The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Children’s workshop for Sadik Kwaish Alfraji’s A Boat to Carry your Dreams 2018 / Photograph: Natasha Harth Children’s workshop for Pauline Kimei Anis’s The Arkono Project 2018, Ngakubul village, Hakö, Autonomous Region of Bougainville / Photograph: Jesmaine Sakoi Gano Pauline Kimei Anis Born 1969, Siwai, Autonomous Region of Bougainville Lives and works in Bougainville The Arkono Project 2018 In the matrilineal societies of Bougainville, men and women traditionally transformed shells into beads used in ceremonial practices. Pauline Kimei Anis is a jewellery-maker from Siwai, where body adornment remains an important customary practice. For APT9 Kids, she invites children to create a necklace using beads they have made from paper and coloured pencils. In addition to their aesthetic vibrancy, it is the relationships required to source materials and the labour needed to fashion them into beads to be given to kin that gives them value. By providing children with the means to make their own beads, they can consider how this transforms paper — often seen as an expendable resource — into something precious. Participating in the activity also promotes a sense of community where families can gather to make, talk and share. Sadik Kwaish Alfraji Born 1960, Baghdad, Iraq Lives and works in Amersfoort, the Netherlands A Boat to Carry your Dreams 2018 ‘One simple, honest sentence and a boat, which held his dreams.’ 1 Sadik Kwaish Alfraji’s animation Ali’s Boat 2015 was inspired by a letter he received from his 11-year-old nephew Ali while visiting Baghdad in 2009. Inside, Alfraji found a drawing of a small canoe-like boat and the words, ‘I wish my letter takes me to you’. For Alfraji, this was no ordinary letter. It represented a powerful evocation of Ali’s deep longing to be liberated from the suffering in Iraq, and symbolised Alfraji’s own dream to be carried back to the country of his childhood. This striking black-and-white animation is a magical yet melancholy reflection on the ‘eternal childish dream of escaping reality to reach some other fantasy place’. 2 Children are asked to think about their own wish, which they can write or draw on paper and fold into a boat to transport their dreams. 1 The artist quoted in Nat Muller (ed.), Sadik Kwaish Alfraji , Schilt Publishing, Amsterdam, 2015, p.156. 2 The artist quoted in Muller, p.154.