director’s foreword Andrea May Churcher Ritual: the past in the present is an ambitious project based on many years of research and extensive cross-cultural conversations. It builds on the Gallery’s established reputation for exploring and interpreting the many complex narratives, histories, traditions, beliefs and issues of Australian Indigenous artists and other cultures within the Asia Pacific region and the world’s tropic zone.
In 2020, as the Gallery was poised to bring together works for the Ritual exhibition, news of the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world. As countries closed their borders and travel between Australian states and territories in Australia ceased, the Gallery paused its exhibition and public programs indefinitely. This was the prevailing situation that prompted Micheal Do, one of the commissioned writers for the supporting exhibition, to write in his essay’ During this confusing kaleidoscope [COVID-19], humanity has responded - both by instinct and design - to refashion and reassert rituals in the most striking ways, using activities to formalise and mark time… Old rituals were paused, while new rituals took their place. One of the defining characteristics of ritual is a recurrent act based on the concept of passage and transformation to bring the past into the present. In the exhibition this is explored through a juxtaposition of commissioned and loan works by Australian Indigenous and Asian Pacific artists who share understandings of cultural knowledge and beliefs, while exploring contemporary issues around identity and cultural continuity. What is deeply interesting and what both Micheal Do and Freja Carmichael point to in their respective essays is the way in which artists from different geographical, cultural and social frameworks parallel ways of interpreting and enacting contemporary issues and conditions as a reflective and reflexive response to rituals that are steeped in culture and in times long passed.
7
