A prayer to be haunted

Micheal Do

anointing. burning. lighting.

As the COVID-19 pandemic tightened its grip globally, communities across the world quarantined in self isolation. For several months in Australia, a country known for its outdoor and active lifestyle, our streets were sterile and empty. In Sydney where I am writing this - like other parts of Australia - people love to engage with each other, touch, talk and debate in conversation. However, during lockdown, this way of life was replaced by a silence that weighed heavily on the landscape. Casting our minds back, only the occasional passer-by would march briskly through the street; the smell of hand sanitiser became an ubiquitous part of the city’s olfactory landscape; facemasks littered the streets, cast away in stormwater drains and in public spaces. Gone were gestures, like a brief brush on the hand, to affirm connection. That was life in lockdown, an experience which remains the ghostly reality for many parts of the world, even now.

delicate humanism at work

As some have identified, this reality is akin to Austrian physicist’s Erwin Schrödinger’s cat, a thought experiment whereby a cat, contained in a box is both living and dead until it can be proved otherwise. Communities in Australia were treated to both have and not have COVID-19. We expected normality to resume, but did not know when, not all at once and even now, we won’t know whether the world we knew once before will be the same. During this confusing kaleidoscope, 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. The citizens of Sardinia, Italy, staged balcony concerts to maintain morale; New York collectively applauded front-line workers; individuals at home across the globe were changing clothes to divide their day into work, leisure and family time, while everyone migrated their lives into the online world. Old rituals were paused, while new rituals took their place.

< Jumaadi

Born Sidoarjo, Indonesia, 1973 Sunan Kalijaga and Dewi Anjani (detail) 2020

solidarity among the powerless

Twentieth century British anthropologist Victor Turner, who specialises in rituals, symbols and passages of time and journeys, defines rituals as, ‘a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words and objects, performed in a sequestered place.’1 Rituals mark the passage of time, define communities, highlight a changed state, express our sense of identity and reaffirm shared memories. They often do all of this at once. However, as rituals tend to be habitual and inherited, we tend not to think about their origins, politics and histories. Therein lies their power, their ubiquity and their sanctity. As we now attempt to give meaning to this time, ritual acts have their greatest power.

purifying passing sacrificing

Ruminating on the power of rituals, the exhibition Ritual: The past in the present, Indigenous North Australia and Asia Pacific Art emerges. Drawing together artists with research areas rooted in the geographies of the Asia-Pacific region, the exhibition reflects on ritual narratives and illuminates how cultural markers and rites of passage frame societies. Reawakening and strengthening our resolve as feeling creatures amid the ongoing traumas of the pandemic, the exhibition artists delve deep into their personal archives, utilising a range of methodologies and mediums to exquisitely evoke intricate case studies.

tact and empathy

Guided by research and reflection, these artists probe the depths of ritual practices to unpack the politics, assumptions and prejudices embedded within ritual practices, delivering original interpretations. By bringing humanity’s reserve to the fore, the artists construct a decentred history of ritual and artistic traditions; they are attentive to the way in which such events have formerly been narrated or indeed ignored in contemporary art discourse.

^ Abdul ABDULLAH

Born Perth, Western Australia, 1986 The wedding (Conspiracy to commit) (detail) 2015

^ Angela TIATIA

Born Auckland, New Zealand, 1973 Group Portrait 2012

one foot in front of the other

The exhibition explores how artists have used narratives to represent culture and ritual experience, while reconsidering the role of narratives and rituals themselves in historical representation. Abdul Abdullah (b. 1986, Perth, Australia) reframes marriage to explore the misrecognition, racists deindividuation and prejudice that confronts coloured bodies in Anglo-Western societies. In Mutual Assurances 2017, the artist remade ubiquitous wedding photographic portraits using a Malay couple dressed in ornate balaclavas. By masking the identity of these Muslim newlyweds behind this signifier of criminality, the artist points to societal projections onto coloured bodies in Anglo-Western societies - outsider, criminal and deviant.

to doubt is to make

Elsewhere in the exhibition, artists address history though the contingencies of their biography, using their own narratives in their work. For Pacific Island communities, the three-thousand-year-old cultural practice of tatau (tattoo) produces personal identity by publicly proclaiming the psychological and societal place of the bearer. Often practised when the bearer is transitioning into adulthood, according to scholar Albert Wendt, the tatau clothes the bearer for life, indicating their adulthood, service to one’s community and that the bearer has ‘triumphed over physical pain and is ready for the demands of life and its demanding activities such as language and oratory.’2

the serene, slow, silent, spectacle

Angela Tiatia (b. 1973, Auckland, New Zealand) calls to mind the political and symbolic weight of this practice in her video Group Portrait 2012. Lasting one minute and thirty-four seconds, the work documents the final moments of a five-hour long tatau process where she receives the malu tatau design that covers a woman’s thighs. By documenting this ceremony, Tiatia gives narrative form to her own personal history - offering audiences an opportunity to watch, as part voyeur and part interloper, this otherwise private ceremonial act.

remarkable energies

However, this access is limited. Tiatia provides us with no means to unpack the symbolism coded within the tattoos, nor have we been given access to the process leading up to these final moments. This archive footage resists an ethnographic dimension of archival footage that has historically repressed and deindividualised Pacific Islander communities. Tiatia recognises that photography and video have been used to provide misguided representations of history, reflecting Tiatia’s interest in acknowledging the fallibility of the archive and the medium’s role in perpetuating (and also resisting) colonial structures.

wearing untethering blurring

The long-term impact of the colonial project is reflected in the work of Greg Semu (b.1971, Auckland, New Zealand). Originally made as a calendar and for display at Casula Powerhouse Art Centre’s Body Pacifica arts festival, Semu’s Body on the Line 2010 photographs depict players from Australia’s National Rugby League adorned with traditional ceremonial costume and adornments from the Pacific Islands. Each player is a bearer of tattoos. However, when explaining the work, the artist notes that sitters do not have the traditional pe’a tatau practice that adorns men in the Pacific Islands. Instead, the NRL players’ tattoos are hybrids of Samoan tatau that incorporate Japanese motifs, including the adornment of the chest and arm sleeve.

history of misunderstandings

These hybrid tattoos function as a metaphor for the systematic knowledge and cultural loss from Western occupation and intervention of the Pacific Islands. During this colonisation, many forms of Pacific Island cultural life were erased and replaced with Western Judaeo-Christian beliefs and principles. These football players, each part of the Pacific Island diaspora who have migrated to Australia and New Zealand, represent a desire to partake in this important cultural practice that proclaims one’s own bodily, spiritual and societal history.

out of sync

However, these individuals are unable to access the practice of pe’a tatau due to structural, cultural, economic barriers. Their reality reflects a new chapter of tattoos and the Pacific Island body - pointing to the effects of European cartographies, taxonomies and histories and their ruinous effects on Pacific Island knowledge production and retention. In this way, Semu invites viewers to think about the past; to make connections between events, characters and objects; to join together in memory and to reconsider the ways in which the past is represented in the wider culture.

> Greg SEMU

Born Auckland, New Zealand, 1971 Roy Asotasi (front) 2010

^ Trina LEALAVAA

Born Auckland, New Zealand, 1994 Ifoga 2017

nothing more than an interlude

This impulse is also explored in Trina Lealavaa’s (b. 1994, Auckland, New Zealand) Ifoga 2017. The two minute and thirty-two second video takes its name from the Samoan exchange, ifoga, a public act of apology. A group will typically submit to selfhumiliation and offer fine mats or ‘ie toga and speeches of contrition to appease the offended group.3 Lealavaa’s video depicts a young woman who has lost her brother to suicide, cycling through charged scenes of restrained mise en scène that depict her grief and torment. The artist likens the aftermath of suicide to ifoga - underscoring how communal processes of contrition, acceptance and solidarity can prevent further escalations of social, economic, cultural and physical conflicts. The video, while not based on personal experience, speaks to the suicide rate in New Zealand, where Pacific Island youth are more vulnerable than European counterparts, with men the highest at-risk category.4

remoulding, disappearing

The photographic image is dynamic, contextual and contingent. Implicit within the medium is the potential to document subjects, details and facets that represent social relationships. Phuong Ngo’s (b.1983, Adelaide, Australia) practice is mired in this politic. His practice is steeped in the systematic preservation and archiving of important cultural and historical objects - both in a material and artistic sense - that traces and explores his Vietnamese heritage. In Dead Objects 2019 Ngo has photographed ancestral shrine objects such as candlesticks, vases and incense burners collected from Ngo’s ancestral homes in Soc Trang, South Vietnam and the Adelaide home where his family settled in 1981 following the Vietnam War (1955 -1975).

pure potential

Ritual in this project serves as both subject matter and a means used to engage with ideas and concepts. By blurring each image, Ngo alludes to the high-speed press photography that documented the Vietnam War, destabilising the photorealism and ethnographic impulses of photography. Ngo’s work investigates the status of the image; it doesn’t so much address the specific historical situation of the war and its mediation by images. Instead, Ngo tackles the moral issue of what images can or cannot make visible. His works propose an investigation that takes, as both its focus and it’s starting point, images understood as things, that is, images in their materiality, interfering in real life, influencing it, even transforming it.

celebrating and marking

By placing his objects within the frame of the photograph, he offers these objects a sense of typology and chronology-drawing attention to each detail and the social relationships within each image. By selecting these objects, Ngo draws upon the lexicons of palettes of compositional elements that are already saturated with meaning and suffused with the aesthetics of ritual objects. These objects are a crystallisation of labour, use-value, sacredness, meaning and desire. In this way, Ngo presents a case for critical engagement of ritual processes through the juxtaposition and tension of these objects, revealing the complexities of the popular and the folk alongside the contemporary.

incubation and maturation

Jumaadi (b. 1973, Sidoarjo, Indonesia) delves into the folk tales and superstitions of the Indonesia island, Java. Forming a significant part of Javanese cultural life, these superstitions and rituals have traditions in Indonesian art that are many centuries long. In Sunan Kalijaga and Dewi Anjani 2020, Jumaadi portrays the meditative cleansing practice of kungkum that takes place on the first day of the Javanese calendar year. Jumaadi has used a thin watercolour to create expansive, two-dimensional scenes that warp perspective, speaking to the tradition of Javanese Hindu scroll paintings that depict epic narratives. The left panel depicts Sunan Kalijaga, one of the nine saints who taught and propagated Islam in Java. It was believed that he often sat by a river or creek to perform his meditation rituals. On the right panel, the mother of Lord Hanuman, Dewi Anjani, one of the heroes of the Indian epic Ramayana, is depicted. She is partaking in the kungkum ritual by a river that is decorated with various mountains, trees and volcanoes that reflect Indonesia’s variable geography. This painted scroll extends Jumaadi’s Wayang beber puppeteering practice - one of the oldest forms of Indonesian theatre that typically exists in villages and has its origins in poetry and storytelling.

expressing. observing

When discussing the work, Jumaadi emphasises his interest in collective and personal narratives that form artistic production, placing a positive value on the variations, flaws and irregularities in human behaviour. By giving life to these mythical characters, he collapses the future, present and past. A compression of tenses, these works simultaneously recall the past while looking forward reiterating the power of devotional forms of art making and rituals, despite the societal changes taking place in Indonesia today.

> Phuong NGO

Born Adelaide, South Australia, 1983 Dead Objects (detail) 2019-20

constructed from the unsaid

Korean filmmaker and auteur Park Chan-Kyong’s (b. 1985, Seoul, Korea) feature length documentary, Manshin: Ten thousand spirits 2013 follows Korea’s most famed naramansin or shaman, Kim Keum-Wha. Blending together re-enacted scenes, documentary footage and fictionalised scenes, Park explores the range of private and public liturgical chants, instrumental music and ritual-staging that characterise Korean shaman rituals, while contextualising the social, political and cultural frameworks that govern these ancient rituals in urbanised, contemporary Korea.

infinite surprises

One of these tensions includes how the Korean government, through cultural initiatives and festivals, uses this practice to communicate nationalistic notions of Korean identity. According to scholar Boudewijn Walraven, Korean rituals require constant interaction between the performers of the ritual and the manshin in a dynamic process where meaning is constantly transmitted, affecting the participants.5 However in Kim’s public performances, there are instances where there is an audience but no actual single participant to forge this relationship, thereby highlighting the tensions of these rituals and their role in contemporary society.

everything can be modified

Charwei Tsai’s (b. 1980, Taipei, Taiwan) performance highlights the impermanence of culture and human practices. Made during a residency in Little Bay, New South Wales, Sea Mantra 1980 depicts the artist writing the ancient Indian text the Heart Sutra. Tsai has had a long history of working with the Heart Sutra, having memorised the text during her childhood in Taiwan. The text is a set of Hindu teachings and aphorisms, including the lesson that everything that surrounds us is a composite of several things that will disintegrate with time. Reflecting on this, Tsai staged the work in the shallows of Little Bay as the waves gently crash around her, dispersing into nothingness. Over seventeen minutes, Tsai repeatedly rewrites the text as a way to come to terms with its content, internalising it as part of her own ritual practice.

< Charwei TSAI

Born Taipei, Taiwan, 1980 Sea Mantra (detail) 2009

lifting and memorising

Art making as a form of ritual is evident in the work of Koji Ryui (b. 1976, Kyoto, Japan). His installation of found objects, TOT 2020, juxtaposes carefully arranged found glass vessels to create space impregnated with a sense of the unknown. For Ryui, the unknown is an occasion for possibilities; it is a provocation that propels us on a journey, a route of unknowing in which we experience many of the ways that we do not know something.

sharing and pausing

TOT is underpinned by Ryui’s interest in Shinto religion, which emphasises the importance of sacred, liminal spaces to channel divine energy and Shinto gods, kami, through a precise set of parameters. Ryui uses animist principles to engage with these objects, affording them with compassion and affection to build their andromorphic presence. It is this presence and conscious configuration of objects that manifests a story. TOT operates as a series of fictions and narrations. As audiences, we have a choice among these histories and fictions, completing the narrative with our subjectivities. It is important to note that Ryui avoids the spectacular and immersive displays that encourage viewers to forget their location. These works prompt viewers to sense their present-tense and feel their phenomenological encounter of the work.

everything is a question

The work does not ask us to simply join together in a romantically sociable way, but instead to consider objecthood, life force and temporary, open-ended experiences. In a poetic gesture, the artist has used the same materials - glass and sand - albeit in two different states. Through this, the artist introduces the concept of time and decay within the life cycle of materials and rituals - important considerations within Ryui’s practice.

> Koji RYUI

Born Kyoto, Japan , 1976 TOT (detail) 2020

^ Taloi HAVINI

Born Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, 1981

Michael TOISUTA

Born Sydney, New South Wales, 1975 Dengung Hyena (Hyena Resounding) 2020

sequencing and selecting. persuading

Taloi Havini and Michael Toisuta have collaborated to create Dengung Hyena (Hyena Resounding) 2020. Unable to travel to their respective communities because of the COVID-19 pandemic (Taloi to the Autonomous Region of Bougainville of Papua New Guinea and Michael to the Republic of Indonesia), both artists developed this collaboration remotely, drawing upon their respective archives of source material. By combining Taloi’s footage of the Hyena ritual in Bougainville - a ritual whereby Bougainvilleans witness and celebrate the new moon ushering in coral spawning - and Toisuta’s instrumentation of Indonesian gamelan instruments, the artists highlight the connectivity and communality of ritual practices throughout the Asia-Pacific region.

obsessive unbending conversations

The work suggests that profound historical understanding (if not objective knowledge) can be achieved through various kinds of sharing of cultural material. For the artists, this was a true collaboration with the work’s imagery, soundtrack and spatial experience informing each other. By fragmenting, deconstructing and reconstructing their recorded material, the artists fracture the narrative fluidity of their archival material, resisting the anthropological tendencies of documentary footage. Instead, they offer a complex meditation of co-existence, asking who, when, where and how these principles have operated. In this way, the artists have chosen to define history not as a sequence of events acted out by individual agents, but as the simultaneity of separate but contingent social frameworks.

we have long forgotten

In this uncertain time, the process of self-isolation provided us with a moment to ponder how cultural markers and rites frame our lives. Rituals build our shared identities and offer us psychological comfort in this confusing world. Like history and rituals themselves, Ritual: The past in the present is a tangle of allusions and realities, hearsay and facts. By offering expansive examples of ritual practices and contemporary art making, the exhibition beats with a rhetorical urgency, an eloquence and a beauty that impels us to view the past differently and grasp what these ideas might portend.

anchors matter

As humankind is humbled by the pandemic that unfolds, grows and spreads, causing major disruption to daily life, art and our experiences of it are more important than ever before. Contemporary art places us in a position to reimagine relations and futures that are altogether different from the present to conceive a future not just as a series of mounting disasters, but as a time for understanding between the different people residing in our communities. But how it achieves this is mysterious. Its effects cannot be anticipated. In this way, contemporary art, as described by Indian scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, is like a prayer to be haunted. A prayer to be haunted by art. A prayer that these works will stay with us; that they will follow us and never relent. Art is a prayer for now.

the art of the ellipses...

end notes

1. Victor, T. 1969. A Ritual Process: Structure and Anti Structure. 3rd ed. Somerset, United States: Taylor & Francis Inc 2. Ellis, J. 2006. ‘Tatau’ and ‘Malu’: Vital Signs in Contemporary Samoan Literature.’ PMLA 121, no.3: 687 - 701.

3. Macpherson, C. 2006. ‘The Ifoga: The exchange value of social honour in Samoa.’ The Journal of Polynesian Society 114, no. 2: 109 - 133.

4. Martin, H. 2017. “Study: Pacific youth more at risk of suicide than any other group.” Stuff NZ, April 28, 2017. Accessed: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/91938328/study-pacific-youth-more-at-risk-ofsuicide-than-any-other-group 5. Walraven, B. 2017. ‘National Pantheon, Regional Deities, Personal Spirits? Mushindo, Sŏngsu, and the Nature of Korean Shamanism.’ Asian Ethnology 68, no.1: 55–80