The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Museums for our collective future APT9 is filled with masses and collectivities, evidenced in the number of collaborative projects and images featuring political camaraderie, processions and protests. The accumulative power of small actions can be found in the many non-figurative works that rely on compositional and material repetition, while the entangled complexity of cultural, political and economic contexts is symbolised by interwoven structural forms. To maintain their relevance as spaces of assembly and community, public art museums in liberal democracies need to distinguish themselves from being simply display mechanisms of the art market or from being subsumed within entertainment industries. In the current political climate, it could be argued that art museums have an even greater responsibility to be sites of active debate and alternative social ordering. How art museums move towards being reflexive places that foster civic engagement and responsibility in response to artists’ questions and provocations is a key question. In the formation of collectives, there are usually tensions between the individual and the group. In APT9, the idea of personal pressures within public forums comes into focus in artworks by Martha Atienza, Meiro Koizumi, Souliya Phoumivong and YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES. In Koizumi’s Rite for a dream – Today my empire sings 2016, a solo figure is pushed forward by police, as verbal abuse is hurled from the sidelines of an anti-emperor protest in Tokyo. The marchers are not the only organised crowd in attendance; alongside them are Japanese ultra-nationalists protesting the rally and the militarised police presence. Here, and in other artists’ works, attention switches between the individual and the assembled, between declarations for wider political change and the personal investment in a cause. On a formal level, Hassan Sharif’s works engage with this tension of the-one-within-the-many. The concept of the singular element amid the larger cluster — from which his ‘objects’ derive their power — is constantly at play. 1 The simple act of being together can be the foundation of solidarity. Waqas Khan’s intricate accumulative mark-making gives form to the Sufi idea of togetherness. 2 In her photographs, Mao Ishikawa captures the intimate moments of Okinawan women with their African–American army boyfriends as spaces of collective potential. This solidarity can also be found in the Jaki-ed, Women’s Wealth and Erub/Lifou projects, where community is of paramount importance and cultural bonds drive artistic practices. Beyond being a space for the public to gather and reflect, the art museum also takes on cultural (as outlined by Ruth McDougall in her essay 'What money can't buy: Relationships of value in the Pacific') and economic responsibilities associated with presentation and acquisition. Accordingly, the APT9 commissioning process supported sovereign spaces where groups spread over vast distances could gather to create work collaboratively. The question of how to build and maintain shared infrastructure is a keen concern for many artists in the region. In this way, the museum is a space to propose, test and promote ways to organise society and public structures beyond established frameworks. Chris Charteris’s artwork references the communal fish traps in Kiribati that are collectively created and jointly maintained. The Karrabing Film Collective uses artwork commissions not only as a way of teaching younger generations and wider audiences about their cultural heritage, but also to provide resources for their community. For Karrabing, art is a means to fund self-determination. 3 More symbolically, the repetitive, symmetrical geometry in Rasheed Araeen’s works speak to the artist’s hopes for a symmetrical society — one in which resources are equally divided. 4 In order to understand how these ideas can operate in wider society, the complexities involved in the entanglement of political, social, religious and economic events need to be mapped. These events necessitate questions not simply of who, when, where and what, but how, and, most importantly, why ? Sawangwongse Yawnghwe attempts to map the intricate network of political, humanitarian, religious and illegal players to provide a wider historical context for Myanmar, beyond the Rohingya humanitarian crisis from the news headlines. Locally, Vincent Namatjira’s paintings raise the question: what kind of country would Australia be if it held Indigenous leaders and elders in the same regard as their parliamentary or business counterparts? Artists are increasingly asking the custodians of public art museums and the curators of bi/triennial art exhibitions about cultural and economic transparency. This public questioning, however, is hampered by increasing limitations on the freedom of assembly and advocacy. Artworks by Shilpa Gupta, Htein Lin and Pangrok Sulap highlight