The Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Perhaps what is most striking about Andrew’s offering to the Gallery is its generosity. Despite a devastating history of loss, compounded in recent years by government interventions and Aboriginal community closures, Andrew finds a way to not only commemorate loss, but to celebrate resilience while opening up a new dialogue. Installed along with an earlier work, TIME I–VI 2012, comprising six large canvases drawing together historical images, Andrew’s painted chevrons stage a conversation between Australian Indigenous histories and those of peoples across the globe. This act demonstrates a powerful resolve to confront tragedy by building more layered, inclusive understandings. This gesture is one that reappears throughout APT8. Responding to histories of occupation, forced migration and labour, war and social unrest, as well as the devastating consequences of environmental damage and natural disaster, APT8 features a number of artists who seek ways to build new social and cultural relationships and structures. For some, like Andrew, this requires a more complex and nuanced comprehension of history; for others, it involves the creation of relational spaces. In varying degrees, all express a sincere hope for collective social renewal and variously engage the vulnerable, sensate body. Moving through the cavernous, white gallery spaces of GOMA, we encounter SaVAge K’lub 2010–ongoing as a pulsing hub. Part of an ongoing project by Rosanna Raymond, this space recalls an old-style museum in its decor and display of Pacific objects and things, 1 however, at times, people, in fact, many people are there, making noise and even laughing. Barkcloth hangs in sheets from the ceiling and big, antique-looking cabinets are packed with treasures and a range of objects created centuries ago, others apparently of more recent origin. The doors of these cabinets open at times, and the exquisitely decorated pieces of woven, shell-encrusted, feathered and beaded regalia they contain are then transferred to warm flesh, coming alive as they contribute to the overall action, colour, sound and meaning of the wearer’s lithe movements through the space. Once returned to the cabinets, these beautiful objects invite us to imagine the stories they could tell. Raymond’s SaVAge K’lub borrows its title from a late nineteenth-century, London-based gentlemen’s club founded by a group of radically minded artists. While offshoots of this club exist across the Commonwealth, including a well-established and exclusive institution in Melbourne, 2 Raymond’s version places emphasis less on secret men’s business and more on the ‘VA’ within SaVAge; ‘va’ is a term invoking Samoan philosophical understandings of space. As Raymond describes it, this space ‘is an active space. It is activated by people. It binds people and things together. It forms relationships, and reciprocal obligations’. 3 In her Brisbane–GOMA SaVAge K’lub , Raymond seeks to generate va through the engagement of contemporary Pacific artists and communities —with each other — and with a selection of tāonga (cultural treasures) from their own and local museum collections. For the artist, inviting individuals and communities from across the Pacific to create new artworks, as well as spoken word and performative actiVAtions, or to simply gather and warm her K’lub with conversation, food and laughter, reinvigorates the mauri (spark of life) that tāonga hold, enabling these treasures to escape the confines of museum vaults, to rise off the pages of potted histories and to live once more. Gently, but resolutely, she embarks on a process of educating and enabling curators, conservators, registrars and other staff across three Queensland cultural institutions 4 to understand the importance of Pacific people and their bodily engagement with the long-term ‘care’ and wellbeing of the tāonga of which they are custodians. With her installation, Raymond has chosen to create an interpersonal space rich in hope and meaning. It is a space involving individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds working towards a new dynamic.