenous knowledge in the transformation of thick rubber conveyor belt sheets and sheet-metal into objects of beauty, and Liu Ding’s painting 1989 2015, showing a computer window provocatively opened to a page with the date referenced in the title (alluding to the ’89 Democracy Movement in China), illustrate how our everyday visual field is littered with expanded concepts and politics. APT8 looks for incongruities, which make us look twice or revisit what is expected. The role of the artist here is paramount. Our longstanding commitment to the Pacific over the last two decades has resulted in a slightly different approach to curatorial practices within some of the key projects. In this APT, curator Ruth McDougall has developed a number of projects driven by curatorial and artistic workshops with collaborators across Melanesia and Aotearoa New Zealand. For Rosanna Raymond’s Brisbane SaVAge K’lub, the artist has included objects from local and international public and private collections. The incursion of the artist into these museum collections results in a highly layered appreciation of the politics of Pacific communities, and the colonial impulse (here mightily repudiated) to commercialise and render passive (Raymond’s title is taken from the historic gentlemen’s club of the same name). With Pacific artists from across the globe, whom the artist has brought together to ‘activate’ these borrowed materials, Raymond as artist and provocateur imagines a wildly different Pacific that collages oral histories and customary practices with their contemporary renditions. Raymond, like Kiri Dalena, poses a philosophical dilemma about the politics of speaking —what is being said? Who is speaking for whom? Dalena’s ‘Erased slogans’ 2012–15 features a series of black-and-white photographs depicting people protesting. However, in these images slogans have been erased — her subjects hoist white signs void of content. The work can be read as questioning the efficacy of protest in our recent histories or the ethics of speaking out. Dalena’s images invoke situations where words and positions are yet to be formed. This APT seeks to insert a need for textured imagination as an antidote to the rhetoric of smoothness in global participation. Rheim Alkadhi’s lectures are filled with photographic images, accompanied by a discussion that may be disconnected from each photo’s subject; she connects images with a fluidity like reading or remembering. Her performances are undocumented, demanding audiences keep the images and narratives in their mind. Similarly, imagination is fundamental to David Medalla. APT8 includes a number of related works, including Cloud Canyons, No.25 1963/2015 and Homage to the Paris Commune – Montmartre Paris 2013. An influential artist working in London since the 1960s, Medalla is best known for his bubble machines, which consist of large acrylic