The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

69 ARTISTS The Precinct (stills) 2018 Two-channel HD video, 16:9, 10:40 minutes, colour, sound, ed. 1/3 / Sound: Ben Sinclair / Courtesy: The artist and Starkwhite Gallery, Auckland / The artist acknowledges the generous support of Elam School of Fine Arts, The University of Auckland, and Images and Sound, Auckland / Proposed for the Queensland Art Gallery Collection Hipkins’s film and photographic work explores these psychic spaces left by Britain’s colonial project in the Asia Pacific, viewed through the lens of nineteenth-century fiction. His feature film Erewhon 2014, for example, draws on Samuel Butler’s utopian satire Erewhon: or, Over the Range (1872) — ‘Erewhon’ being an anagram of the word ‘nowhere’ — and his video The Port 2014 borrows lines from HG Wells’s novella The Time Machine (1895), which he pairs with eighteenth-century astronomical instruments and New Zealand suburban architecture. Hipkins’s City of Tomorrow 2017 references Le Corbusier’s seminal volume on architecture and urban design, The City of To-morrow and Its Planning (1929), juxtaposing original quotes about repetition and order with photographs of the stark concrete facades of Chandigarh in India. The Precinct positions Lucas’s novel, which abandons European civics in the face of natural disaster and war, alongside these colonial histories. Hipkins is known for his conceptual, fragmented narratives, and in The Precinct he employs cinematic techniques such as visual doubling, repetition and montage. By heightening the tonality of hues and inverting colours, the scenes are difficult to locate in time. Combined with short edits, there is a fetishising of the image, which creates awareness of the colonial past within the present. The crafted, doubled imagery of The Precinct metaphorically connotes both the British homeland and its mirror colony, past and future: the morally corrupt and decayed city overrun by nature in 2000, and the harmonious, healthy paradise that Lucas’s time traveller finds in 2200. Since its regeneration for World Expo 88, South Bank has become a cultural and recreational quarter of the city, shaped to embody civic capital. In The Precinct , however, these spaces lie largely vacant. Gavin Hipkins’s Brisbane — and, by extension, postcolonial Australia — is fortress-like and haunted by its past, waiting uneasily for the future. Zara Stanhope Endnotes 1 Thomas Pennington Lucas was a doctor, scientist, collector and inventor of the popular Lucas’ Papaw Ointment, as well as a writer of religious philosophy. 2 Lucas’s book was published a year after Brisbane's ‘Great Flood’ of 1893. 3 Jeff Wall, ‘Traditions and counter-traditions in Vancouver art: A deeper background for Ken Lum’s work’, in The Lectures 1990 , Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, 1991, p.68. Born 1968, Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand Lives and works in Auckland Gavin Hipkins’s The Precinct 2018 is poetic yet ominous. The built and verdant environment portrayed in the soft-colour, atmospheric projection is familiar, but difficult to place in time. A soundtrack of both natural and human activity accompanies the two-channel video work, which gradually reveals the city of Brisbane — as it could have been, and as it may be in the future. The Precinct is a rediscovery of the city’s riverside over time, particularly the area known as South Bank. Hipkins’s guide to the South Bank Precinct is The Curse and its Cure (1894) by Dr Thomas Pennington Lucas, the first published work of fiction to be set in Brisbane. 1 The book comprises two separate novels: The Ruins of Brisbane in the Year 2000 and Brisbane Rebuilt in the Year 2200 . Lucas imagined Brisbane at the turn of the millennium as a corrupt city decaying from floods and immersed in separatist wars with Victoria and New South Wales. 2 Attitudes towards Australia’s Indigenous population remain firmly entrenched in the nineteenth century. Two centuries later, the city has been transformed into a utopian moral paradise based on Christian principles. Hipkins reimagines this decline and subsequent rebirth in The Precinct . At the heart of Hipkins’s practice is his interest in place in the collective imagination, and how place defines societies and speaks to future communities, especially in the nations of the British Commonwealth. He is influenced by Canadian photographer Jeff Wall’s term ‘Commonwealth Romanticism’, specific to countries such as Canada, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, where overt colonial attitudes have a continuing presence amid new aspirations of nationhood and community. 3 As a Pākehā New Zealander, Hipkins questions what it means to revisit colonial processes today. He is also fascinated with the moralising, and almost Enlightenment-like, tone of Victorian novels, which often lean towards an unfulfilled utopianism that Hipkins locates in the remnants of colonial endeavours, particularly modernist architecture. GAVIN HIPKINS