Slow Moving Waters by twmuseum

CURATED BY NINA MIALL

CON ONT ENTS

Foreword 5

Grant Stevens

How Water Works by Tony Birch

Mandy Quadrio

TarraWarra – Slow Moving Waters 9 by Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin AO

This exhibition was produced on the lands and waters of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. TarraWarra Museum of Art acknowledges the Wurundjeri as the original custodians of this land, and we extend our respect to their community, their Ancestors, and their Elders, past, present and emerging.

Black Ophelia by Tony Birch

Run Circle Settle Be by Nina Miall

Of Time and Tides 16

Jeremy Bakker

Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin and Jonathan Jones

James Geurts

Louisa Bufardeci

Lauren Brincat

Re-scalings of Time 38

Registrations of Place 80

Yasmin Smith

Caitlin Franzmann

Jacobus Capone

Brian Martin

No girr a Marawili

100

Registrations of Labour 104

Oliver Wagner

108

Christian Capurro

112

Raquel Ormella

116

George Egerton-Warburton

120

Michaela Gleave

Sundari Carmody

Dignifying Slowness in a Hyperactive World by Toni Ross

125

Nicole Foreshew and P. Thomas Boorljoonngali

Birrarung Billabong by Tony Birch

131

Registrations of Time 52

List of works

132

Daniel Crooks

Image credits

134

Robert Andrew

Biographies 135

Lucy Bleach

Acknowledgements 148

Megan Cope

Contributors 150

FORE OREWORD

Inaugurated in 2006, the TarraWarra Biennial has presented the works of over 170 artists over the course of six exhibitions to date. Providing a significant platform for each of its six guest curators to identify and respond to new trends in contemporary Australian art, each iteration has had a distinctive and independent curatorial lens. This year’s exhibition, Slow Moving Waters, curated by Nina Miall, is no exception. Taking its cue from the winding Birrarung (Yarra River) located nearby the Museum, the exhibition builds on the very special atmosphere of TarraWarra. A retreat for the imagination, Slow Moving Waters invites our audiences to slow down, consider alternative tempos, listen deeply, and immerse themselves in subtle, minimal and evocative works by twenty-five artists from around Australia. The exhibition had been planned for 2020 but, due to the pandemic and resultant lockdowns in Victoria, it could not be realised until 2021. As it happens, the themes of this Biennial (which had been developed well before 2020) have emerged as even more relevant to our times. After a year of significant disruption to our normal working rhythms, the artists in this exhibition explore time in a variety of ways: time is stretched, contracted, slowed and measured. We witness artistic and organic processes of making, creating, growth, and decay. Some works take us into the cosmos while others focus in on a grain of sand. The exhibition explores both the spectrum of life’s cycles and systems of belief, while also connecting with the rhythms of nature. The Museum thanks all of the artists involved in the project for their diverse, original and committed response to the themes of this Biennial, and for their patience with our changing schedules. We also thank the private lenders to the exhibition and the artists’ representative agents. We were delighted to partner with the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, to co-commission Caitlin Franzmann’s to the curve of you. We are grateful to the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body, and the RISE fund from the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications. We also value the contribution from Creative Victoria and Arts Queensland for their support of the exhibition and the artists involved.

I would like to also thank Senior Wurundjeri Elder Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin AO for her assistance with this project, and for her enlightening essay in the catalogue. We also thank Tony Birch for his remarkable and poignant new poems in this catalogue and are grateful to Dr Toni Ross for her insightful reflections on the themes of the Biennial in her essay. I thank Nina Miall for her exceptional professionalism, unique curatorial approach and dedication to the project during difficult circumstances. The Museum has a wonderful partnership with the RISING festival for this exhibition, with the presentation of the new work The Rivers Sing by Dr Deborah Cheetham AO in collaboration with Bryon Scullin and Thomas Supple, which premieres at the Museum on the opening weekend. We are thrilled to be working with RISING on such a compelling work that, like the exhibition, is an ode to the river and the skies. I especially thank Hannah Fox and Gideon Obarzanek, joint artistic directors of RISING, and producer Zillah Morrow and the RISING team, for bringing this work to the Museum. TarraWarra Museum of Art acknowledges and thanks our founding patrons, Eva Besen AO and Marc Besen AC for their remarkable gift of the Museum and its collection; the Inaugural Foundation Supporter: the Besen Family Foundation; the TarraWarra Museum of Art Foundation; the Board of TarraWarra Museum of Art; the major sponsors: Probuild, Arnold Bloch Leibler Lawyers and Advisers, , Deloitte Private, Chubb Insurance Australia and AON; our major partners: Paoli Smith Creative, IAS Fine Art Logistics and RACV Club; our education program supporters: the Ullmer Family Foundation, the Scanlon Foundation, Credit Suisse, the Bennelong Foundation, the Erdi Foundation and Escala Partners; and public program supporter Yarra Ranges Council. Finally, I extend my thanks to all the staff and volunteers at the Museum for their commitment to the Museum, and for their support and enthusiasm for the TarraWarra Biennial 2021: Slow Moving Waters, with a special thank you to our Exhibitions Manager, Michelle Mountain. Victoria Lynn Director

Jeremy Bakker, Surfacing 2021 (video still detail) OVERLEAF: Daniel Crooks, Study for Object #8 (Pause and Turn) 2021

How Water Works

cup a hand skin and bone this water well a beating heart of molecules life one two three thousand years twice daily rises to gently fall again flow stories asking who are we within this world let water run circle settle be sun of arctic water moving slowly south sleeping ebbing rising upwelling loops of life seconds centimetres patience slowly spirit your beauty and humility shape shift onward through air and bodies entwined with other waters in plants in soil in country from pregnant clouds rain on my roof to birth my love

F. F. Bailliere (1866). Part of the County of Evelyn, 1866 [cartographic material] / lithographed at Office of Lands and Survey, Melbourne. Melbourne: [F.F. Balilliere] OVERLEAF: Oliver Wagner Reconstructed Painting 42 2020 (detail) house paint dust on linen 91.9 x 101.6 cm

TARRAWARRA – SLOW MOVING WATERS

These waters which flow today were once locked up in the valley of the mountains. The creation story of ‘How the Yarra was formed’ told by Billi-Billeri the Ngurungaeta tells how headmen of the Wurundjeri Woiwurrung people freed the water by carving into the landscape many thousands of years ago. Their arduous journey and knowledge of Country allows us to share a precious commodity of today. Once the water of the Yarra was locked in the mountains. This great expanse of water was called Moorool, or Great Water. It was so large that the Woiwurrung had little hunting ground. This was in contrast with the Wathaurong and the Bunurong, whose hunting ground was the lovely flat which is now Port Phillip Bay. Mo-yarra, slow-and-fast-running, was the headman of the Woiwurrung. He decided to free the country of the water. He cut a channel through the hills, in a southerly direction, and reached Western Port. However, only a little water followed him, and the path cut for it gradually closed up, and the water again covered the land of the Woiwurrung. At a latter time the headman of the tribe was Bar-wool. He remembered Mo-yarra’s attempt to free the land. He knew that Mo-yarra still lived on the swamps beside Western Port (Koo-wee-rup). Each winter he saw the hill-tops covered with the feather-down which Mo-yarra plucked from the water birds sheltering on the swamps. Bar-wool resolved to free the land. He cut a channel up the valley with his stone-axe. But he was stopped by Baw-baw, the mountain. He decided to go northwards but was stopped by Donna Buang and his brothers. Then he went westwards and cut through the hills to Warr-an-dyte. There he met Yan-yan, another Woiwurrung, who was busily engaged in cutting a channel for the Plenty River in order to drain Morang, the place where he lived. They joined forces, and the waters of Moorool and Morang became Moo-rool-bark, the Placewhere-the-wide-waters were. They continued their work, and reached the Heidelberg-Templestowe Flats, or Warringal, Dingo-jump-up, and there they rested while the waters formed another Moorool.

Bar-wool and Yan-yan again set to work, but this time they had to go much slower, because the ground was much harder, and they were using up too many stone-axes. Between the Darebin and Merri Creeks they cut a narrow, twisting track, looking for softer ground. At last, they reached Port Phillip. The waters of Moorool and Morang rushed out. The country of the Woiwurrung was freed from water, and Port Phillip was inundated. * * * In 1893, David Syme, purchased View Hill Estate. He changed the name of this property to Tarrawarra being the local Wurundjeri Woiwurrung word, meaning ‘slow moving waters’. Tarrawarra lies between the Healesville and Yarra Glen townships. At Healesville the Birrarung or Yarra River, turns west and the stream becomes increasingly silty reducing the clarity of the water, and by the commuter town of Yarra Glen, it begins to take on the brownish colour that the lower reaches are known for. In its natural state, the purities from the top down provided a natural replenishment for local billabongs and wetlands which were filled with animals and birds and supported a healthy indigenous vegetation across the flats. Looking up river and at the narrowest point there is a bend which is known as the ‘arc’. The arc rises to a high point, then escalates slightly downwards, and the flow continues its journey along graceful bends, rippling over sand and pebbles and over rocks and ledges, forming deep reaches. Tarrawarra and its ‘arc’ are a special part of this journey. Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin AO

deny the cross the holy word deny the gun

Black Ophelia

the wire and hoe caste and colour theft of ground of bodies go and be and be with the drifting river with the spirit water go to the water the water the water go Black Ophelia shimmering within a sheet of glass whispered lips to beating heart she sounds – always was always will be . . .

RUN CIRCLE SETTLE BE

The river bears me on and I am the river. I am made of a changing substance, of mysterious time. Maybe the source is in me. Maybe out of my shadow The days arise, relentless and unreal. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Heraclitus’ (1969) 1 A particularly meandering stretch of the Birrarung (Yarra River), marks the southern boundary line of the TarraWarra Estate, winding languidly through Wurundjeri Country in the Yarra Valley. With its extensive wetlands and waterholes, the perennial waterway is a lifeline along which communities, agriculture and trade have flourished for generations. Following a choreography of graceful, unhurried arcs, the river’s circuitous route through the landscape is believed to have informed the name ‘Tarrawarra’, a Woiwurrung word most commonly translated as ‘slow moving waters’.2 The drift of Tarrawarra’s ‘slow moving waters’ is the departure point for the TarraWarra Biennial 2021, which reflexively explores ideas of deceleration, delay, and the decompression of time. Encompassing twenty-five artists from across the country, the exhibition responds to two related cues: the idea of slowness, and the gentle, measured flow of the nearby Birrarung (Yarra River). Aligned with the slow currents of the river, the Biennial proposes a stay to the ever more rapid flows of people, commerce and information that define the temporal dynamic of globalisation. It develops from the premise that between the acceleration of our current age and the impossibility of stopping altogether is a temporal space of possibility and resistance: slowing down. By carving out a space from within the processes of speed and efficiency that govern contemporary life, the exhibition seeks to explore alternative conceptions of time and how they might offer different ways of being in the world. Harnessing the potential of slowness as both a passive and an active means for claiming different forms of agency, Slow Moving Waters orients itself around disturbances to the prevailing current, recognising that, from within the eddies of the river, new networks of solidarity, support and resistance can take hold.

The Age of Acceleration Articulated and exalted by the Futurists in early twentieth-century Italy (though ushered in some decades before by the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution), the cult of speed has radically altered the periodicity of individual, collective and planetary experience. Today, distortions of temporality are being exponentially generated by what the American art critic and academic Jonathan Crary refers to as ‘the expanding, non-stop life-world of twenty-first-century capitalism’, occasioned by the volatility of globalisation, the velocity of digital technologies, and the torrent of instantaneous communications.3 The human cost of this convergence of forces is a besieged attention span and an informational overload, as what began as the emancipatory promise of accelerationism is experienced more and more as an oppressive and enslaving imperative.4 Having become habitualised to speed’s technologies and tempos, many people are exhausted by the relentless productivity demanded of them, and increasingly alert to its devastating social and environmental consequences. In The Arcades Project (1927–1940)—an encyclopaedic work of historical reckoning—the German philosopher Walter Benjamin reflects on the dialectic of progress, whose experience, he argues, entails both boredom and social regress. Benjamin’s formulation of modernity as the eternal return of the new of almost a century ago, today assumes epic proportions in what has become an ongoing deferral of the present.5 The perpetual growth and innovation inherent to the Western latecapitalist project has resulted in what Crary conceives of as ‘a time that no longer passes, beyond clock time’, a frenetic temporality that contrasts starkly to those of nature and many other cultures with their great, deliberate circles.6 As the German academic and slow theorist Lutz Koepnick has remarked, the uninterrupted operation of markets, information networks and other systems that characterises our hyperaccelerated epoch means that in the present moment we occupy multiple temporal frameworks and spatial orders simultaneously: ‘Time today is sensed as going forward, backward and sidewise all in one; it might be perceived as chronological and cosmic, geological and modern, local and global, evolutionary and ruptured in one and the same breath’.7 According to Crary, one of the key conditions of this delirious 24/7 existence is the inscription of human life into ‘a ceaseless duration, defined by a principle of continuous functioning’.8 The colonisation of

TARRAWARRA BIENNIAL 2021

the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency has dramatically shifted the configurations of work and play, sleep and waking, illumination and darkness, reshaping human perception and experience in profound and lasting ways. Amid the disappearance of diurnal time and any extended periodicity, human life becomes increasingly detached from any unfolding of variegated or cumulative experience.9 Previously stable and durable social forms are eroded, escalating the alienation of the individual and making it increasingly difficult to orient oneself to a temporal framework that is collectively shared. At scale and over time, speed engenders what the contemporary Dutch philosopher Thijs Lijster has identified as a ‘petrification’ of history, whereby the intricate, time-consuming work of memory is abraded and our receptivity to the manifold textures of the present are greatly diminished.10 The French philosopher Alain Badiou’s comment that ‘today revolt requires leisureliness and not speed’ exemplifies a recent body of thought that locates slowness as a radical point of departure for imagining new social relations that are resistant to the imperative of speed.11 However, there is agreement in much of this decelerationist discourse that the antidote to the assault on the rhythmic, periodic character of human life is not simply to be found in slowing down. Koepnick rejects the notion of slowness as speed’s inversion, suggesting that the way in which to disrupt speed culture’s domination is not to reverse it, but to ‘refract the impact of speed on our sense of time and mobility, our structures of memory and anticipation, our notion of place, subjectivity and community.’12 In the pauses and hesitations opened up by slowness, he argues, we can experience the evolving landscapes of the present in all their temporal and textural multiplicity. For the German sociologist and political scientist Hartmut Rosa, it is the idea of ‘resonance’, which he defines as a meaningful relationship of reciprocity and mutual understanding between human beings and their environment, that holds the promise of respite from this paradoxical time of indifference.13 While respite is not easily found in this age of human and ecological expenditure, it is art’s capacity for drawing attention to the rich textures of human experience—its ability to map the experience of contemporaneity through the particularity of its materials, forms and rhythms—that allows it to not only mobilise, but also to problematise, the revolutionary potential of slowness and refocus our perception in an age of seemingly endless distraction.

A Dynamic of Deceleration Slow ideas and practices have, ironically, been gathering considerable momentum for some time, coalescing in recent years in slow movements around food, cinema, cities and sex, among other pursuits. As Koepnick remarks, it seems at every turn we receive instruction about ‘how to resist the speed of the present, ignore the relentless ticking of our clocks, and revive extended structures of temporality’.14 In manifestos which decry the impoverishment of human experience by the temporal dictates of late capitalism, these movements privilege collective practices of care, continuity, stability and sustainability over individualist ones of competition, acquisition and advancement. They frequently recognise the strategic function and value of ‘doing nothing’—the observation of those moments in which we might reflect and nourish ourselves—as a necessary prerequisite to ‘doing something’. Underscoring the dynamic between inaction and activism, slow movements seek to redress the estranging, disempowering effects of a global infrastructure designed for continuous production and consumption, by refiguring the relationship between bodies, time and space. Many of these slow ideas have gained heightened currency amidst the profound upheaval caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, whereby major disturbances to global capitalism have prompted a return to restorative and reparative pursuits in place of extractive and consumptive ones. Primed to take advantage of this decelerationist impulse is the multimillion-dollar wellness industry, whose wholesale co-option of slowness is evinced by the glut of meditation apps, mindfulness screensavers and mandala colouring books available. But while the salutary effects of slowing down have been championed by a range of movements and discourses in recent years, slowness is far from straightforward in terms of its liberating or revolutionary rhetoric and potential, as the Australian academic Francis Russell has suggested: ‘The common-sense appeal of the injunction to “slow down” and decelerate potentially obscures the perhaps unintended and unconscious attachments that slow discourse holds to conservatism, homogeneity and nostalgia’.15 That the affirmation of slowness resonates strongly with the middle class, the strata of society that has most thoroughly internalised the intensifying rhythms of neoliberal globalisation—that is most accustomed to Badiou’s leisureliness—also implicates it as a typically bourgeois preoccupation.16 After all, being able to pause is a privilege not available to all.

The source for the title of this essay is the Tony Birch poem ‘How Water Works’, which is published on page 7 of this exhibition catalogue. 1

Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Heraclitus’ (1969), from In Praise of Darkness, (trans. by Norman Thomas di Giovanni), New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1974.

Maxine Palmer’s Tarrawarra: An Account of 130 Years of a Victorian property is one of several historical accounts which cite the ‘slow moving waters’ translation and connect it specifically to the winding river. (Maxine Palmer, Tarrawarra: An Account of 130 Years of a Victorian property, the Hawthorn Press, Melbourne, 1967, p. 31).

Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, London and New York: Verso, 2014, p. 8.

Thijs Lijster and Robin Celikates, ‘Beyond the Echo Chamber An Interview with Hartmut Rosa on Resonance and Alienation’ in Thijs Lister (ed.), The Future of the New: Artistic Innovation in Times of Social Acceleration, Amsterdam: Valiz, 2018, p. 24.

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, (trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin), Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belkap Press, 2002.

Crary, 2014, p. 8

Lutz Koepnick, On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary, New York: Columbia University Press, 2014, p. 3.

Crary, 2014, p. 8.

Ibid., p. 9.

10 Thijs Lister, ‘Harder, Better, Stronger, Faster: Introduction’ in Thijs Lister (ed.), 2018, p. 16. 11

Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy, (trans. by Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens), London: Continuum, 2006, p. 38.

12 Koepnick, 2014, p. 6. 13 Thijs Lijster and Robin Celikates, 2018, p. 25. 14 Koepnick, 2014, p. 4. 15 Francis Russell, ‘Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Capitalism So Fast, So Accelerated? Slow Art and Decelerationist Strategy’ in David Attwood and Francis Russell (eds.), The Art of Laziness: Contemporary Art and Post-Work Politics, Melbourne: A+A Publishing, University of Melbourne, 2020, p. 20. 16 In contrast to the middle class, Hartmut Rosa talks about the forceful deceleration of the un- or under-employed which serves to devalue the available time they have as non-productive. Quoted in Lister. See Lijster and Celikates, 2018, p. 27.

TARRAWARRA BIENNIAL 2021

OF TIME AND TIDES

Developing from this dynamic theoretical framework, the TarraWarra Biennial 2021 surveys recent artistic work engaging with differentiated temporalities in an effort to mitigate the compression and disorientation of the present. Processes of hesitation, deceleration or delay find expression in works which enlist slowness as a conceptual framework, aesthetic strategy or radical political gesture. That the exhibition had to be postponed by eight months on account of the coronavirus pandemic has ensured—by chance more so than design—that slow ideas are also firmly embedded in the curatorial methodology. Taking shape reflexively around registrations of time, place, and labour, Slow Moving Waters advances an expanded, complex notion of slowness, understanding it as a medium through which we can explore alternate types of mobility, sharpen our senses, and re-orient ourselves to the overlooked subtleties of the present. Certain works in the exhibition harness duration through labour- or time-intensive processes, or evolve and shift over time in ways which reward close and extended scrutiny. Others draw on strategies which involve walking, dreaming or idleness as means of operating outside the cycles of production, circulation and consumption that circumscribe our sense of time and delimit so much human behaviour. Core to the exhibition’s concerns are a commitment to environmental custodianship, to collective forms of action, and to an aesthetics of care, as well as a deep regard for the enduring resilience of First Nations systems of knowledge. For many people, the process of deceleration begins from the moment they embark on the journey to the regional setting of TarraWarra Museum of Art. It continues inside the galleries where the Biennial unfolds spatially, temporally, materially, and conceptually, rewarding repeat viewing and accumulating in intensity over the course of its run. On Time, 2020, a striking provocation by the artist Jeremy Bakker, introduces the first of several physical and conceptual impediments in the space, obstacles to a hastening through the exhibition. Occupying a plinth at the entrance to the galleries, a piece of granite rock punctures the glass face of a clock, frustrating the forward momentum of its arms. As the second hand pulses against the inert mass of the rock, a feeble metallic sound is emitted. A literal figuring of Crary’s ‘time that no longer passes, beyond clock time’, On Time announces a pause to clocktime’s dominant narrative and accompanying urgencies, exhorting us to attend to the quieter rhythms of ‘non-ticking time’ within the exhibition.

The River as Repository As you proceed through the exhibition, a number of works by senior Wurundjeri Elder Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin and Jonathan Jones, James Geurts, Louisa Bufardeci, Lauren Brincat, and Megan Cope, respond to the cultural significance and tempo of the Birrarung. A reverence for the river, for its timeless expansiveness and vitality, is a common thread in these works, stemming from its regard as ‘a repository of story and knowledge, flourishing in deep time’.17 Wending through the south gallery, Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin and Jonathan Jones’s installation Making the Birrarung, 2021, maps the section of the river near the Museum through the serpentine arrangement of hundreds of cast-bronze mussels interspersed with stone axe heads. Simple, unassuming creatures, the mussels used to be a regular fixture on the riverbed, filtering the water and providing sustenance for communities nearby, though their numbers have become depleted in recent years on account of introduced toxins and pests, faster-flowing currents and the resulting destabilisation of riverbeds. The work acknowledges two creation stories of the Birrarung with the inclusion of the stone axes invoking Billi-Billeri’s account of how the Birrarung was formed through cutting a channel with a stone axe (told by Aunty Joy in this catalogue), and a sound recording, in which Aunty Joy and her grandson tell the account of an old man causing a young boy to cry, the stream of his tears becoming the river. Passages of the recording are whispered or barely discernible as a provocation to attend with more care to the wisdom of our Elders. A river run dry, Making the Birrarung reflects on the cultural flow of rivers as the mainstay of Aboriginal nations in the south-east, with Jones noting how the worsening conditions of the river can be understood as a metaphor for the health of Aboriginal communities. He describes how ‘successive years of Western farming practices have seen the river, which many Elders remember flowing clean and clear, choked with silt. The clouding of our waters can be understood as a clouding of our minds … Yet there remain moments of clarity, pools of clear knowledge still residing in our community in the form of our Elders’.18 Resonating with Aboriginal ancestral connections to Country through time, this collaborative installation is deeply attentive to the accumulated presences to be found in the river as it makes its passage through the landscape.

TARRAWARRA BIENNIAL 2021

James Geurts’s suite of experimental drawings Flow Equation, 2021, also considers the ways in which the Birrarung has, over time, been reassigned from a natural life force to a commodity, visualising critical stages of this transformation. Five lightboxes, each combining a spidery neon drawing derived from studies of river debris with a site-responsive scan of the landscape, create a sequential narrative of the river’s dynamics at points of human intervention along its course. Cadences of continuum and rupture can be read in the balance of neon and scanned elements, intended to mirror the river’s flow and its regular interruption or alteration by commercial, technological and cultural forces. Suspended at a moment of high-pressure flux and diversion, Flow Equation arrests the tumultuous intersection of these forces of nature and culture, allowing some of the submerged histories, archaeologies and utilities of the waterway to surface. Louisa Bufardeci’s installation of eight new needlepoint works Looking in to the land attached, 2020, conducts a surfacing of a different kind, taking shape around the silt sedimentation that remains on the soles of the artist’s feet and between her toes following a swim in the Birrarung. These muddy residues are subjected by the artist to a staged process of abstraction: firstly, through viewing individual grains under a high-powered microscope, then through their transcription onto a needlepoint chart, and finally through the act of needlepoint itself. Decontextualised and rendered in an array of coloured yarns, the sediments assume myriad mineralogical and astronomical associations. Areas of light and shadow heighten the silt’s granular structure, suggesting a shifting topography in which recognisable forms may be perceived. Synthesising macroscopic and microscopic perspectives, Bufardeci’s needlepoints extend through time to speak to the abiding materiality of the land. Through the process of collecting, abstracting and translating sedimentation from the river, the artist explores ‘the way place and history can stick to us’, the slow, cumulative and lasting impressions left on us by our experiences in the world.19

Loosely suspended, a prepared spinnaker cascades to the floor, its drapes and knots serving as abstract evocations of the currents and countercurrents of a river, its passages of flow and eddies of resistance. Retired from service at sea, the repurposed sailcloth preserves time’s imprint in its fibres, weathered by sustained exposure to the elements. Within the gallery, gentler environmental conditions exert the spinnaker to subtly swell and contract, breathing around the constraints imposed by the custom-made church bell ropes and red woollen hand grips known as ‘sallys’. The spinnaker is periodically taken out into the landscape by Brincat’s aides where, enlivened by the wind, it billows and undulates in tribute to the river’s ebb and flow. Undertaken as ‘maintenance’ actions rather than performed specifically for an audience, these manipulations of the sailcloth are intended by the artist as a private ‘lament for the river’, a way of honouring its resilience, adaptation and transformation.

17 Tony Birch, ‘Walking and Being’, Meanjin Quarterly, summer 2019, URL: https://meanjin.com.au/essays/walking-and-being/, accessed 30 July, 2020. 18 Jonathan Jones, email to the author, 7 August 2019. 19 Louisa Bufardeci, email to the author, 12 August 2019.

Taking inspiration from the river’s stream rather than its sedimentation, Lauren Brincat’s work Freak Out, Far Out, In Out, 2021, is the latest in her series of ‘Performance Instruments’. These dynamic sculptural installations are reconfigured at regular intervals by select collaborators (‘aides’), their form altering continually throughout the exhibition.

JEREMY BAKKER

Hands in the Dark 2017 (video still) OPPOSITE: On Time 2017

Surfacing 2021 (video stills)

AUNTY JOY MURPHY WANDIN AND AND JONATHAN JONES

Jonathan Jones bindugaanygalang (freshwater mussel shells) in progress bronze

Jonathan Jones and Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin after William Barak untitled (shield design) 2013 fluorescent tubes and fittings, electrical cable installation view, TarraWarra Museum of Art, 2013

JAMES GEURTS

Flow Equation 2021

LOUISA BUFARDECI

Looking in to the land attached 8 2020 OPPOSITE: Looking in to the land attached 8 2020 (detail)

Looking in to the land attached 7 2020 OPPOSITE: Looking in to the land attached 6 2020

LAUREN BRINCAT

Artspace studio stills PAGES 34–36: Salt lines: Play it as it Sounds 2016 sail cloth, church bell ropes, bass, performed maintenance action dimensions variable For The Biennale of Sydney with Australia Council for the Arts

RE-SCALINGS SCAL OF TIME

While the Birrarung offers an evocative reference point for a number of the artists in the TarraWarra Biennial, other artists look to the vastness or intricacy of geological and cosmological cycles, seasonal rhythms, interconnected ecologies and ancient knowledge systems. They consider time’s extremes of scale, from the transience of its passing on quantum mechanical levels to the unfathomable expanses that structure the evolution of the universe. In works which enact radical shifts in perspective, the accelerated dynamics of the present are perforated by deep time, and by cyclical and non-linear conceptions of time. Disrupting the teleology of late capitalism with its ceaseless onward movement and strictly linear notion of progress, they interrogate the dominant structures and frameworks that shape our knowledge of the universe through thinking at different scales. Artists Michaela Gleave and Sundari Carmody explore aspects of the cosmos, the contingencies and entanglements of its vast, complex systems. Taking the night sky as her site of enquiry, Gleave’s The World Arrives at Night (Star Printer), 2014, combines astronomical knowledge, geo-positioning technology and specially developed source code to chart the gradual rotation of the earth specific to its location. A dot matrix printer registers the appearance of stars over the horizon at TarraWarra, printing key information such as the star’s common name, its constellation, spectral type, distance from the sun in lightyears, and magnitude, at a rate of one star per minute and theoretically for eternity. Over time, this incessant flow of data accumulates as a concertinaed pile on the floor, majestic trajectories of celestial movement compressed into plain typed records which gradually disappear in a sea of paper. Sundari Carmody’s suspended work Sagitta and Cyclus, 2020, poses similar questions about our relationship to the known and unknown worlds. Composed of brass spheres and rods, a 2.5-metre sculpture of the constellation Sagitta (Latin for ‘arrow’) sits in a dynamic relationship to a circular brass ring, a white stork skull and fragment of magnetite poised at opposing points on the ring’s orbit. This apparently abstract arrangement of objects is underpinned by an esoteric logic: in the early nineteenth century, storks injured by arrows while wintering in Africa helped shed light on the mystery of bird migration, while traces of magnetite found in the beaks of migratory birds are believed to act like a compass for their navigation in flight. Carmody’s mobile installation makes visible these ‘invisible’ phenomena and presents them in the

enmeshed state in which we find them naturally, the intricacies of which still elude our understanding. Through illuminating these non-linear connections in ways which preserve their wonder and inexplicability, she counters ‘the homogeneity of the present’ 24/7 world, whose ‘fraudulent brightness’ Crary argues extends everywhere and presumes to ‘preempt any mystery or unknowability’.20

Deep listening In her book Slow Philosophy: Reading Against the Institution (2016), the Australian philosopher Michelle Boulous Walker makes a case for resisting instrumental relations to thinking by cultivating a greater receptivity to ambiguity and contradiction—that unknowability mentioned by Crary above—in order to bring a balance of illumination and shadow to our understanding of the world. She argues that ‘by sitting patiently with complexity, we undertake the work of transformation that slows our habitual modes of haste. We suspend our too often hurried judgments in favour of a discerning quality of attention that remains with the complexity we engage. We become, ourselves, the site of a receptive and intense relation with the things of the world’.21 As Aboriginal activist, educator and artist Dr Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr Baumann AM has written in relation to the Ngan’gityemerri language group of the Daly River region in the Northern Territory, First Nations people have long understood the importance of unhurried time for complex encounters: ‘Our Aboriginal culture has taught us to be still and to wait. We do not try to hurry things up. We let them follow their natural course — like the seasons. We watch the moon in each of its phases. We wait for the rain to fill our rivers and water the thirsty earth’.22 In contrast to Western time which is often considered and experienced as a finite resource, time in many Indigenous cosmologies takes shape around a cycling of decay and renewal. An ongoing mapping of deep time on everyday time is central to the practice of storytelling, so rich and varied across Indigenous cultures and fundamental to expressions of kinship, territory and ceremony. Dr Miriam-Rose writes of the privileged place that listening and waiting hold in these oral traditions. In her reflection on dadirri—a word, concept and spiritual practice from the Ngan’gikurunggurr and Ngen’giwumirri languages which embodies an appreciation of their deep connection and sacred identity with the

TARRAWARRA BIENNIAL 2021

land—she describes it as a quality of her people for ‘inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness’.23 Coming from a Western philosophical tradition, Boulous Walker speaks of how attentive listening acknowledges difference and supports the agency of the individual. In the concept and tradition of dadirri described by Dr Miriam-Rose, this practice assumes a more spiritual dimension, as a way of creating and holding space, its bodies and its stories, in expressions of profound affinity and respectful difference.

20 Crary, 2014, p. 19,

Deep listening plays a formative role in the collaboration between Wiradjuri artist Nicole Foreshew and the late senior Gija artist of Nagarra skin P. Thomas Boorljoonngali, a chapter of which is included in this year’s TarraWarra Biennial. Embarked on in 2016, Gemerre/Garraba (Scar/Body), 2016–, takes the form of an intergenerational exchange between two artists—one approaching the height of her career, the other at the end of her life—the resonances of which find expression in artworks encompassing traditional and non-traditional media. Adopting a framework based on Wiradjuri and Gija narratives, the early years of the project saw the artists exchanging material objects from Country in person, sharing stories of body and skin, earth and song, across culture, time and place. The new bodies of work created in response to their dialogue spanned the breadth of the country and life’s experience. Following Boorljoonngali’s passing in Kununurra in 2018, Ronella Ramsay, Boorljoonngali’s granddaughter and executor of the P. Thomas Estate, requested Foreshew continue to make artwork with the support of Warmun Art Centre. Drawing on Boorljoonngali’s repository of Gemerre estate works Foreshew maintains kinship ties through an ongoing process of cultural reciprocation. The group of scarification paintings, and wood, ochre, ash and iron sculptures presented in the exhibition emerges from this posthumous exchange. Material expressions of their respective connections to Country, these Gemerre/Garraba works offer a visual account of the shared intimacies that arise from intergenerational learning over and beyond a single lifetime.

23 Ibid.

21 Michelle Boulous Walker, quoted in ‘Could “Slow Philosophy” Offer An Antidote to Modern Academia?’ an interview with Rhys Tranter, published 11 October 2017, URL: https://rhystranter.com/2017/10/11/ slow-philosophy/, accessed 14 December 2020, 22 Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr, ‘Dadirri, Inner Deep Listening and Quiet Still Awareness: A reflection by Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr’, 1988, URL: https://www.miriamrosefoundation.org.au/about-dadirri/ dadirri-text, accessed on 21 July 2020.

MICHAELA GLEAVE

The World Arrives at Night (Star Printer) 2014

The World Arrives at Night (Star Printer) 2014 (detail)

SUNDARI CARMODY

PAGES 44–47: Sagitta and Cyclus 2020

NICOLE FORESHEW AND P. THOMAS BOORLJOONNGALI Gemerre/Garraba (Scar/Body) 2016–

Nicole Foreshew Wunan 2019 OPPOSITE: Bangal 2018–19

P. Thomas Boorljoonngali Gemerre 2008

REGISTRA STRAT IONS OF TIME

If Foreshew and P. Thomas Boorljoonngali’s co-authored project follows the arc of a human lifetime, other works in the Biennial inhabit the lifespan of the exhibition, developing, evolving and unfolding over its duration. Through adopting expanded, extended and cyclical structures of temporality, the artists of these works attempt to restore what Crary calls ‘the blurred, meandering textures’ of human time, in the process revealing the present as a space of multiple trajectories and possibilities.24 The notion of time’s multiple possible trajectories, its geometries and abstractions, is pursued by Daniel Crooks in his spatial intervention Object #8 (Pause and Turn), 2021. A new iteration of his ‘Real Imaginary Objects’ series, this site-specific work presents time visually by sequencing small, detailed cross-sections of it, a method referred to by the artist as a ‘time-stack’. Supple, entwining plywood forms writhe up the wall, disappearing and reappearing as though traversing different dimensions. The objects’ contortions are the result of a mapping process in which discrete points of the artist’s movements in space are captured continuously at high speed by a 3D slicing camera. The recorded sequence of two-dimensional ‘frames’ is then aggregated into a threedimensional model, its form an extrusion of the data through time. Crooks figures time as a tangible and voluminous material in these works, manipulating it into a spatial realm which allows its every fold and crease to be experienced in three dimensions. Conveying dynamism in stasis, the liquid sculptural forms of Object #8 (Pause and Turn) continue the artist’s studies of time and motion, opening up new metaphysical possibilities in their evocation of other dimensions.

Material transformations Where Crooks draws on data to convey the fundamentally fluid nature of time, Robert Andrew’s richly textured kinetic installation Continuing Depths of Connection, 2019–20, begins with the extrusion of a single, unending thread coated with red ochre from the artist’s Yawuru Country in Western Australia. Over time what begins as a tangle of thread takes the concrete, cursive form of the Indigenous word ‘inala’, a term whose various associations encompass ideas of community, and of a gathering or resting place. While many of Andrew’s previous works involve acts of disintegration or erasure, Continuing Depths of Connection develops from an act of accrual. The red earth-stained thread loops and pools

onto a piece of crushed granite, reshaping the word ‘inala’ again and again in a physical gathering together of community. In this ongoing process of reiteration and renewal, each transcription of the word bears the trace of its earlier form in the manner of a palimpsest, conveying the convolution and mutability of language, its potential for reclamation and reinvention. Continuing Depths of Connection invites us to consider the gradual, complex process of bringing people together to build knowledge and share culture, attesting to the enduring value of communal expression. Other works by Lucy Bleach and Megan Cope in the Biennial enact slow material transformations of a very different nature. Long interested in our relationship to volatile environments, Bleach’s new installation gives physical expression to the often invisible transformations that ensue from the earth’s vibrations. Comprising three related sculptures, attenuated ground (the slow seismogenic zone), 2021, responds to the geological phenomena of slow earthquakes, which produce a delayed, imperceptible rupture over extended periods — a process referred to by the artist as ‘a poetry of collapse’. A double bass, the largest and lowest-pitched string instrument in the symphony orchestra, is embalmed in toffee, its form gradually revealed as the toffee liquefies onto a plaster plinth below. Excited by tactile transducers, the exposed strings of the double bass transfer the infrasonic pulse of slow earthquake events. Picked up by a seismometer embedded in the toffee, the tone of their vibrations shifts subtly. As the instrument ‘plays’ the sustained release of seismic energy — a phenomenon known as harmonic tremor — it makes visible and audible, subterranean processes which we rarely witness directly. On an adjacent wall, a polished concrete slab, fractured through a process of seismic simulation, continues Bleach’s enquiry into the slow upheaval of geological activity. The slab’s network of cracks has been intricately sutured by the artist according to the principles of the Japanese art of kintsugi, using a powdered core sample extracted from the slow seismogenic subduction zone in the Japan Trench (responsible for disastrous megathrust earthquakes like the 2011 Tohoku-Oki quake), illuminated with gold. In a nearby window, a Ficus coronata, a species of fig tree found near TarraWarra Estate, grows in a Rhizobox. Laying bare the plant’s extraordinary vascular root system, the Rhizobox reveals channels of communication between the tree’s superterranean and subterranean spheres. Sharing material, formal and conceptual

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correspondences, the three resonant forms of Bleach’s installation reflect on sustained vibration, slow states of transition and delicate acts of repair. Together they compel a reimagining of our relationship to our increasingly unstable environment. Transposing questions of environmental instability from the earth to water, Quandamooka artist Megan Cope’s work Currents III, 2020, considers the impact of western farming practices on our waterways, and the related problems of rising sea levels and ocean acidification. Three ice sculptures, imbued with naturally coloured plant extracts (red cabbage, blueberries) which act as natural pH indicators, are suspended from the ceiling. As the ice cores melt, they stain paper made from algal blooms, the changing lurid colours an index of a rise and fall in pH levels (algal blooms are known to disrupt the natural balance of lakes and reservoirs). An accompanying wall work charts stretches of the Birrarung from its source on Mt Baw Baw to its mouth in Port Phillip Bay, mapping variations that occur as the river moves from freshwater to saltwater. With its dynamic and mercurial materiality, Currents III evokes the deteriorating health of the waterways through a live painting process that alters the work in unpredictable ways throughout the exhibition. The work’s ongoing physical transformation alerts us to the vital importance of water as the primary medium through which we experience the devastating effects of climate change, distilling how today’s actions shape tomorrow’s planet.

Asynchronicities of time The slow rhythms of environmental change to which Cope’s installation is so vividly alive are animated in quieter ways in a durational moving-image work by Grant Stevens. Below the mountains and beyond the desert, a river runs through a valley of forests and grasslands, towards an ocean, 2020, is a computer-generated video combining artificial intelligence, mindfulness principles and real-time computer graphics to create an imaginary environment in a continuous state of flux. Simulated in rich detail using 3D gaming technologies, five ecosystems — forest, desert, lake, grassland and ocean — evolve and function as an interdependent, real-time system. As in nature, these digital environments continually transform through the rhythmic changes brought about by the cycles of the seasons, day and night, and the tides, as well as less predictable fluctuations in the weather (clouds, wind, humidity), and slower

geological and botanical processes such as growth, decay, erosion, and uplift. Determined algorithmically within parameters set by the artist, the subtle environmental dynamics of the scene are registered by seventy cameras which roam the computer-generated terrain with an almost sentient gaze. Unbound by narrative, the work’s limitless duration highlights how multiple overlapping timelines sit in various distinct relation to real time. Natural processes that are highly accelerated (one day/night cycle takes 14 minutes) unfold almost imperceptibly, while an orchestral soundscape builds uneasily to a climax that never arrives. With extended viewing, the sense of absence — of people, fauna, action or climax — from these landscapes becomes disquieting, the paradoxes and dissonances of the simulated natural setting more conspicuous. At once idealised and homogenised by its algorithms, Stevens’s slow, self-sustaining environment deepens our perception, offering an alternative to hyperactive digital technologies that compete for slices of our fragmented attention. At the same time, it understands how fulfilment of the promises of these technologies is often withheld, illustrating Crary’s assertion that, in spite of the professed compatibility, even harmonisation between human time and the temporalities of networked systems, ‘the lived realities of this relationship are disjunctions, fractures and continual disequilibrium’.25 Drawing on the seductive visual languages of the video gaming and wellness industries, Below the mountains ... offers an opportunity to attend to the discrepancies between the temporal rhythms of the natural environment and those of our own hectic daily lives.

On Time and Memory If Stevens’s video apprehends the intensifying asynchronicities of the present, Mandy Quadrio’s sculptural work for the Biennial invites us to consider the importance of time for the articulation of memory. Specifically, it interrogates the hegemonic temporal regime of colonisation and the collective amnesia that has arisen around the treatment of the palawa (Tasmanian Aboriginal) people. In Whose time are we on?, 2021, sinews of steel wool interweave to create a richly textured installation, whose folds — some draped from cables, one spreading along the floor and up the gallery wall — are physically explored by visitors. While the artist affirms the continuity of her proud palawa heritage in this work, asserting the strength and resilience of her palawa ancestors against

the pervasive myth of their extinction under colonial rule, her choice of a modern industrial household substance distances the work from the materiality of Country. Laying bare the steel wool’s coarse, abrasive qualities, Quadrio instead makes explicit colonialism’s systematic scouring of palawa sovereignty, suggesting with tangible immediacy, the ongoing violence perpetrated against the palawa over centuries. In the steel wool’s entangled forms, the histories of the domestic servitude and indentured labour of First Tasmanians find raw material expression. Perforations within the drapery riddle the official historical account of this period, exposing its gaps and inconsistencies. In titling the work Whose time are we on?, Quadrio explores the complex temporality of entwined cultural histories with their inherent asymmetries of power, and conveys the ability of intergenerational memory to resurface despite its suppression by colonial forces. Quadrio’s work underscores the relationality of slowness, the idea that slow always sits in relation to another tempo. In Franco-Czech writer Milan Kundera’s novel Slowness (1995), the narrator elucidates the relationship between tempo and memory, remarking that ‘the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting’.26 For Crary, the atrophy of individual and collective memory that is demanded by the acceleration of the present moment has reached an end game in which the conditions of information access and communication in today’s hyper-networked world ensure ‘the systematic erasure of the past as part of the fantasmatic construction of the present’.27 Developing at such exponential rates, acceleration assumes a violent temporal register, upsetting the grounding work of memory and wresting us from our situatedness in social, cultural and historical context. 24 Crary, 2014, p. 29. 25 Crary, 2014, p. 31. 26 Milan Kundera, Slowness, (trans. by Linda Asher), New York: Harper Perennial, 1997, p. 135. 27 Crary, 2014, p. 45.

TARRAWARRA BIENNIAL 2021

DANIEL CROOKS

ROBERT ANDREW

PAGES 60–63: Continuing Depths of Connection 2018–19 stained string, gravel, aluminium and electromechanical elements 250 x 800 cm

LUCY BLEACH

Rhizobox and Ficus coronata roots OPPOSITE: something more solid 2017 (detail) toffee, full-size cello, electro-magnet, contact mic, amplifier, cingel film dimensions variable Remanence, Ten Days on the Island Festival, Domain House, Tasmania

Slow earthquake seismic magnitude graph (detail) Japan Trench core sample (taken from the geographic epicentre of the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake) OPPOSITE: Studio image of toffee on plaster, 2020 Replica of Tarrawarra Museum of Art’s gallery floor after being shaken on a biaxial simulator with the same force as the slow earthquakes preceding the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake, 2021

MEGAN COPE

Lake Eucumbene, New South Wales, 7 March 2019 Photograph: Scott Blencowe OPPOSITE: The pH scale Universal Indicator © dezydezy/123RF.COM

Work in progress, Currents III 2021

GRANT STEVENS

PAGES 72–75: Below the mountains and beyond the desert, a river runs through a valley of forests and grasslands, towards an ocean 2020 (production stills, 16:9)

MANDY QUADRIO

PAGES 76–79: Whose time are we on? 2020 (details)

REGISTRATIONS STRA OF PLACE

If today’s hyper-accelerated world functions in an impossible temporality, its spatiality is similarly compromised, increasingly dispersed over the dematerialised territories of cyberspace. As Jenny Odell has remarked: ‘What is missing from that surreal and terrifying torrent of information and virtuality is any regard, any place, for the human animal, situated as she is in time and in a physical environment with other human and nonhuman entities’.28 Capitalism’s corrosive influence on our relationship to the earth and to other living things is of course not new, having been prophesied by Karl Marx a century and a half ago as labour was organised away from agrarian models, with their reliance on seasonal and diurnal cycles of time, towards the round-the-clock temporality of the modern factory. However, formal scientific recognition of the colossal and irrevocable impact that human life has had on the earth since the Industrial Revolution has only recently arrived with the coinage of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, by Eugene Stoermer and Paul Crutzen in 2000.29 Responding to this unfolding environmental crisis, many contemporary artists are today re-orienting their practices away from an anthropocentric perspective to a more ecocritical refiguring of our relationship to our environment. Taking their cue from philosopher Rosi Braidotti’s notion of the post-human, which posits the human and non-human as a continuum and argues for a ‘posthuman ethics of collaborative construction of alternative ways of being-in-this-together’, they are exploring our precarious and embodied entanglements with other species.30 In works which make visible what Professor Timothy Morton calls the ‘sprawling mesh of interconnection’, they find value in the intimate interdependence and ontological equivalence of all human and non-human beings.31 Dissolving traditional distinctions between nature and culture, this fluidity of relations becomes the starting point for how we might imagine, and then enact, sustainable futures.

Situated slowness A profound belief in the interconnectedness of the earth’s ecologies filters through the perspectives of a number of the artists in the Biennial, a foil to the sense of disorientation and perpetual disequilibrium that is increasingly a function of the contemporary human condition today. As a working farm and vineyard within a rural setting, the TarraWarra Estate (within which the Museum is located) provides fertile ground for these artists looking to understand and restore the rich heterogeneity

of the world through creating situated instances of individual and collective slowness. Several highly site-specific new works explore time as it is lived within TarraWarra and its surrounds, excavating the singular history, geology and culture of this place in ways which take account of its past uses, present traces and future incarnations. These works place trust in the direct, sensorial reality of TarraWarra, finding in its cyclical rhythms and ecological interconnectedness an alternative template for relations of synergy, intimacy and harmonious co-existence over ones of expenditure, extraction and atomisation. In the resonances of the natural environment, and in the praxis of its care, they identify touchstones by which we can orient ourselves and navigate the multiple dimensions that currently claim us.

that connect local people to each other and to the land they inhabit. Interestingly, both Smith and Franzmann are among a growing number of artists choosing to live primarily outside metropolitan areas, often pursuing itinerant modes of working which foreground a proximity and responsiveness to site. Against the global economy’s insistence on mass exchange and circulation, their integrated approach to work/ life signifies a restored preoccupation with the intimacies of the local, while at the same time refraining from the susceptibility of slow thinking to retreat into a mode of pastoral romanticisation. Rather, by focusing on the abundant multiplicity and ecological interconnection of their immediate environment, these artists attempt to remedy the widespread degradation of local events and exchanges that is taking place today.

Yasmin Smith is one of several artists in Slow Moving Waters whose works, having emerged from local collaborations and residencies undertaken on-site at TarraWarra, uncover the hidden narratives of the land. Taking its shape, colour and texture directly from the vineyard of the TarraWarra Estate, her installation Terroir, 2020, intimately connects a forensic approach to form and material with an archaeology of place. Gnarled forms of ceramic grapevines climb the gallery wall, their gradient in tune with the raked vines visible outside in the landscape. Enlisting TarraWarra’s viniculturists’ knowledge of the local hydrology, geology and soil composition, Smith cast grapevine prunings in clay before firing them with a glaze developed from the ashes of their burnt remains. Ribbons of bark formed longitudinal impressions in the direction of the plant’s growth during the casting process, subsequently allowing the glaze to pool in the bark’s fissures and run off its ridges. Removed from the vine, these cast specimens assume the appearance of old bones, animal skeletons or detached limbs. The glaze’s mushroom-brown patina and satin texture is decided by the particular balance of macro- and micro-nutrients which have travelled into the vines via natural means and through human intervention. The unique properties of this sitederived glaze find parallels in the vinicultural concept of terroir, a French term used to describe how the character, colour, texture and flavour of different wines is determined by environmental factors (soil composition, bedrock, climate), and by human activities (agricultural management), which exert a dual influence over the specificity of the yield.

Working with collaborators across disciplines and with the particularities of site, Caitlin Franzmann’s participatory works develop around slow practices, conversation, critical listening, and collective forms of care. Bringing together material and immaterial forms, to the curve of you (TarraWarra) proceeds from a sculptural installation of foraged, fermented and preserved foods in the gallery space to take in the surrounding grounds of TarraWarra. Within the gallery, reformed laboratory glassware houses live cultures such as kombucha and plant matter foraged from the local area, a sensory prompt for an intimate audio experience that is accessed via a QR code on the work’s wall label. As a voice guides visitors out of the gallery and walks them around the Estate, objective accounts of the ancient practices of cultivation and fermentation give way to more discursive reflections on cellular ecologies, borders, plant consciousness, and the intricate microbial relations between humans and their environment. Traversing biology, agriculture, history, mythology, philosophy and Indigenous cultural knowledge specific to TarraWarra, Franzmann’s guided walk encourages the slow practices of dwelling in, and aligning with, place: walking, observing, conversing, listening, growing, foraging, tasting, feeling and fermenting. Weaving connections between the microbiomes of soil, plants and humans — networks that can be physically sensed through sight, smell, taste and vibration — Franzmann opens up a space that is dynamic, fluid and, for the most part, invisible. to the curve of you (TarraWarra) unearths the microscopic cultures of TarraWarra, drawing on the simple activity of a guided walk to extend attention to the cellular level, to those essential cycles of decay and transformation that sustain all life.

The outcome of another residency, Caitlin Franzmann’s experiential sound work to the curve of you (TarraWarra), 2021, shares Smith’s interest in the enmeshed ecologies of TarraWarra and in collaborations

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Walking the River Franzmann’s guided walk participates in an established tradition of walking as a means of reflection from the French poet Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur to the peripatetic conceptualism of the British artist Richard Long. It is a practice that has long been inscribed in a certain spatial politics, frequently framed as a strategy for heightening observation and ‘slowing down’ the world. For the writer Tony Birch, whose river poems are threaded throughout this catalogue (a line from one provides the title to this essay), walking affords a meditative stimulus to writing and a connection to place. Often deployed as a ‘preamble’ to writing, it assists him in recovering stories of place, and in recentering absent and forgotten narratives.32 Belgian-born artist Francis Alÿs shares Birch’s regard for the political implications of this private navigation of public space, believing that ‘walking, in particular drifting, or strolling, is already — within the speed culture of our time — a kind of resistance … a very immediate method for unfolding stories’.33 In its conscious, grounded mapping of time and space, walking is a way of exposing ourselves to the world, making sense of its everyday rhythms and assigning meaning to our experience. Walking is also a central trope of Jacobus Capone’s practice, interwoven with intimate gestures and acts of endurance in performances within nature that the artist refers to as ‘uncertain pilgrimages’. Sincerity and Symbiosis, 2019, is the second act of an ongoing project entitled ‘Forewarning’, which takes shape around expressions of ecological grief, manifesting as a series of reconciliations and farewells within environments imperilled by human behaviour. The three-channel video documents a six-week-long durational performance that Capone undertook in an undisclosed plantation forest in Shiga prefecture in Japan in 2019. Each day, the artist performed a solitary, highly ritualised choreography of walks through which he sought, over time, to honour every tree in the forest. The repetitive failure of Capone’s outstretched hand to make physical contact with the tree implies the fraught symbiosis between humanity and nature, a relationship increasingly marred by entanglement and rift. The pathos of this engagement is amplified by the realisation that the forest has been compromised by deforestation. Barefoot in mid-winter, the artist tentatively navigates this environment of devastation, repeatedly traversing a symbolic threshold between the sacred and the profane. As he does so, the landscape leaves scratches and bruises on his body, unseen marks exacerbated with each daily ritual.

While the communion that Capone seeks with his surroundings in Sincerity and Symbiosis is withheld, his humble ministrations of care sound a redemptive note, suggesting a heightened alertness to the precarity of the natural world and our implication in its survival.

Environmental Fragility and an Aesthetics of Care In his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), Rob Nixon uses the concept of ‘slow violence’ to give visibility and urgency to the gradual devastation wrought by climate change and related environmental crises, whose dispersal across time and space makes them difficult to apprehend at human-scale.34 Crary attributes this impending environmental catastrophe directly to our age of acceleration, perceiving the latter as inseparable from the former ‘in its declaration of permanent expenditure, of endless wastefulness for its sustenance, in its terminal disruption of the cycles and seasons on which ecological integrity depends’.35 Responding to this clarion call, artistic practices like those of Caitlin Franzmann and Jacobus Capone enact a sort of cultural rewilding — at times actual, at times symbolic — as a way of slowly regenerating exhausted ecosystems and their delicate interdependencies. Such expressions of ‘ecosympathy’ are symptomatic of a growing interest among politically and environmentally engaged artists in an aesthetics of care. An aesthetics of care assuages trauma as it is held in the body and the environment through forms of affective solidarity and collective healing, standing as a potent counter-practice to the exclusions and disregard of a careless society. The time of care is necessarily slow, not the expedient time of the self-serving, but the deliberate time of the selfless, slackened by the affective labour of listening, empathising and nourishing, and permeated with an elevated receptivity to the intensities of the moment. Reclaiming the idea of ‘care’ from the wellness industry (which has, in recent years, pressed it into the service of selling bath oil) and foregrounding its key virtues of compassion, patience and respect, practitioners of an aesthetics of care revive the notion of care in the activist sense — social, political and economic, as a fundamental human right. As the American activist Audre Lorde writes in A Burst of Light and Other Essays: ‘Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is selfpreservation, and that is an act of political warfare’.36

Caretaking for Country As an embodied practice, an aesthetics of care finds one of its more powerful and spiritual expressions in the Indigenous concept of caretaking for Country which, deriving from a deep-seated sense of custodianship, is so integral to First Nations epistemologies. For the Wiradjuri people of central NSW — to whom the Biennial artists Jonathan Jones and Nicole Foreshew belong — it is intimately bound up in the idea of yindyamarra. An entreaty to go slowly, mindfully and respectfully, yindyamarra has been described as ‘a field of mutual respect that is the Wiradjuri way of life’.37 At a time of accelerating planetary change, the practice of caretaking for Country — of which yindyamarra is a profound expression — is also a grounding force for many First Nations people: a way of connecting to the land, its histories and stories. The depth of an Indigenous connection to Country is explored in three finely detailed charcoal drawings by Brian Martin that portray sites of personal significance and cultural knowledge on Wurundjeri land not far from TarraWarra. A member of the Bundjalung, Muruwari and Kamilaroi peoples, Martin sketches the works from analogue photographs he has taken of the physical environment, drawing smaller abstractions on approximately A3-sized sheets, before reconstituting the full work at scale in the studio where the composition is further refined. Through this process the picture plane is fragmented and the image subtly dislocated, undermining any reading of the work as a representational landscape drawing in the western tradition and instead expressing an ontology grounded in Indigenous cultural practice. Martin refers to these textured and nuanced charcoal drawings as Methexical Countryscapes — rather than ‘represent’ the landscape, they seek to reveal Country, indexing the fundamental and sustaining qualities of an Indigenous relationship to territory. (Martin appropriates the Greek term methexis, meaning a collective and ritualistic action or performance that brings something into being). One drawing, oriented on the floor, invites viewers to reflect on these questions of relationality by physically walking on Country, an act which radically refigures our experience of it.

animated dramatically by water, wind and other elemental forces. Having developed a visual language that is characterised by striking innovations within inherited Yol gu traditions, Marawili is part of a generation of senior women artists who have redefined the accepted conventions of bark painting in recent years. The subjects of these three bark paintings are the imposing rock formations that rise out of the bay at Baratjala, where strong saltwater currents mingle with the freshwater of the inland rivers. Considered variations in the artist’s dusky pink palette evoke the undulations of water and its different states of agitation across this intertidal zone. Dominating her energetic compositions, the large rocks situate us firmly within Marawili’s Country, their organic geometries wrought by atmospheric and seasonal change. Lashings of sea spray and lightning connect the rocks, rendered through elaborate strings of dots and rhythmical zigzagging lines. As they criss-cross the bark, these streams of parallel lines invoke the lightning snake Mundukul who sanctifies the waters at Baratjala through his command of the weather. But while the spirit world and the natural world are entwined in Yol gu philosophy, Marawili distances her work from the major ancestral narratives and traditional clan designs, instead conveying the dynamism of this living landscape in a more personal, secular register, one that stands ultimately as a compelling expression of her caretaking for Country.

28 Jenny Odell, ‘how to do nothing’ in MEDIUM, URL: https://medium.com/ @the_jennitaur/how-to-do-nothing-57e100f59bbb, accessed 9 September, 2020. 29 Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, ‘The ‘Anthropocene’’, Global Change Newsletter, no. 41, 2000, p. 17-18. 30 Rosi Braidotti, ‘Aspirations for a Posthumanist’, lecture delivered as part of the 2017 Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Whitney Humanities Centre, Yale University, Thursday 2 March, 2017, URL: https://rosibraidotti.com/2019/11/21/aspirations-of-aposthumanist/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign= aspirations-of-a-posthumanist, accessed 25 February 2021. 31 Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought, Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2010, p. 4. 32 Max Delany live-stream interview with Tony Birch, ACCA Book Club, 29 July, 2020 33 Francis Alÿs, quoted in Russell Ferguson, Francis Alÿs: Politics of Rehearsal, (exh. cat.), Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, published by Steidl, 2007, p. 63. 34 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, London: Harvard University Press, 2011. 35 Crary, 2014, p. 9. 36 Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light and Other Essays, Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1988, p. 205. 37 Abstract from the film Yindyamarra Yambuwan, directed by Bernard Sullivan, produced by Uncle Stan Grant Snr AM and Aunty Florence Grant, URL: https://researchoutput.csu.edu.au/en/ publications/yindyamarra-yambuwan, accessed 24 September 2020

A deep and abiding connection to Country resounds in similar ways through three large bark paintings in the Biennial by Madarrpa artist No girr a Marawili. Marawili paints the natural features of her ancestral home near Blue Mud Bay in East Arnhem land, Northern Territory,

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YASMIN SMITH SMITH

Terroir 2020 (details) OVERLEAF: Seine River Basin 2019 installation view, Cosmopolis #2: rethinking the human, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2019

CAITLIN FRANZMANN

Vitality becomes you 2021 vials of Achira flower essence created with Annie Meredith OPPOSITE: essence meets essence 2021 multi-channel audio, red lighting, yellow wall paint, timber drum shells with sounding elements of seeds, nails, felt, and mylar, performed by Hannah Reardon-Smith, Jodie Rottle and Amanda Terry

Pampach’i 2021 mother Achira flower essence created with Annie Meredith, glass vessel handblown by Jarred Wright, riverstone, steel stand OPPOSITE: to the curve of you (Achira) 2021 stills from video documentation by Charlie Hillhouse

JACOBUS CAPONE

Sincerity and Symbiosis 2019 (video still details)

BRIAN MARTIN

Methexical Countryscape Wurundjeri # 4 2020 PAGE 98: Methexical Countryscape Wurundjeri # 5 2020 PAGE 99: Methexical Countryscape Wurundjeri # 6 2020

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REGISTRATIONS STRA OF LABOUR

The capacity for slowness to sensitise us to the subtleties of our lived experience, so richly in evidence in Marawili’s barks, finds strikingly different expression in the work of several Biennial artists who explore decelerations and delays within the creative process. If, as Crary argues, global capitalism’s steadfast pursuit of progress depends upon the capture and control of our time and experience, these artists reclaim the ‘useless time’ of reflection and contemplation through embedding slow ideas in the labour of their art-making.38 They harness what the Russian philosopher Boris Groys calls ‘excessive time’, preserving pauses in their process through which they may intensify the quality of their perception and make space for chance, doubt and irresolution in their work.39 Texture and materiality come to the fore in this infolding of attention, amplifying inner intricacies and contradictions and opening up a spirit of enquiry that, at times, necessitates a process of unlearning. Drawing on postwar traditions of colourfield abstraction and process art, Oliver Wagner’s expanded painting Trace of Time, 2021, encompasses just such an approach. Smooth, powdery washes of pink and teal conceal a time- and labour-intensive process which responds to ideas of impermanence and chance interaction. As preparation for the work, the artist assiduously sands back studio walls applied with multiple coats of household acrylic paint over several weeks to create a residual ‘house paint dust’—fine fragments of dried paint—which he separates by hue. The dust is then scattered onto a horizontal linen support from different heights to create gradations of colour whose irregular saturations register the ghostly gestures of the artist’s hand. Involving a dual combination of chance and control, this application yields an unstable and materially volatile surface which is intended to shift and degrade over the duration of the exhibition. Small piles of coloured dust will likely accrue on the ledge beneath the canvas. Wagner is also receptive to interactions with the work on the part of rogue insects, curious visitors seduced by the painting’s tactility, and other environmental agents, perceiving these unplanned traces as evidence of the transience and flux of all things. Sharing the painting’s authorship with various external forces, Wagner relinquishes the exacting control and protracted labour of the early stages of the work’s making to admit the possibility of something ephemeral, unfixed and unforeseen.

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A Space for ‘Not-Knowing’ For artists such as Wagner, a time-intensive process allows the vagaries of creativity to be given full reign, creating a space for what Lijster refers to as ‘not-knowing’, where things can evolve and emerge without the tyranny of certainty.40 This space of ‘not-knowing’ resonates with Groys’s characterisation of the contemporary as constituted by ‘doubt, hesitation, uncertainty, indecision—by the need for prolonged reflection, for delay. We want to postpone our decisions and actions in order to have more time for analysis, reflection, and consideration’.41 Straining against capitalism’s unchecked growth, pauses and hesitations open up opportunities in which to foster agency and initiate change, preserving the future as a sphere of the unpredictable by dwelling on the indeterminations of the present. They enable artists to prioritise process over product, cultivating responsiveness without reactivity, an openness to undoing and remaking, to failure, and to generative approaches in which experimentation and reinvention can thrive. In a world where demarcations between labour and leisure time have dissolved to the point where we are left with 24 potentially monetizable hours, these momentary gaps allow us to imagine new ways of being and doing. As Koepnick argues, one of the crucial functions of slowness is to challenge ‘deterministic fantasies of mindless progression and develop concepts of meaningful progress instead’.42 Koepnick’s ‘deterministic fantasies of mindless progression’ undergo a systematic sabotaging via acts of reproduction, translation, decomposition and erasure in the mercurial inkjet prints of Christian Capurro. Appropriated from magazine advertisements, news reportage and other printed matter, the source images for this new suite of scanner-made works titled enclasticine, 2017-21, are repeatedly subjected to ‘smart defects removal’ software. In its conventional application, this electronic ‘dusting’ program identifies and removes defects such as dust or scratches from analogue and scanned digital images. Misapplied here by the artist, it rigorously ‘cleans’ each image, rendering and re-rendering it to remove perceived imperfections, a process of excavation through which the original picture fabric is gradually degraded and, in the process, remade, almost to the point of abstraction. The resulting photographic interventions are distinctly electronic in appearance,

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algorithmically disfigured scenes with heavily striated picture planes and prismatic effects of light and colour. Referred to by Capurro as ‘digitalanalogue chimeras’, they undermine the indexicality and materiality of the original photograph through an abrasive act of representation that reveals beauty in its corruption.

by the reverse side of the textile which appears to unstitch itself at a similarly uneven rate. Laying bare the irregular rhythms of the creative process, In the small gaps of the day so that I don’t notice the length of the accumulated time, 2021, venerates the ‘useless’ time of imagination and reflection as a spur to artistic labour.

Idleness and Inaction

Wasted Time

The regimented rhythms and ruthless efficiency of machine-led labour, whose advent precipitated what Crary refers to as a ‘mass dispossession of time and praxis’, approaches a point of digital sublimity in Capurro’s photographs.43 They throw into relief the distinctly non-machinic, and in fact intensely human, phenomenon of non-productive, or wasted, time, which is explored elsewhere in the Biennial. Many artists attest to the fact that non-productivity—the time of idleness and imagination in which essential work is being done but nothing concrete is actually produced—is a vital precondition for creativity. A time of rehearsal, as Francis Alÿs calls it, this suspended, non-teleological time enables the important work of thinking, reflecting, healing and sustaining, privileging maintenance and care over novelty and production.44 As the American artist and writer Jenny Odell notes, ‘It’s a kind of nothing that’s necessary for, at the end of the day, doing something’.45

The question of labour, of how that labour is managed, monopolised, remunerated, but also, crucially, wasted within an accelerationist culture is interrogated by several artists in the Biennial. The more radical among them share a view of idleness and inertia as not simply consisting of doing nothing, but as time spent in conscious resistance, denying the dogmas of productivism and deliberately foiling a productoriented culture. Boris Groys recruits the protagonist of Albert Camus’ ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ (1942), a ‘proto contemporary artist’ condemned to senselessly and repeatedly roll a boulder up a hill, as a metaphor for a present which reproduces itself without leading to any future.46 He perceives the loss of this infinite historical perspective as generating the phenomenon of ‘boring’ time. Increasingly under threat due to its inability to be monetised, it constitutes a non-compliant time, one which drags on, gets distracted and circles back, with no regard for the demands of capitalist productivity.

Raquel Ormella’s intimate embroidered works and accompanying animations, made to mark the ‘in-between moments’ of the day, chronicle precisely this time of non-productivity. Three intenselyworked textiles overlay a phrase about the brief windows of time in which they were produced (‘As I Wake’, ‘Before I Sleep’) with the words ‘Here Now’, suggesting the profound infolding of attention required for creative work. The palette of the works enhances their introspective mood, with modulations of tertiary colours creating points of rich chromatic similarity and contrast, variously erasing and restoring distinctions between the letters. Paired with each textile, a time-lapse animation reveals the fitful dynamic of the work’s materialisation, in which intense periods of industry and activity are interspersed with moments of stasis and contemplation. Scanned at regular intervals throughout each work’s making, these animations capture the fragile but necessary balance of ‘productive’ and ‘non-productive’ time for the process of creation. The dynamic of action/inaction is mirrored

Sequestered within a storage cavity of TarraWarra Museum of Art, a diorama by George Egerton-Warburton explores the radical attraction of the withdrawal of one’s labour and its awkwardness for the productivity and efficiency mandated by neoliberalism. Made paradoxically by the artist on days when he faces barriers to inspiration or has nothing else to do, a rhythmical arrangement of white cot beds evokes an infirmary, intended by the artist as a rehabilitative space for confusion. Diminutive and inert, the beds harbour the promise of sleep, whose intrinsic uselessness and passivity makes it an important disruptor to Crary’s 24/7 world. They grant refuge to the ‘non-productive’, acknowledging various types of illness as alternative modes of being, even mobilising immobility as a form of sacred resistance. An ongoing series that has become for the artist an assertive act of non-participation, the beds imply an entire workforce has been taken out, prompting the viewer to look for a symptom in the room.

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Egerton-Warburton’s beds are here ‘socialising’ with a large steel sculpture, from which a discarded kitchen sink is suspended. A droll reference to ‘kitchen sink drama’, the sculpture acts both as a protagonist and a set. Combining text and image and drawing on contradictory forms and writers, several paintings form a backdrop to the installation, doubling as a moodboard for an unresolved narrative. In this installation, sense-making is a threat imparted by a hegemonic biopolitical order, with the paintings proposing confusion as an antidote.

THE RIVER’S END Considering the broader arc of history against the pull of the accelerated now, the TarraWarra Biennial 2021 advances expansive relations to time that are grounded in both place and community, attentive to an idea of the present as a site of multiple durations, pasts and possible futures. The exhibition’s central concerns have been starkly illuminated by the exceptional moment of the coronavirus epidemic, which has caused untold disruption to the tempos and structures of global capitalism and demanded that our perception and understanding of time be configured anew. For many, days spent in lockdown have felt endless and indistinct, set adrift from those ritualised behaviours that are vital markers of time’s passage. While at times disorientating, this vast ceremony of deceleration has also engendered a collective sigh of relief and a realisation of the degree to which we have become habitualised to perpetual motion and neglected traction. It is not merely coincidence that, as we recover some clarity on our conditioning to accelerated rhythms and its environmental cost during the pandemic, the rivers are also beginning to run clear again. In navigating this uncertain terrain, it is imperative that we move with the river’s current, placing nature and the environment at the heart of any new political contract to imagine a different and more sustainable way of being in the world. Dr Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr offers us a cue: ‘We are River people. We cannot hurry the river. We have to move with its current and understand its ways’.47 Adopting a range of extended temporal frameworks, the TarraWarra Biennial 2021 urges us to begin this process.

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The works in the exhibition call for a new collective effort to follow the rhythms of the river’s slow-moving waters, with their meandering currents, rather than being hurried along by the unchecked flow of global capital. Tony Birch speaks of ‘placing trust in the course of the river’ as a way of shifting our consciousness and re-orienting it towards a coalitional imagination and collective growth.48 As a site where nature and culture converge, it is a living entity whose ever-changing contours chart our own fluid histories and register the environmental degradation that threatens us all. In the river’s circling eddies, we find ways in which we might all disturb the prevailing current, gathering our collective energies to ‘run circle settle be’. 38 Crary, 2014, p. 40. 39 Boris Groys, ‘Comrades of Time’, e-flux Journal #11, December 2009, URL: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/11/61345/comrades-of-time/, accessed 11 January 2021. 40 Lijster, 2018, p. 14. 41 Groys, 2009. 42 Koepnick, 2014, p. 14. 43 Crary, 2014, p. 57. 44 Groys, 2009. 45 Jenny Odell, ‘how to do nothing’ in MEDIUM, URL: https://medium.com/@ the_jennitaur/how-to-do-nothing-57e100f59bbb, accessed 9 September 2020. 46 Groys, 2009. 47 Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr, ‘Dadirri, Inner Deep Listening and Quiet Still Awareness: A reflection by Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr’, 1988, URL: https://www.miriamrosefoundation.org.au/about-dadirri/ dadirri-text, accessed on 21 July 2020. 48 Tony Birch, ‘Walking and Meaning’ in Meanjin Quarterly, summer 2019, URL: https://meanjin.com.au/essays/walking-and-being/, accessed 28 July 2020.

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OLIVER WAGNER

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PAGES 110–111: Process images PAGE 108: Reconstructed Painting 19 2019 house paint dust on linen 152.4 x 198.1 cm PAGE 109: Removed Painting 5 2018 house paint dust on linen 182.9 x 137.4 cm

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CHRISTIAN CAPURRO

enclasticine (220) 2017–21 OPPOSITE: enclasticine (429) 2019–21 enclasticine (521) 2020–21

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enclasticine (410) 2019–21 OPPOSITE: enclasticine (466) 2019–21 enclasticine (217) 2017–21

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In the small gaps of the day so I don’t notice the length of the accumulated time (As I Wake) 2021

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In the small gaps of the day so I don’t notice the length of the accumulated time (Day In Day Out) 2021

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GEORGE EGERTON-WARBURTON

English i 2017 DC motor, cardboard, wood, brushed stainless steel 44.5 x 30.5 x 58.4 cm OPPOSITE and OVERLEAF: English, installation view, Château Shatto, Los Angeles, 2017–18

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DIGNIFYING SLOWNESS IN A HYPERACTIVE WORLD Toni Ross

From lack of repose our civilization is turning into a new barbarism. At no time have the active, that is to say the restless, counted for more. That is why one of the most necessary corrections to the character of mankind that have to be taken in hand is a considerable strengthening of the contemplative element in it.1 - Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (1898) Titled Slow Moving Waters, the 2021 TarraWarra Biennial invites us to contemplate the politics of time. Curator Nina Miall has assembled works by twenty-five Australian artists that stage ideas and experiences of tempo and temporality at odds with the hyper-acceleratory logic of global capitalism and the instrumental attitudes towards people and environments that it mandates. The words of Friedrich Nietzsche prefacing this essay were written in the closing years of the nineteenth century. They indicate that questioning hyperactive features of modernity such as dynamism, speed and incessant innovation—essential to a Western ideal of progress—is nothing new. What is new in present day, late-modernity is that hyperactive tendencies that were always a feature of modern societies are now widely perceived as running out of control. In recent decades, turbo-charged capitalism and its ever-churning technologies have attracted a host of critical commentaries. Many describe the ruinous consequences for social, physical and psychic health arising from the frenetic pace of contemporary life. German sociologist Hartmut Rosa characterises late-capitalist society as one that ‘forces us into a mode of competition, optimization and speed’ that ‘creates permanent time-pressure and stress’.2 Such claims are echoed in Jonathan Crary’s polemic 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013), which casts contemporary societies as more fixated on speed and non-stop activity than ever before. Speaking of the current economic order’s drive to eliminate unproductive time and labour, Crary writes: ‘billions of dollars are spent every year researching … how to eliminate the useless time of reflection and contemplation’.3 While sleep, according to Crary, is one of the few realms of human experience not yet fully colonised by the 24/7 tempo of working life, such times of repose are under relentless threat from the forces of economic enterprise.

Other commentators observe that the preeminent modern ethos of productivity, where science, technology and management systems of every kind are harnessed to achieve maximum efficiency and outputs, has resulted in the destruction of the natural world to an unprecedented degree. Australian philosopher Simon Lumsden contends that the animating beliefs, economic systems and cultural habituations of western modernity, spread world-wide through colonisation and globalisation, are now patently ‘out of alignment with a self-sustaining natural world upon which human life and ecology depend’.4 Many works in Slow Moving Waters question or diverge from temporal schemas endemic to modernity. The small sample of works discussed below amplify suspended or slow modalities of time in a world where speed and efficiency are venerated. Jeremy Bakker’s On Time, first exhibited in 2017, speaks to the modern obsession with clock time— measured as successive, atomised units from which chance and aimless loitering are exiled. This piece stages interference with the chronometric marking of time by submitting a generic wall clock placed flat on a white plinth to a concocted accident. As though descended from the sky, a rustic chunk of basalt has shattered the glass of the clock, abruptly halting the movement of its hands. Consequently, we hear the metallic sound of the second hand tapping uselessly against a geological impediment to its forward momentum. Here a material symbol of vast spans of geological time bests the human invention of clock time that governs most of our lives. Another work by Bakker called Surfacing, 2020, attends to issues of time and human attitudes to the natural world, a thread running through many works in the exhibition. This single-channel colour video records a humble garden snail crawling across the surface of a computer screen transmitting a natural history program fronted by David Attenborough. The aimless, leisurely crawl of the gastropod mollusc contrasts with the familiar animated figure of Attenborough and the high-impact imagery of stunning natural landscapes that he has hosted for millions of viewers worldwide. Surfacing invites reflection on the temporal dynamics of the big-budget, natural history filmmaking Attenborough has become synonymous with. While the broadcaster is widely admired for his environmental advocacy, the ways in which nature and wildlife are depicted in Attenborough-narrated programs are entirely in keeping with the hyperactive, techno-boosterism of a capitalist system that

Jeremy Bakker, On Time 2017 (detail)

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has destroyed the Earth’s ecologies. Such programs routinely hype technological advances able to bring nature to viewers in novel and exciting ways, while supplying ample moments of heightened action and energy expected of any dramatic tale. As film scholar Derek Bousé observes, natural history programming typically presents ‘nature in closeup, speeded-up, and set to music, with reality’s most exciting moments highlighted, and its “boring” bits cut out’.5 This approach endorses an anthropocentric vision of nature as subject to ever-greater human mastery and as an unlimited resource for media consumables. Surfacing thus choreographs a telling contrast between the uneventfulness of watching a snail, perhaps the least charismatic of wildlife, slowly edge its way over the surface of a glowing computer screen, and the high-impact visual and dramaturgical aesthetics of ‘blue chip’ nature documentaries. The folding together of different temporal formats in the portrayal of nature also occurs in Grant Stevens’s computer-generated moving image and sound piece, Below the mountains and beyond the desert, a river runs through a valley of forests and grasslands, towards an ocean, 2020. Procedural generation was employed to make this work, a method used in video game production where algorithmically created data embeds randomness within the system. Programmed to be of endless duration, Below the mountains … is displayed on large, abutting, wall-mounted screens showing constantly evolving, simulated panoramas of rivers, lakes, mountains, grasslands, oceans and forests. Seventy artificially intelligent cameras track slowly through these vistas, recording artificial manifestations of the cyclical rhythms of nature, with all signs of human presence excised. We are lulled by decidedly undramatic shifts from day to night, weather and seasonal changes, tidal fluctuations, and vegetation flourishing, ageing, decaying and dying. Below the mountains … also tracks larger arcs of time where geological and topographical features are formed, weathered and reshaped over eons. Just as the work’s visuals create a sense of anticipation for some defining event that never arrives, the soundtrack of synthesised, orchestral-type samples waxes and wanes without ever reaching a climactic moment. The sound also recalls relaxation music common in meditation and mindfulness exercises—those ubiquitous, currentday palliatives for stressed-out citizens. In this respect, the work could be viewed as offering an island of sanctuary from contemporary speed culture. Yet, the temporal texture of Below the mountains …

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is more complex than it appears. On the one hand, natural cycles are accelerated: the passing of around four days and nights is compressed into an hour of viewing time, one hundred years of seasonal and environmental modulation is condensed into a year, and a thousand years of ecological transformation occurs over ten years of the work’s unfurling. On the other hand, like much recent slow film and video with an ecological bent, the viewing experience, devoid of dialogue or commentary, appears to decelerate time, encouraging sustained, finegrained attentiveness to the smallest of details within these simulated natural settings. Rather than choreographing a dramatic contrast between speed and slowness, Below the mountains … configures natural rhythms as a subtle oscillation between enduring and transient temporalities. While Stevens’s works are made with advanced digital technologies, they present alternative temporal rhythms to the hyperstimulated sensorium of current media and consumer culture. Quite different means are employed to depict the natural world in three paintings by Indigenous Australian artist No girr a Marawili. Hand rendered in earth pigments of red and white ochre on roughly textured sheets of stringybark, these works bespeak an intimate connection with earth and land. Born around 1939, Marawili resides in the community of Yirrkala in north-east Arnhem Land. However, the paintings on show, all titled Baratjala and made in 2018, refer to another coastal region about two hundred kilometres south of Yirrkala. Baratjala names the clan estate of the Madarrpa people from which Marawili descends on her father’s side. As a young girl she lived here with her father, his wives and their many offspring. The paintings in Slow Moving Waters are what the artist calls ‘water designs’, which often refer to a seaside place in Madarrpa country situated in Blue Mud Bay.6 Marawili describes such works as follows: ‘the paintings I do are not sacred. I can’t steal my father’s painting, I just do my own design from the outside. Water. Rock. Rocks which stand strong and the waves which run and crash upon the rocks. The sea spray’.7 The artist has created many water design variations, yet they typically comprise a limited set of schematic motifs and marks suggestive of organic forms and processes. The Baratjala works in Slow Moving Waters depict two to three roughly circular or oblong forms denoting coastal rocks that are placed on loosely brushed white ochre grounds. While an imposing presence in each composition, the rocks are painted by mixing red and white ochre

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to create delicate, almost floating hues of pink. Encroaching sea water and airborne spray are evoked by trails of red and white dots that run across or curl away from the rock shapes while smaller concentric circles of dots adorning the rocks refer to barnacles or sea oysters. Two paintings in the show also contain zigzagging clusters of thin parallel lines said to recall skies alive with lightning strikes common in the Top End wet season. Echoing Marawili’s account of rocks standing strong against onrushing seawater, some commentaries interpret the rock formations in these paintings as signifying the enduring ‘solidity’ of Madarrpa culture.8 As is common in many indigenous cosmologies, Marawili’s paintings imply a circular thinking of time tethered to cyclical rhythms of nature— rotations of the seasons, the tides, the sun and the moon. Traditionally, communal custodianship and care of nature have been central to indigenous systems of knowledge, which are accumulated and passed down slowly over time. Such cosmologies often assume an organic vision of the world where all dimensions of nature and of human life form a web of interdependent relationships. Western modernity broke with such models, reconceiving human subjects as free, self-creating individuals, no longer determined by authorities such as gods, ancestral origin stories or nature. Modernity in effect supplanted the circular time of nature with the linear time of historical progress, which these days is almost universally equated with technology-driven economic growth. In her account of competing histories and philosophies of time, Jay Griffiths writes that the ideology of progress: … pretends to be an absolute good because it is defined by those it serves well; the rich, the politically powerful, all types of colonialists and ideologues. Ask those whom it serves badly and they will tell you that the engines of ‘progress’ have justified the destruction of lands and peoples of the land, from racism to land thefts, from pollution to genocide.9

Postscript Considering the previous remarks about the hyperactive temporal regime of late-modern societies it’s an obvious irony that in 2020 the SARS-2 coronavirus shut down large swathes of the global economy. Responding to this crisis, the world media daily churns out stats tracking infections, deaths and hundreds of millions of job losses. Rippling through the deluge of pandemic narratives are recurrent motifs of time, speed and also slowness. National leaders and health experts rightly obsess over slowing the (upward) curve of infections. Governments are judged by whether they reacted to the pandemic with speedy efficiency or as dawdling incompetents. Some people working at home in lockdown report losing track of the days, of feeling less hustled by time or of spending more time with families. Alternatively, health-care workers on the ‘frontline’ speak of never working so hard, and under such immense physical and emotional pressure. Media commentators ask whether lower carbon emissions resulting from less people driving or flying and economies grinding to halt will have any lasting effect on climate change. The consensus seems to be no. Despite temporary emission reductions, the required levels of reduction would need to occur over decades to have any substantial impact.10 It also appears likely that when the coronavirus is finally mastered the global economy will roar back into action to make up for losses in economic growth. Having displaced the whims of gods or cycles of nature as coordinating human life, modernity created free, self-determining subjects, confident in their capacity to manage the future, to meet and beat any challenge to their habitual ways of life. The environmental ravages of climate change and the sudden advent of COVID-19 have perhaps made this confidence wobble, compelling us to confront the idea of a future and a natural world we cannot always bend to our will. At the time of writing, we have no idea when the virus’s reproductive prolificacy will be halted, a situation surely worthy of sustained contemplation about the kind of world we wish to share.

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Endnotes 1

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, (trans. by R.J. Hollingdale), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 133.

Bjørn Schiermer, ‘Acceleration and Resonance: An Interview with Hartmut Rosa,’ Acta Sociologica E-Special issue: ‘Four Generations of Critical Theory in Acta Sociologica’, 2017. URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/pb-assets/cmscontent/ASJ/Acceleration_and_Resonance.pdf, accessed on 9 February 2020.

Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, London & New York: Verso, 2013, p. 40.

Simon Lumsden, ‘Hegel and Pathologized Modernity, or the End of Spirit in the Anthropocene’, History and Theory, vol. 57, no. 3, 2018, p. 383.

Derek Bousé, Wildlife Films, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000, p. 3.

Clothilde Bullen, ‘Everything Together: Partisian Ecologies and Painting,’ Contemporary Art of Australia & Asia-Pacific, issue 40:2, June 2020, p. 43.

7 No girr a Marawili, quoted in Hayley Megan French, ‘No girr a Marawili: Fingers in the Paint’, Art Collector, issue 80, April–June 2017. URL: https://artcollector.net.au/nonggirrnga-marawilifingers-in-the-paint/, accessed on 2 July 2020. 8

Art Gallery of New South Wales, collection notes No girr a Marawili. URL: https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/115.2018/, accessed on 2 July 2020.

Jay Griffiths, Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time, London: Harper Press, 2000, pp. 184–185.

10 Larissa Basso, ‘Why a 17% emissions drop does not mean we are addressing climate change,’ The Conversation, 21 May 2020. URL: https://theconversation.com/why-a-17-emissions-dropdoes-not-mean-we-are-addressing-climate-change-138984, accessed on 28 June 2020.

OPPOSITE: James Geurts SITE 2: O’Shannassy Aqueduct Sluice Millgrove, Victoria neon, solar, battery, converters Light installation at site of river intervention, marking the 100 floodline along the Birrarung (Yarra River) Floodplain Project, curated by Simon Maidment, National Gallery of Victoria, 2018 OVERLEAF: Louisa Bufardeci Looking in to the land attached 6 2020 (detail)

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Birrarung Billabong Sitting with your open coffin thinking and not thinking I want to be with the world and you. I knock against the grain of wood and want to know if you remember the day we took the bikes to the river and rode along the bank against a current willing us home to safety. At the billabong we circled sacred water, threw away our shoes and socks and splashed through tea-stained shallows and stomped in mud. We were something more than wild boys that day. We were our mother’s babies, from her womb, from her waters that one morning broke and set us on our way. You had never been happier and you lead the way and you told me that we should never leave, that we should stay with the water and be the water is what you whispered to me, shyly and with all the love you held in your heart for me. On our way home, we rode in the darkness below and a big sky above. We were not afraid, not me or you. Our hair was long and curled and golden, our eyes the richest brown, our skin carried water and water carried skin. The sounds of the river rushing at the falls a common pulse. Now I understand that we were never so alive and we would never be again. I stand and bend forward and kiss your cold skin and know that you are not here in this squat box. You were never here little brother, the one we knew as Golden Boy. You are with the water.

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LIST OF OF WORKS

Measurements are height before width before depth Robert Andrew Yawuru, Kimberley region Continuing Depths of Connection 2019–20 crushed granite, thread, red ochre, spindle, electromechanical components 200 x 600 x 300 cm Courtesy of the artist, Inala Wangarra and Milani Gallery, Brisbane This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. This project is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland. Jeremy Bakker

Acknowledgments: Mio Heki: Kintsugi master, Atelier Hfumi, Kyoto Yoshihiro Ito: Professor of Slow Earthquakes, Disaster Prevention Research Institute, Kyoto University Jon Smeathers: composer and sound technician Stuart Houghton: furniture designer Tobias Staal: seismic researcher, Earth Sciences, University of Tasmania Adrian Russell: Professor of Geotechnical Engineering, UNSW Lauren Brincat Freak Out, Far Out, In Out 2021 Spinner cloth, upcycle sailcloth, rope dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne

Hands in the Dark 2017 single-channel video video duration 00:09:00 looped

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

On Time 2017 clock, broken glass, granite rock 60 x 60 x 30 cm

Louisa Bufardeci

Surfacing 2021 single-channel video with sound video duration 00:04:30 Made with the support of Andy Tetzlaff, James Geurts, Sam Stewart and the Bogong Centre for Sound Culture. Incorporates footage from the BBC documentary Life in the Undergrowth (2005), written and presented by Sir David Attenborough. All works courtesy of the artist Lucy Bleach attenuated ground (the slow seismogenic zone) 2021 double bass, toffee, seismometer, wooden table, tactile transducers, form ply, plaster, surface vibration speakers, polished concrete, powdered core sample, powdered gold leaf, Ficus coronata plant, Rhizobox, soil dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist

Looking in to the land attached 1 2020 wool, linen 28 x 29 cm Looking in to the land attached 2 2020 wool, linen 21 x 31 cm Looking in to the land attached 3 2020 wool, linen 25 x 29 cm Looking in to the land attached 4 2020 wool, linen 26 x 32 cm Looking in to the land attached 5 2020 wool, linen 23 x 28 cm Looking in to the land attached 6 2020 wool, linen 28 x 27 cm Looking in to the land attached 7 2020 wool, linen 29.5 x 31 cm

Looking in to the land attached 8 2020 wool, linen 28 x 27.5 cm All works courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne Jacobus Capone Sincerity and Symbiosis 2019 synchronised 3-channel HD video with sound video duration 00:36:00 dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and Moore Contemporary, Perth

Megan Cope Quandamooka (Moreton Bay/North Stradbroke Island), south-east Queensland Currents III (freshwater studies) 2020 ice, natural dyes, grapevine, jute, cotton cord, blue-green algae, plant fibre, cotton rag, ochre, ink dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. This project is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.

enclasticine (220) 2017-21 inkjet print

Megan Cope would like to thank Betty Russ, Sierra Bell, Mara Mack, Phoebe Rose, Jana Moser, Sue Davidson, Michelle Eabry, Mashara Wachjudy, Michael Donnelly, Kairon Ward, Henry Taylor, Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin, Milani Gallery and Marine Biologist Roberta Johnson as original collaborator on Currents I.

enclasticine (410) 2019-21 inkjet print

Daniel Crooks

Christian Capurro enclasticine (217) 2017-21 inkjet print

enclasticine (429) 2019-21 inkjet print enclasticine (466) 2019-21 inkjet print enclasticine (521) 2020-21 inkjet print All works courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane Sundari Carmody Sagitta and Cyclus 2020 brass, 3D-printed Ciconia ciconia (white stork) skull, magnetite rock dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. The artist would like to acknowledge assistance from South Australian Museum staff Maya Penck and Dr Kyle Armstrong.

Object #8 (Pause and Turn) 2021 plywood, stainless steel 401 x 105 x 94 cm Courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne George Egerton-Warburton Some words/concepts/mood (kitchen sink drama) 2021 oil on board, wood, foam, cotton, steel installation dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne Nicole Foreshew and P. Thomas Boorljoonngali Gemerre/Garraba (Scar/Body) 2016– Nicole Foreshew Wiradjuri, central-west NSW Bangal 2018–19 natural ochre and pigments on wood 5 pieces, dimensions variable Wunan 2019 found oxidised iron fragment 77 x 90 cm

P. Thomas Boorljoonngali Gija, of Nagarra skin, Warmun, WA Gemerre 2008 natural ochre and pigments on board 100 x 80 cm Gemerre 2008 natural ochre and pigments on board 100 x 80 cm Gemerre 2008 natural ochre and pigments on board 100 x 80 cm Gemerre 2008 natural ochre and pigments on board 100 x 80 cm All works courtesy of the Estate of the Artist and Warmun Art Centre This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body Caitlin Franzmann to the curve of you (TarraWarra) 2021 hand-blown glassware, fermenting and preserved foraged plant matter, river stones, rusted steel stands, audio file dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist to the curve of you has been developed in partnership with the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. This project is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland Michaela Gleave The World Arrives at Night (Star Printer) 2014 dot matrix printer, mini PC, custom computer program, fanfold paper, table infinite duration dimensions variable programming: Michael Fitzgerald Cosmic Time Durational performance with prepared instruments 2021 Composer: Amanda Cole Musical director: Louise Devenish

Performers: The Sound Collectors Lab Costume designer: Katy B. Plummer This project is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW All works courtesy of the artist James Geurts Flow Equation 2021 neon, converters, exposed wires, works on paper as photographic backlit prints, light boxes series of 4, 200 x 140 x 17 cm each Courtesy of the artist and GAGPROJECTS, Adelaide No girr a Marawili Madarrpa, Yithuwa group Baratjala — Lightning and the Rock 2018 natural pigments on bark 199 x 80 cm Baratjala 2018 natural pigments on bark 185 x 77 cm Baratjala 2018 natural pigments on bark 175 x 109 cm All works courtesy of the Van Aanholt collection, Melbourne Brian Martin Bundjalung, Muruwari and Kamilaroi Methexical Countryscape Wurundjeri # 4 2020 charcoal on paper 207 x 150 cm Methexical Countryscape Wurundjeri # 5 2020 Charcoal on paper 207 x 150 cm Methexical Countryscape Wurundjeri # 6 2020 charcoal on paper 207 x 150 cm All works courtesy of the artist and William Mora Galleries, Melbourne

All works courtesy of the artist

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Raquel Ormella In the small gaps of the day so I don’t notice the length of the accumulated time (As I Wake) 2021 silk and cotton on linen, single-channel video 17 x 12 cm In the small gaps of the day so I don’t notice the length of the accumulated time (Day In Day Out) 2021 silk and cotton on linen, single-channel video 19 x 9 cm In the small gaps of the day so I don’t notice the length of the accumulated time (Before I Sleep) 2021 silk and cotton on linen, single-channel video 17 x 12 cm

Mandy Quadrio Palawa, tebrakunna, north-east Tasmania Whose time are we on? 2021 steel wool dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist This project is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland. Yasmin Smith Terroir 2020 stoneware slip and TarraWarra pinot noir vine-ash glaze dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and The Commercial, Sydney

Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

Grant Stevens Below the mountains and beyond the desert, a river runs through a valley of forests and grasslands, towards an ocean 2020 procedurally generated computer graphics with sound, multiple display formats (1-3 video channels) infinite duration Courtesy of the artist and Sullivan + Strumpf, Sydney Originally commissioned by UTS (The University of Technology Sydney), assisted by Max Warlond, 3D Artist Oliver Wagner Trace of Time 2021 house paint dust on linen 198 x 305 cm Courtesy of the artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin and Jonathan Jones Making the Birrarung 2021 cast bronze mussels, sound dimensions variable Courtesy of the artists

IMAGE CREDITS PHOTOGRAPHS BY: Scott Blencowe: pp. 68–69; Jenni Carter: pp. 22–23; Christian Capurro: pp. 24–25; Elle Fredericksen: pp. 86–87; Michaela Gleave: pp. 40–43; Shauna Greyerbiehl: Charlie Hillhouse: p. 91; pp. 34–36; Anthony Hodgkinson: pp. 110–111; Ross Honeysett: p. 37; Louis Lim: pp. 60–63, 89–90; Peter Mathew: pp. 64–65; Marc Pricop: p. 88; Sam Roberts: pp. 44–47; Elon Schoenholz: pp. 120–123. IMAGES SUPPLIED BY: Courtesy of the artist(s): pp. 4, 18–21, 22–25, 40–43, 44–47, 48–49, 64–67, 76–79, 124; Courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery: pp. 30–33, 34–37, 56–59, 130; Courtesy of the artist and Buku-Larr gay Mulka, Yirrkala: pp. 101–103; Courtesy of the artist and The Commercial, Sydney: pp. 84–87; Courtesy of the Estate of the Artist and Warmun Art Centre: pp. 50–51; Courtesy of the artist and GAGPROJECTS, Adelaide: pp. 26–29, 129; Courtesy of the artist, Inala Wangarra and Milani Gallery, Brisbane: pp. 60–63; Courtesy of the artist and the Kochi Core Centre, Kochi, Japan; Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane: pp. 70–71, 112–115, 116–119; Courtesy of the artist and Moore Contemporary, Perth: Cover, pp. 92–95; Courtesy of Professor Yoshihiro Ito, Disaster Prevention Research Institute, Kyoto University, Japan; Courtesy of the artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney: pp. 10, 108–111; Courtesy of the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney: pp. 72–75; Courtesy of the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne: pp. 120–123; Courtesy of the artist and William Mora Galleries, Melbourne: pp. 97–99.

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Robert Andrew Language group: Yawuru Born 1965, Perth. Lives and works in Brisbane. Robert Andrew is a descendant of the Yawuru people, his Country is the lands and waters of the Broome area in the Kimberley Region, Western Australia. His work investigates the personal and family histories that have been denied or forgotten. Andrew’s work speaks to the past yet articulates a contemporary relationship to his Country — using technology to make visible the interconnecting spiritual, cultural, physical, and historical relationships with the land, waters, sky, and all living things. Andrew’s work often combines programmable machinery with earth pigments, ochres, rocks and soil to mine historical, cultural and personal events that have been buried and distanced by the dominant paradigms of western culture. Andrew’s work has been presented in major exhibitions in Australia and internationally including: Yokohama Triennale, Japan, 2020; The National: New Australian Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2019; Colony: Frontier Wars, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2018; Experimenta Make Sense, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2017; Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria, 2017; and TarraWarra Biennial 2016: Endless Circulation, Healesville, Victoria, 2016. His recent solo exhibitions include Our Mutable Histories, Ellenbrook Art Gallery, Perth, 2019; Data Stratification, Kapelica Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2018; and Our Mutable Histories, Museum of Brisbane, 2017. His work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, and Gadens Lawyers, Brisbane.

Jeremy Bakker Born 1979, Canberra. Lives and works in Melbourne. Jeremy Bakker is a Melbourne-based artist who works across drawing, installation, sculpture, photography and video. His practice takes its momentum from the apparent contrast between the common human

desire for continuity and permanency, and the transient nature of material reality. Taking a range of forms—including durational drawings that embed time in the accumulation of marks on paper, familiar objects that have been transfigured through different material states, and ephemeral site-specific installations—Bakker’s work engages with ideas of time and presence as understood through bodily engagement with the physical world. As an artist, Bakker often makes use of the dislocation of travel — of being an outsider in new locales and cultural spaces — as a means to generate work. To this end, he has regularly undertaken international residencies since 2012, including the Courthouse Gallery and Studios residency program, Ennistymon, Ireland, 2019; AIR Krems, for RMIT Situate Austrian Art Residency exchange, Krems, Austria, 2017; DCR studios, The Hague, Netherlands, 2016; and the Echigo-Tsumari Australia House Artist Residency, Niigata Prefecture, Japan, 2012. Recent solo projects have often been presented as direct outcomes of extended residency periods and include With Holding, Kunstverein Baden, Baden, Austria, 2017, and These Fleeting Few, Youkobo Art Space, Tokyo, Japan, 2012. Bakker’s most recent international solo exhibition, Erratics, was presented in 2019 at the Courthouse Gallery, Ennistymon, Ireland, 2019, and followed a two-month residency. Recent works have turned attention towards digital media technologies and consider how screen-based representations of nature and time might engender both intimacy and distance.

Lucy Bleach Born 1968, Sydney. Lives and works in Hobart. Lucy Bleach’s practice focuses on humanity’s enduring relationships to volatile environments by engaging with communities that directly experience such interactions and scientists who monitor the earth’s vibration. She generates artworks where processes are informed by geological force and which anticipate their own ensuing instability and transformation. She uses her practice to investigate transitions of matter, to slow down the process of material collapse, to link global and local vibrations, and to invest in intricate acts of repair.

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Over the course of a thirty-year practice, Bleach’s work has included major solo commissions, curated exhibitions and collaborative works. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and undertaken research projects in geologically unstable regions in Italy, Japan, Hawaii and Vanuatu. Recent selected projects include Rueremus, 2021, for Mona Foma, Hobart, Tasmania, 2021; Sampling (the slow seismogenic zone), 2020, included in The Habitat of Time, curated by Julie Louise Bacon, Arts Catalyst Gallery, London, 2020; Gestures of Care, 2019, visual dramaturgy with choreographer and dancer Sofie Burgoyne, Tasdance; Variations on an Energetic Field, 2018, for The Unconformity festival, Queenstown, Tasmania, 2018; Phase Transition, 2018, included in The Return, curated by Stevie S. Han for Dark Mofo festival, Hobart Penitentiary, Hobart, 2018; Something More Solid, 2017, included in Remanence, part of the Ten Days on the Island Festival, Domain House, Hobart; Underground, 2015, Contemporary Art Tasmania solo commission, Contemporary Art Tasmania, Hobart, 2015; SuperSlow, 2015, Kelly’s Garden Curated Projects, Tasmanian International Arts Festival, Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart, 2015; Horizontal Slowness, 2015, (collaboration with Narelle Jubellin), Redlands Konica Minolta Art Prize, Sydney, 2015.

urban cities, and the ocean. The artist’s video works take the form of documented and often repetitive actions. Collaboration is an important part of Brincat’s practice involving shared projects with percussionists, architects, seed savers, scientists, choreographers, equestrian riders and indigenous horse whisperers. Her sculptural pieces sit alone and alongside the video works often giving the moving image a tactile presence.

Lauren Brincat

Brincat completed a Master of Visual Arts at the Sydney College of the Arts in 2006. She was awarded the Australia Council for the Arts Emerging Artist Creative Australia Fellowship in 2012–2014 and the Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship in 2009.

Born 1980, Sydney. Lives and works in Sydney. Brincat’s most recent work takes the form of banners and sculptures made out of sailcloth, as well as malleable forms in textile that can be activated by participants. In 2019, Brincat created her large-scale work Other Tempo, co-commissioned by Carriageworks and Performance Space for Liveworks Festival. The artist also created The Plant Library, 2019, a co-commission by the MCA’s C3West program and Landcom. In 2016, Brincat presented Salt Lines: Play It As It Sounds, Performance Instruments (2016), a site-specific installation at Carriageworks as part of the 20th Biennale of Sydney. Brincat’s videos often portray the artist undertaking actions in relative solitude. In these works, she pushes her physical and cognitive limits following rule-based actions. The artist is known for a series of ‘walking pieces’ occurring in vastly different contexts, from empty fields, to busy

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Brincat has exhibited widely across Australia, including solo exhibitions No Performance Today (with Bree van Reyk and the NSW Police Marching Band) as part of Sonic Social, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2014 and Performance Space, 2015; It’s Not the End of the World, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne, 2013; Shoot From the Hip, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney, 2012; Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Museum of Old and New Art, MONA FOMA Festival of Music and Art, Hobart, 2011. Significant group exhibitions include The space between us: Anne Landa Award, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2013; Contemporary Australia: Women, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2012; TarraWarra Biennial 2012: Sonic Spheres, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, Victoria, 2012; and Tinnitus: a symposium on art and rock’n’roll, Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 2012.

Brincat’s works can be found in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; MONA Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart; as well as private and corporate collections.

Louisa Bufardeci Born 1970, Melbourne. Lives and works in Melbourne. Louisa Bufardeci is a Melbourne-based artist, researcher and educator with over twenty years of professional experience. Her practice is broadly focused on contemporary socio-political issues, particularly

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how these issues involve representing experience through statistics and other data. She has used statistical information, maps, plans, codes, sounds, speeches, digital images, GPS data, case studies, scientific ideas and more as the basis of works in a wide variety of media including digital prints, installation, video, neon, needlepoint, photomontage, animation, braiding, sound, drawing, kinetic sculptures, text, actions, fabric, embroidery, wall drawings and paintings. The relationship between abstraction and representation is a common element in her work. Bufardeci has participated in major international exhibitions including the NGV Triennial in 2018, the Asia-Pacific Triennial in 2012, and the Asian Art Biennial in 2009. Her work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Melbourne and other cities in Australia and overseas. She has been the recipient of many grants and awards, has completed small and large scale public and private commissions, and has participated in artist-in-residency programs in Melbourne, Los Angeles and Delhi. As well as working on art projects, Bufardeci contributes to the local art community by teaching at various local institutions, volunteering as a guide to contemporary art at her local community centre, and by mentoring young artists. Her practice is represented by Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne.

Jacobus Capone Born 1986, Perth. Lives and works in Perth. Born and based in Perth, Western Australia, Capone maintains a practice that incorporates performance, photography, video installation, painting and site-specific work. Characteristically poetic there is a holistic nature to his undertakings which increasingly attempt to integrate all action, however perceived by others, into the wholeness of one lived experience. In 2007, he traversed Australia by foot, in order to pour water from the Indian Ocean into the Pacific. His work has been shown in a range of institutions both nationally and internationally including Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Momentum Berlin, the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, which housed his solo exhibition, Forgiving Night for Day as part of the 2017 Perth International

Arts Festival. He was included in Primavera 2017: Young Australian Artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; ACCA’s New16, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. He was a finalist of the 2017 Ramsay Art Prize, has participated in numerous international festivals, fellowships, and residencies and was the recipient of the 2016 John Stringer Prize. He received a Bachelor of Fine Art from Edith Cowan University in 2007.

Christian Capurro Born 1968, Dampier, Western Australia. Lives and works in Melbourne. Artist, photographer, and filmmaker Christian Capurro is based in Melbourne and often working internationally. Capurro’s work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, MASS MoCA, Museum of Contemporary Art, The American Academy in Rome, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, STUK Kunstencentrum, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Artspace and the Institute of Modern Art. His work is held in most major Australian collections and, amongst other notable accolades, he has been the recipient of the International Studio and Curatorial Program Australia Council Residency and the prestigious Anne and Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship. In 2019, Capurro presented the three-act exhibition Two Shores at Reading Room, Melbourne. The show brought together two bodies of work—the tripod-tool Disport objects and the paint and ambient light paper works known as work for tired eyes — in a site oriented, improvised dialogue that was reconfigured with changing works and relations each week over a three-week period. Other continuing works include the mobile phone digital videos and installations, for example SLAVE, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2014, and a man held, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, 2015; and the scanner interpolation photographic works, ICEdust, Milani Gallery, Brisbane, 2018, from which a new branch of pictures, enclasticine, debut at the TarraWarra Biennial 2021. Christian Capurro is represented by Milani Gallery, Brisbane.

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Sundari Carmody

narrative of ‘Australia’ and our sense of time and ownership in a settler colonial state. These explorations result in various material outcomes.

Daniel Crooks

Born 1988, Murwillumbah, New South Wales. Lived in Bali, Indonesia, 1990–2006. Lives and works in Adelaide.

In 2020, Cope presented newly commissioned work at the 2020 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Monster Theatres. She also undertook a residency and solo exhibition at Canberra Glassworks. New work will also be presented in OCCURRENT AFFAIR: proppaNOW at the University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane in 2021. In 2018, Cope undertook a residency in Paris with the Australian Print Workshop (APW) for a project titled French Connections, which was exhibited at the APW in 2019 and Mosman Art Gallery in 2020. In 2018, she completed Weelam Ngalut (our place) commissioned for the Monash University Museum of Art’s Public Art Walk. Her large-scale sculptural installations have been curated into three national survey exhibitions, The National 2017: New Australian Art, 2017, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial, 2017, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; and Sovereignty, 2016, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne.

Born 1973, Hastings, New Zealand. Lives and works in Melbourne.

Sundari Carmody is an artist currently based in Adelaide whose practice is primarily focused on the language of sculpture. She concerns herself with the question of how to engage with universal systems and aspects of being which linger in the category of the unknown, in ‘the dark’. She attempts to find useful frameworks to give form to things that are invisible or which lie just beyond the limits of our perception. Relevant precedents to her methodology include research in the areas of dark matter, sleep and the study of nocturnal creatures. The scope of her investigations take into account the scientific, cultural, physiological and psychological aspects of ‘the dark’. Carmody spent her formative years in Indonesia before moving to Perth and then Adelaide where in 2011 she graduated with a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) at the South Australian School of Art. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Fountain, Firstdraft, Sydney, 2019; Churchie Emerging Art Prize 2018, QUT Art Museum, Brisbane, 2018; Steady Illiterate Movement, Seventh Gallery, Melbourne, 2017; Primal Site, BUS Projects, Melbourne, 2015; CACSA Contemporary 2015, SASA Gallery, Adelaide, 2015; The Black Swan: Suite, FELTspace, Adelaide, 2014; and March of the Black Swan, Constance ARI, Hobart, 2014. She has recently returned from Berlin where she undertook a three-month residency at Phasmid Studio.

Megan Cope Quandamooka, North-East region. Born 1982, Brisbane. Lives and works between Minjerribah, Queensland and Melbourne. Megan Cope is a Quandamooka (North Stradbroke Island in south east Queensland) artist. Her site-specific sculptural installations, video work and paintings investigate issues relating to identity, the environment, and mapping practices. Cope’s work often resists prescribed notions of Aboriginality, and examines psychogeographies that challenge the grand

In 2017-19 Cope was the Official War Artist commissioned by the Australian War Memorial (AWM) and travelled to the Middle East, resulting in the series, Fight or Flight, held by the AWM, Canberra. In 2016, Cope was also commissioned to create new work for Frontier Imaginaries at QUT Art Museum which toured to Al-Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jerusalem. She also exhibited alongside Tracey Moffatt at Artspace in Bereft, a solo exhibition of sculptural and video work in 2016. Cope’s work has been exhibited in Australia and internationally including at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art; Art Gallery of New South Wales; Gold Coast City Art Gallery; MONA FOMA, Hobart; ARC Biennial, Brisbane; Cairns Regional Art Gallery; Koorie Heritage Trust, Melbourne; City Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand; Para Site Contemporary Art Space, Hong Kong; Careof Art Space, Milan; the Australian Embassy, Washington; and Next Wave Festival, 2014. In 2015, Cope’s work was curated into an exhibition at Musées de la Civilisation in Québec, Canada, which also acquired her work for their permanent collection. Megan Cope is a member of Aboriginal art collective proppaNOW and is represented by Milani Gallery, Brisbane.

Daniel Crooks works predominantly in video, photography and sculpture. He is best known for his digital video and photographic works that capture and alter time and motion. Crooks manipulates digital imagery and footage as though it were a physical material. He breaks time down, frame by frame. The resulting works expand our sense of temporality by manipulating digital ‘time slices’ that are normally imperceptible to the human eye. Recent solo exhibitions include Daniel Crooks: Seek Stillness in Movement, Latrobe Regional Gallery, Morwell, 2018; High Street (After Ruscha), Bundoora Homestead Arts Centre, Melbourne, 2017; Phantom Ride, Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Melbourne, 2016; Truths Unveiled by Time, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne, 2014; Daniel Crooks, Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia , Adelaide, 2013; A Garden of Parallel Paths, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2013; Daniel Crooks: Pan No.2, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna O Waiwhetu, New Zealand, 2010. His work has featured in numerous group exhibitions, including So Long as You Move, Ark Galerie, Indonesia, 2014; Marking Time, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2012; Parallel Collisions: 2012 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2012; 2010 Move on Asia, Tate Modern, London, 2010. Crooks’s works are in notable public collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; M+ / Museum of Visual Culture, Hong Kong; Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne; Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; and the Chartwell Collection, Auckland.

George Egerton-Warburton Born 1988, Kojonup, Western Australia. Lives and works in Melbourne. George Egerton-Warburton employs text, sculpture, painting and video in his practice which embraces stylistic dissonance, and the syntax of

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conceptual art. Elusive situations anchored by droll humour and irony, where sympathetic structures and topologies of stress are cobbled together in textured installations. Egerton-Warburton has presented rows of miniature beds that suggest that there is a symptom in the room. Embracing the contradictions of conceptual art and critique, motors hum with pathos, mulling over multiple notions of power. Some of them, ‘replacements for men,’ investigate what it is to be a constituent. In another work, dog shit is mistaken for a truffle to investigate the conditioning inherent in a past occupation. Confusion, boredom, and ambiguity are isolated as an antidote to the mechanism of interpretation; before we ‘obey’ language. Egerton-Warburton is currently a PhD candidate at Monash University. In 2015, he and his peers dropped out of the University of Southern California’s MFA program in response to the increasing neoliberalisation of the course and mistreatment of students and faculty by the University administration. Selected solo exhibitions include ‘,’, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2019; Coma, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, 2019; Penal Café, Shoot the Lobster, New York, 2019; Cooking the Books, Contemporary Art Tasmania, Hobart, 2018; Wincing wind-chime, repugnant fold-out breath, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, 2017; Pillow Torque, with Lauren Burrow, Physics Room, Christchurch, 2016; Weeping Glass Stool, with Lauren Burrow, Pansy, Melbourne, 2015; Administration is just Oulipian poetry, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2014; Just paintings, with Helen Johnson and Hamishi Farah, Westspace, Melbourne, 2014; Steaming ties, Artspace, Auckland, 2013; and Dog, Studio 12, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, 2013. Selected group exhibitions include Something drawings 2, Read the room, Melbourne, 2019; Hippies use the side door to enter the bazaar, Drill Hall, Sydney, 2019; Freedman Foundation Scholarship exhibition, UNSW Galleries, Sydney, 2017; Only lovers left alive, Los Angeles, 2017; Untitled (A Mensa Halloween), 621 S Anderson St, Los Angeles, 2016; Mined Control, As It Stands, Los Angeles, 2016; TarraWarra Biennial 2016: Endless Circulation, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, 2016; New 15, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2015; Recesses, Park View, Los Angeles, 2015; Plagiarist of My Unconscious Mind!, Château Shatto, Los Angeles, 2015; Art as a verb, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2014; Notes from the Field, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne, 2014; Circulating Collections, TPP Museum, Japan, 2014; and Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2013. 139

Nicole Foreshew

Caitlin Franzmann

James Geurts

Michaela Gleave

Wiradjuri, central-west New South Wales. Born 1982, Sydney. Lives and works mid north coast, New South Wales.

Born 1979, Gympie, Queensland. Lives and works in Brisbane.

Born 1970, Warragul, Victoria Lives and works in Melbourne.

Born 1980, Alice Springs, Northern Territory. Lives and works in Sydney.

Caitlin Franzmann is a Brisbane-based artist who creates installations, sonic experiences, performances, and social practice works that focus on place-based knowledge and embodied practices. In reaction to the fast pace and sensory overstimulation of contemporary urban life, she invites people to slow down, listen and contemplate interactions with their surroundings and with other living entities, including plants, insects, water, rocks and micro-organisms. She creates intimate situations within galleries and public spaces that allow for gathering, conversation and storytelling as a way to encourage reflection on histories, complex ecosystems and environmental concerns specific to a place.

James Geurts’s conceptually driven practice works across sculpture, site-action, drawing, installation, photography, video, public artworks and earth-scale projects. Through abstraction, fieldwork, site interventions and studio research, Geurts typically focuses on the way that cultural and natural forces intersect to shape not only landscape but perception itself. His site-actions include modifying analogue and digital methods to emulate conditions of the site. Recent projects explore the diversion of river agency, consider the impact of industry on geology, study the seismic, draw a line from the primordial to the technological, and investigate concepts of time.

Michaela Gleave is a Sydney-based artist whose conceptual practice spans numerous mediums and platforms including digital and online works, installation, performance, photography, sculpture and video. Her projects question our innate relationship to time, matter and space, and focus particularly on the changing intersections between art, science and society.

Franzmann has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the National Gallery of Victoria, Institute of Modern Art and Kyoto Art Centre. She has participated in residencies in Indonesia, Turkey, Japan, Chile and, locally, with Brisbane City Council’s Karawatha Forest Discovery Centre. She was recipient of the 2014 Churchie National Emerging Art Prize and was selected to exhibit in Primavera 2014: Young Australian Artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Recent awards, commissions and exhibitions include the ACME Studio Residency in London, through the Australia Council of the Arts 2022; EON Project, Kevin Taylor Legacy Recipient, T.C.L. Landscape Architects Australia, 2021; Fluid Geography, Renewal SA public sculpture commission for Adelaide Festival Plaza, Adelaide, 2021; Habitat of Time, curated by Julie Louise Bacon, Arts Catalyst, London, 2020; Floodplain, curated by Simon Maidment, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2018; Seismic Field, GAGPROJECTS, Adelaide, 2018; Liminal Trajectories, (supported through the ANAT Synapse program and CSIRO), CAVES, Melbourne, 2018; Georges Mora Fellowship 2017; Archaeology of Time, Creative Victoria Public Sculpture Fund, 2016; Water Gate, Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei City, Taiwan, 2017.

A contemporary artist, writer and curator from the Wiradjuri nation, central-west New South Wales, Nicole Foreshew works across a range of mediums, from photomedia to sculpture, film and video. In 2015, Foreshew was Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), Sydney and Curator of Primavera 2015, MCA’s annual exhibition of young Australian artists aged 35 and under. In 2014, she was awarded the NSW Aboriginal Art Fellowship administered by Arts NSW to undertake her work titled Grounded: Earth’s’ materials, processes and structures and she was the winner of the prestigious Parliament of NSW Aboriginal Art Prize 2014 for her photographic work It comes without seeking 1. Foreshew completed the Parramatta Artist Studios international residency program in Montreal, Canada at the Darling Fonderie studios in partnership with the Canadian Council for the Arts in 2012, and was awarded the College of Fine Arts (COFA) Professional Development Award also in 2012. Foreshew has exhibited widely across Australia and internationally including Water, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2019–2020; Minyambul-yiri-yimbang (because it is a sacred thing) a solo exhibition at Goulburn Regional Gallery, 2018–2019; Primavera 2017: Young Australian Artists, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2017; Shimmer, Tarnanthi, Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, Adelaide, 2015; Wiradjuri Ngurambanggu, Murray Art Museum, Albury, 2015; Hereby Make Protest, Carriageworks, 2014; Shadowlife, curated by Natalie King and Djon Mundine, Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria, 2013; Born in Darkness Before Dawn, a major public artwork commission for Place Projections, Eora Journey, a City of Sydney arts initiative curated by Hetti Perkins, 2013; and Maamungun Compatriots, a group exhibition with works by Michael Riley and Jonathan Jones at Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, India, 2012.

As a member of the feminist art collective LEVEL from 2013–2017, Franzmann has collaboratively presented participatory works at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. With LEVEL, she has also co-curated exhibitions and forums with a focus on generating dialogue around gender, feminism and contemporary art. She was most recently on the management committee of Outer Space ARI 2018–2019, and is currently a core member of Ensayos, a collective research practice centred on extinction, human geography and coastal health. She originally trained as an urban planner before completing a Bachelor of Fine Art at Queensland College of Art in 2012.

Foreshew’s works are held in a number of state and regional galleries across Australia including the Murray Art Museum, Albury, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney and National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

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Geurts completed a Masters of Arts at RMIT in 2009 and postgraduate research at GEMAK Institute, The Hague, Netherlands in 2011. His works are held in the collections of the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno Nevada; Dalhousie Art Gallery, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada; Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei City, Taiwan; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; GEMAK Institution, The Hague, Netherlands; Gold Coast City Gallery, Queensland; Wollongong City Art Gallery, Wollongong, New South Wales; Canvas International Art, Amsterdam; La Chambre Blanche, Quebec, Canada; Festival Arts Centre, Adelaide; Flinders University, Adelaide. James Geurts is represented by GAGPROJECTS Adelaide & Berlin and Contemporary Art Society London.

Gleave’s work has been presented extensively across Australia as well as in Germany, Greece, The United Kingdom, Austria, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, Iceland, the United States and Mexico. She has developed major performance and installation works for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Dark Mofo Festival, Hobart; Fremantle Arts Centre, Perth; Bristol Biennial, UK; Carriageworks, Sydney; and Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne. Gleave has been awarded residencies at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York City, Tokyo Wonder Site in Japan, and CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science, Australia. In 2015, Gleave won the Churchie National Emerging Art Prize. and was awarded a prestigious Creative Australia Fellowship in 2013. Permanent installations of her work have been commissioned by Carriageworks, NSW, Bendigo Art Gallery, VIC, Salamanca Arts Centre, TAS, and The Rechabite, WA. Gleave’s exhibitions include Coronal Mass (solo), Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart, 2019; Time, Melbourne Art Fair, Melbourne, 2018; The Score, The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2017; 2016 Bristol Biennial: In Other Worlds, Bristol, UK, 2016; Aufstiege, KunstRegion Stuttgart, Germany, 2016; Trace: Performance and its Documents, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2014; A Day is Longer than a Year (solo), Fremantle Arts Centre, Western Australia, 2013; Our Frozen Moment (solo), Carriageworks, Sydney, 2012; We Are Made of Stardust (solo), Art Futures, Hong Kong Art Fair, 2012; Octopus 11: The Matter of Air, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, 2011; A Perfect Day to Chase Tornadoes (White), Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin, 2010; and Primavera 2009: Young Australian Artist, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2009.

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Jonathan Jones

No girr a Marawili

Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi peoples. Born 1978, Sydney. Lives and works in Sydney.

Clan: Madarrpa, Yithuwa group Homeland: Bäniyala Moiety: Yirritja Born c. 1939, Darrpirra, north of Djarrakpi (Cape Shield), north-east Arnhem Land. Lives and works in Yirrkala, north-east Arnhem Land.

A member of the Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi nations of south-east Australia, Sydney-based Aboriginal artist Jonathan Jones works across a range of mediums, from printmaking and drawing to sculpture and film. He creates site-specific installations and interventions into space that use light, subtle shadow and the repetition of shape to explore Indigenous practices, relationships and ideas. Jones often works with everyday materials, recycled and repurposed to explore relationships between community and the individual, the personal and public, historical and contemporary. Jones’s artistic concern centres on acknowledging local traditional owners and Australia’s hidden histories, while creating alternative and new spaces in the mainstream for Indigenous culture to exist within. He is dedicated to the integration of artwork within the built environment and to working collaboratively in teams. This style of artwork presents the opportunity to acknowledge a site’s history and future, to develop new understandings and to raise awareness within lived environs. Selected recent solo exhibitions include untitled (D21.281 Galari bargan), Dunedin Public Art Gallery, NZ, 2018; barrangal dyara (skin and bones), Kaldor Public Art Project 32, Royal Botanic Garden Sydney, 2016; guguma guriin (black stump), Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art, Performance Space, Sydney, 2015; and guwiinyguliya yirgabiyi ngay yuwin. gu gulbalangidyal ngunhi (they made a solitude and called it peace), Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, NSW, 2015. Selected group exhibitions include the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2018–19; A Lightness of Spirit is the Measure of Happiness, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2018; and Defying Empire, Third National Indigenous Art Triennial, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2017. Jones has also undertaken many major public art projects including shell wall, 2015, with Aunty Esme Timbery, Alexander R9, Barangaroo, Sydney; Kamay plants, 2013, with Aunty Julie Freeman, Commonwealth Parliament Offices, 1 Bligh Street, Sydney; and untitled (one blood, one tongue), 2013, with the United Ngunnawal Elders Council, Neville Bonner Primary School, Canberra.

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No girr a Marawili is one of the most highly regarded artists currently working at Buku-Larr gay Mulka at Yirrkala in the Northern Territory. Known for her highly sophisticated bark paintings and Larrakitj, Marawili’s use of organic patterns in these remarkable artworks reflect an ingrained, natural understanding of her culture, history and environment. Like many Yol u working at Buku-Larr gay Mulka, Marawili draws inspiration for her artistic practice from her familial ties. She paints the cross-hatched motifs from the Djapu clan of her late husband, the artist and statesman Djutjadjutja Mununggurr, the designs of her mother’s Galpu clan, as well as those belonging to her own Madarrpa clan. What differentiates Marawili’s interpretation of these designs is the free and natural spirit that resonates through the work—the gift of a skilled yet uninhibited artist. In 2018, the Art Gallery of New South Wales presented the major solo exhibition No girr a Marawili: From my Heart and Mind. This significant exhibition, curated by Cara Pinchbeck, spanned the artist’s career with a focus on the last five years. Other solo exhibitions include Progression, Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne, 2017; Lightning: No girr a Marawili, Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2017; Baratjula, Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne, 2016; No girr a Marawili Bark, Tim Melville Gallery, Auckland, 2016; Lightning and the Rock, Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne, 2015; Yathikpa, Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne, 2014; and And I am still here, Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne, 2013. In 2020, Marawili was selected to participate in the prestigious NIRIN: 22nd Biennale of Sydney and in 2019–20, a major installation of her work was unveiled at TARNANTHI: Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, presented by the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide.In 2017, Marawili’s paintings and Larrakitj (poles) featured in Defying Empire the 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and her work also

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featured in Who’s Afraid of Colour at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Other selected group exhibitions include Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia, Newcomb Art Museum, Tulane University, New Orleans, touring (2016–19); Supranatural: New Work from The Buku-Larr gay Mulka Art Centre, Australian Consulate-General, New York, 2015–16; Our Spirits Lie in the Water, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2015; Revolution: New work celebrating 20 years of printmaking at Yirrkala Print Space, Nomad Art, Parap, Northern Territory, 2015; Sydney Contemporary, Alcaston Gallery, Carriageworks, Sydney, 2013; and Gan’yu Gallery, Darwin Festival, Darwin, 2012. In 2019, No girr a was announced as winner of the Roberts Family Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Prize, as part of the prestigious Wynne Prize 2019 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney and she was also announced winner of the 2019 Telstra Bark Painting Award at the 36th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Awards at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin.

His research and practice focus on refiguring Australian art and culture from an Indigenous ideological perspective based on a reciprocal relationship to Country. He has published numerous essays and articles and is an impassioned educator and communicator. His work has been recognised in various art prizes and is held in various private and public collections including the National Gallery of Victoria. His publication history has investigated the relationship of materialism in the arts to an Indigenous worldview and Aboriginal knowledge framework and epistemology. He has further reconfigured understandings of culture and visual practice from an Aboriginal perspective. Martin is the inaugural Associate Dean Indigenous in the Faculty of Art Design and Architecture (MADA) at Monash University, where he leads the Wominjeka Djeembana research lab and is honorary professor of Eminence with Centurion University of Technology and Management in Odisha, India. He is represented by William Mora Gallery, Richmond.

Marawili’s work is held in a number of collections, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Berndt Museum, University of Western Australia, Perth; Chartwell Collection, Auckland, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o T maki, Auckland; Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, University of Virginia, Charlottesville; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Australian National Maritime Museum, Sydney; and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Raquel Ormella

Brian Martin

In 2018, Shepparton Art Museum curated a solo survey show that is now touring the eastern states of Australia with NETS Victoria. Ormella’s work has been included in the Asian Art Biennial, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, 2015; the California-Pacific Triennial, Los Angeles, USA, 2013; the Aichi Triennale, Nagoya, Japan, 2010; the Biennale of Sydney, 2008; the Biennale of Istanbul, Turkey, 2003; and the Sao Paulo Biennale, Brazil, 2002. Recent group exhibitions in Australia include Material Politics, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2017, and The National: New Australian Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2017. She has held solo exhibitions at Milani Gallery in Brisbane, Artspace in Sydney, and Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces in Melbourne. She is a Lecturer at the School f Art & Design, Australian National University, Canberra.

Bundjalung, MurraWarri and Kamilaroi peoples. Born 1972, Sydney. Lives and works in Melbourne. Brian Martin is a descendant of Bundjalung, MurraWarri and Kamilaroi peoples and has been a practising artist for twenty-seven years exhibiting in the media of painting and drawing. Martin has a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Hons) from the University of Sydney, a Graduate Diploma Vocation, Education and Training from Charles Sturt University, and a PhD by research from Deakin University.

Born 1969, Sydney. Lives and works in Canberra. Raquel Ormella has a diverse artistic practice that includes video, installation, textiles and creating zines. Her works investigates how art can encourage political consciousness and social action in relation to questions of national identity and the environment.

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Mandy Quadrio

Yasmin Smith

tebrakunna, Coastal Plains Nation, north-east Tasmania; Oyster Bay Nation, eastern Tasmania. Born 1959, Melbourne. Lives and works in Brisbane.

Born 1984, Sydney. Lives and works in Sydney.

Mandy Quadrio is a proud palawa woman whose ancestral countries are the Coastal Plains Nation and the Oyster Bay Nation of north-east and eastern Tasmania. She is a Brisbane-based, socio-political artist working across sculpture, installation, photography and mixed media. Through her art practice, Quadrio maintains her commitment to bring attention to historical, cultural and political events that have been ignored and buried by Australian colonial histories.

Yasmin Smith travels widely, undertaking research for her archaeological ceramics installations that explore the chemistry of glaze techniques to furnish material evidence of histories, ecologies, geology and culture. She makes her glazes from organic and inorganic material found on site with elements of the clay body sometimes also locally excavated as part of her process. Smith pursues an alternative system of knowledge gathering by embracing ecological intelligence, collaboration and aspects of environmental science. Smith’s practice straddles art (ceramics) and more scientific investigations.

In her work Quadrio employs materials and objects from her ‘cultural tool kit’ such as Tasmanian bull kelp, fibres and ochres. She combines these cultural artefacts with found and Western manufactured objects. Through the re-ordering of these materials she weaves together narratives that reference the harsh and legally-sanctioned, attempted annihilation and scrubbing out of her palawa people and history. While her work acknowledges the genocide in Tasmania she is also celebrating palawa existence and continuity.

In 2019, Smith was invited by Kathryn Weir, Director and Chief Curator of Cosmopolis, to undertake a research project to inform the production of a major new ceramic installation, Seine River Basin, for Cosmopolis #2: rethinking the human, presented by the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Smith undertook five months of research and production in Paris and surrounds, focusing her work on the flora and soils of local waterways. In support of her project, Smith was awarded a residency at the Cité International des Arts in Paris through the Australia Council for the Arts.

Asserting the strength and resilience of her palawa ancestors, Quadrio’s research and making acts to counter the ongoing, pervasive myth of Tasmanian Aboriginal extinction. Quadrio’s works become acts of resistance as she asserts her identity and claims her sovereign status as a palawa woman.

Solo exhibitions include Drowned River Valley, The Commercial, Sydney, 2018; Ntaria Fence, The Commercial, Sydney, 2015; Apprentice Welder, as part of Installation Contemporary, curated by Aaron Seeto for the inaugural Sydney Contemporary Art Fair, Sydney, 2013; Stone Skin, The Commercial, Sydney, 2013; For the Promise of Water or Being Clean, Peloton, Sydney, 2011; Boundary (with Kenzee Patterson), MOP, Sydney, 2011; For No Real Reason, Firstdraft, Sydney, 2010; and If I Could Come Near Your Beauty With My Nails, Newspace Gallery, Sydney, 2006.

Quadrio has held solo exhibitions at the Queensland University of Technology Art Museum and Milani Galley CARPARK in 2020. She has shown at the Institute of Modern Art Belltower Gallery, Brisbane, 2019, Firstdraft, Sydney, 2019 and was represented in the Hobiennale 2019 at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart. Quadrio was a recipient of an Australia Council residency and Innovation Lab Award in 2018 . Her work has been collected by the St Andrews War Memorial Hospital in Brisbane. Quadrio is currently a Doctoral candidate in Visual Arts at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Brisbane.

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Group exhibitions include Cosmopolis #1.5: Enlarged Intelligence, curated by Kathryn Weir, Centre Pompidou off-site, Chengdu, China, 2018; SUPERPOSITION: Equilibrium & Engagement, the 21st Biennale of Sydney, curated by Mami Kataoka, Sydney, 2018; Sidney Myer Fund Australian Ceramic Award, Shepparton Art Museum, Shepparton, 2017; Sculpture at Barangaroo, Barangaroo Reserve, Sydney, 2016; MCA Artbar, curated by Nick Dorey and Hossein Ghaemi, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2014; Nocturnal Windows, curated by Ian Geraghty for the

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display windows of Gregory Boutique, Sydney, 2014; Reality Considerations (for the sake of), curated by Eleanor Ivory Weber, 55 Sydenham Rd, 2012; Ceramica, curated by Scott Donovan, the Institute of Contemporary Art Newtown, Sydney, 2012; Everything’s Alright, curated by Amanda Rowell, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 2010; and Structural Integrity as part of the Next Wave Festival, Melbourne, 2010.

touring exhibition, various venues, 2013–14; We Used to Talk About Love, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2013; Desire Lines, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2012; Life is Risk/ Art is Risk, National Artists’ Self-Portrait Prize, University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, 2011; and The Leisure Class, the Australian Cinematheque, QAGOMA, Brisbane, 2007.

Smith completed her Master of Visual Arts (Ceramics) at Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney in 2010. She was a director of the influential Sydney artist-run initiative, Locksmith Project from 2008 until 2010. Her work is in the collection of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Artbank and Shepparton Art Museum.

Stevens’s works are held in many private collections, as well as public institutions such as: the Queensland Art Gallery|Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Artbank; the University of Queensland Art Collection, Brisbane; the Chartwell Collection, New Zealand; and the Oppenheimer Collection, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Kansas, USA. Stevens received his PhD from the Queensland University of Technology in 2007, and is currently Deputy Head of School (Art) at UNSW Art & Design, Sydney.

Grant Stevens Born 1980, Brisbane. Lives and works in Sydney. Working predominantly with moving image, photography, and computergenerated imagery, Grant Stevens’s practice explores the various ways that digital technologies and conventions of representation mediate our inner worlds and social realities. While his early works focused on the entanglements of popular culture, language, and the conventions of communication, his more recent works tap into therapeutic responses to today’s cult of speed and hyperactivity. Stock photography, mood music, guided meditations, and borrowed phrases remain important reference points, as Stevens uses the tools of visual culture to reflect on its complexities and paradoxes. Present throughout is a particular ambivalence that flickers between the existential and the mundane, where sincere quests for meaning and insight mix with the familiar tropes and formulas of popular visual culture. Stevens has exhibited widely since the early 2000’s, with numerous solo exhibitions in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and the United States. His works have also featured in many significant curated exhibitions at publicly funded museums and contemporary art spaces including: Hope Dies Last: Art at the End of Optimism, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, 2019; Out of the Ordinary, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2017; GOMA Q: Contemporary Art from Queensland, QAGOMA, Brisbane, 2015; The Wandering: Moving Images from the MCA Collection,

P. Thomas Boorljoonngali Gija, of Nagarra skin, Warmun, Western Australia. Born 1933, Riya, East Kimberley, Western Australia. Died 2018, Kununurra, Western Australia. P. Thomas Boorljoonngali was a Gija woman of Nagarra skin whose bush name, Boorljoonngali, means ‘big rain coming down with lots of wind’. She was born at a place called Riya on the Turner River, south-east of the Bungle-Bungles. When Boorljoonngali was young she worked on Turner Station looking after poultry, gardening, grinding salt and carting water from the well but often preferred to run away into the bush with the old women. She loved walking all over the country with her grandmother and the other old women, hunting, collecting dingo scalps and looking for gold. She married Joe Thomas from Rugun, Crocodile Hole and lived there for many years. She began painting when Freddie Timms set up Jirrawun Arts at Crocodile Hole. Her work depicting Dreaming places and bush tucker from the Crocodile Hole area as well as the country around the middle reaches of the Ord and Turner rivers where she was born, achieved almost immediate success. She was represented in the Telstra Art award exhibition in 1999 with a stunning picture Boornbem Goorlem,

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Hot Water Spring II done in black and a pinkish red colour made by mixing red and white ochre. The spring is in a gorge with the open sky shown as a plain expanse of paint above the water and rock faces. Other works include Bush Honey - ‘Sugarbag’ Dreaming at Dry Swamp in which the dark cells of the hives float on a plain ground, and Loomoogool Blue Tongue Lizard Dreaming in which a prominent landscape feature is seen from the side. Her work has been acquired by a number of collectors and galleries including a special focus purchase of five paintings by the Western Australian Art Gallery in 2000. Her painting The Escape done as part of a series of paintings relating to massacre stories by Jirrawun artists intended to be shown together as Blood on the Spinifex was exhibited at the Seventeenth National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award Exhibition in 2000 and was highly commended and was purchased as part of the MAGNT Telstra collection. This image was used as the poster and catalogue cover for the exhibition at the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne between December 2002 and March 2003. An eight-panel series on the same subject was shown at Raft Artspace in Darwin in April 2002 and was purchased by the Art Gallery of Western Australia in 2003. Boorljoongali was also a singer and dancer with the Neminuwarlin Performance Group in its production of Fire, Fire Burning Bright which premiered at the Perth International Arts Festival in February 2002 and opened the Melbourne International Festival of the Arts at the State Theatre of Victoria in October 2002. She sang the haunting Warnalirri with Peggy Patrick on the second half of the group’s CD released in 2002 during Perth International Arts Festival. In 2017, Ms. Thomas’ work created during the Jirrawun era was featured in a special exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia during the TARNANTHI festival; the same eight-panel Gemerre series was later featured in RAFT Artspace’s special duo show, featuring her works and those of Peggy Patrick in Alice Springs (in June 2018). Boorljoonngali later created a beautiful painting depicting her sisters who were stolen from their birth country and placed in Wyndham, in a painting titled My Stolen Sisters from Gija Country, which was a finalist in the Art Gallery of NSW’s 2018 Wynne Prize.

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The great artist attended her last Warmun artist weekly Tuesday meeting on 30 October 2018, where she enjoyed the special birthday cake marking the 20th Anniversary of Warmun Art Centre with some fellow artists and friends. She passed away peacefully at Kununurra Hospital on Monday 5 November 2018 in the late afternoon.

Oliver Wagner Born 1969, Zurich, Switzerland. Lives and works in Sydney. Oliver Wagner wishes to acknowledge the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation, the custodians of the land and waters upon which he lives and works. His practice explores the potential, motive and approach of a post painterly language. This has led to a methodology where house paint is rendered into dust before being scattered into compositions on linen, or ephemeral installations in exhibition spaces. Oliver Wagner graduated in 2017 with a Master of Fine Arts and in 2015 with a Bachelor of Fine Art Honours from the National Art School in Sydney. He was invited to exhibit work in the Redlands Konica Minolta Art Prize, 2018, and has been the recipient of Australian art prizes including the John Olsen Drawing Prize, 2014, the John McCaughey Painting Prize, 2014, and the Jocelyn Maughan Drawing Prize, 2012. Recent notable exhibitions include the solo shows Still, 2020, and If Painting is the Name, 2019, at Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney, as well as group shows in Sydney, New York, and Paris, including the presentations of Sarah Cottier Gallery at the Sydney Contemporary Art Fair in 2018 and 2019; The Subtle Art of Defiance, Cross Art Projects, Sydney, 2019; Paddock IV, Gallerie Abstract Project, Paris, 2018; Chroma, Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney, 2018; and Rate of Change, COMA Gallery, Sydney, 2018. His works are held in public and private collections, including Artbank Australia and the National Art School Collection, Sydney. Oliver Wagner is represented by Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney.

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Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin Wurundjeri Born Healesville, Victoria. Lives and works in Healesville, Victoria. Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin AO is a senior Wurundjeri Elder of the Kulin Nation in Victoria and a traditional owner of the Melbourne and Yarra Valley region. She is known for her traditional welcome to country in the Woiwurrung language ‘Wominjeka Wurundjeri Balluk yearmenn koondee bik’ (Welcome to the land of the Wurundjeri people). Born in Healesville, Aunty Joy’s family never left Wurundjeri land and she is the great-great niece to William Barak, the last traditional Ngurungaeta of the Wurundjeri-wilam clan.

Aunty Joy is also an artist, writer and storyteller. Her first book, Welcome to Country: A Traditional Aboriginal Ceremony was published in 2016 and her follow-up book, Wilam: A Birrarung Story was launched in 2019. Between 2013 and 2019 she collaborated with Jonathan Jones and Tom Nicholson on the exhibition Future Memorials and the major public artwork untitled (seven monuments) both commissioned by TarraWarra Museum of Art. In 2005, she collaborated with David Chesworth and Sonia Leber to sing and record a soundscape for the William Barak footbridge, which connects Birrarung Marr to the MCG. In 2001, she collaborated with the didgeridoo player Mark Atkins and the composer Philip Glass in the concert work Voices, performed at the Melbourne Town Hall and New York’s Lincoln Centre.

In 2002, Aunty Joy was awarded the Victorian Aboriginal Women’s Award for her involvement with Aboriginal issues over the past thirty years. In 2006 she was made an officer of the Order of Australia ‘for her service to the community, particularly the Aborigines, through significant contributions in the fields of social justice, land rights, equal opportunity, art and reconciliation’. Joy is an Adjunct Professor of Swinburne University of Technology, an honorary PHD from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, inaugural Elder of LaTrobe University and Honorary Doctorate of University of Melbourne. She has previously been the Chair of the Wilin Centre for Indigenous Cultural Arts and Development at the Victorian College of the Arts, Patron for The Black Arm Band, Patron for Onemda VicHealth Koorie Health Unit, Co-Patron for Keeping Koori Kids in Catholic Education and Patron for Parliament of World Religions. Joy is also an Ambassador for BreastScreen Victoria. She has had numerous government appointments, including a member of the Equal Opportunity Commission of Victoria and of the AntiDiscrimination Tribunal, a Trustee of the National Gallery of Victoria and Co-chair for the Victorian Review of Royal Commission of Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. She has given the traditional Welcome to Country greeting at many Melbourne events and to many distinguished visitors.

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ACKNOW NOWL EDGEMENTS This exhibition was produced on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. TarraWarra Museum of Art acknowledges the Wurundjeri people Nation as the original custodians of the lands and waters on which the Museum stands and we extend our respect to their community, their Ancestors, and their Elders, past, present and emerging.

We gratefully acknowledge the support of our project funders:

The Museum gratefully acknowledges the following for their generous support of this exhibition:

Curator Our sincere thanks to Nina Miall for her professionalism, curatorial prowess, and resilience in bringing to fruition her unique vision for this Biennial.

Sincere thanks are extended to the following for their assistance with this exhibition:

Artists Robert Andrew, Jeremy Bakker, Lucy Bleach, Lauren Brincat, Louisa Bufardeci, Sundari Carmody, Christian Capurro, Jacobus Capone, Daniel Crooks, Megan Cope, George Egerton-Warburton, Nicole Foreshew and P. Thomas Boorljoonngali, Caitlin Franzmann, James Geurts, Michaela Gleave, No girr a Marawili, Brian Martin, Raquel Ormella, Mandy Quadrio, Yasmin Smith, Grant Stevens, Oliver Wagner, and Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin and Jonathan Jones.

Catalogue authors Tony Birch, Dr Toni Ross, and Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin.

Artists’ representatives Anna Schwartz Gallery; The Commercial, Sydney; Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney; GAGPROJECTS Adelaide & Berlin; Milani Gallery, Brisbane; Moore Contemporary, Perth; William Mora Gallery, Melbourne; Sutton Gallery, Melbourne; and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Singapore. We are also grateful for the support of Warmun Art Centre and Buku-Larr gay Mulka Centre.

Lenders to the exhibition Thank you to the lenders who have supported this exhibition through loans from their private collections.

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The Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body; the Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand (RISE) Fund – an Australian Government initiative; Creative Victoria; and Arts Queensland.

D. Anastasio Carpentry, Catalyst Signs, Clearlight Shows, Exhibit One, Rob Graham, HAZIK Coatings, and Robert Sinclair.

We wish to acknowledge the vision and support of: Our founding patrons Eva Besen AO and Marc Besen AC; our principal supporter, the TarraWarra Museum of Art Foundation; the Board of TarraWarra Museum of Art; our major sponsors: Probuild, Arnold Bloch Leibler Lawyers and Advisers, Deloitte Private, Chubb Insurance Australia, and AON; our major partners: Paoli Smith Creative, IAS Fine Art Logistics, and RACV Club; our education program supporters: the Bennelong Foundation the Ullmer Family Foundation, the Scanlon Foundation, Credit Suisse, the Erdi Foundation and Escala Partners; and public program supporter Yarra Ranges Council. We are proud to be a co-commissioner with the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane for Caitlin Franzmann’s to the curve of you; and to partner with the RISING festival.

We extend our thanks to the staff and volunteers:

Curator’s Acknowledgements I acknowledge the unceded land and waters of the Wurundjeri people, and honour their ongoing care and custodianship of Country. I also pay my respects to the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the Traditional Custodians of the land on which I live and work, and where much of this exhibition has been conceived remotely. My sincere thanks to the Biennial artists for their vision, sensitivity and dedication, and for their patience with the, at times, uncertain passage of the exhibition amid a global pandemic. I am so grateful for your resilience and commitment to the process of collective slowness. I extend my gratitude to the artists’ galleries, representatives and assistants, and to the lenders to the exhibition, particularly the Estate of P. Thomas Boorljoonngali, the Warmun Art Centre, and Biddy and Chris Van Aanholt. I give thanks for the remarkable talents of the unflappable team at TarraWarra Museum of Art. They have worked tirelessly to bring this exhibition and its accompanying catalogue and public programs to fruition against the odds. My thanks to Victoria Lynn, for her expert guidance and leadership; to Michelle Mountain, for her organisational brilliance and careful stewardship of the Biennial; to Anthony Fitzpatrick, for his considered engagement with the exhibition’s research and his judicious editing; to Mim Armour, for her seamless registration; to Tony Dutton, for meeting sometimes ludicrous requests with a warm smile; to Annemarie Kohn and Kali Michailidis for their grant-writing flair; to Shannon Lyons, for expert facilitation of public programs; to Katrina Raymond (MediaLink Productions), Elisabeth Alexander and Jasmin de Wolf, for their combined marketing and media savvy; to Stacie Piper, for her First Nations wisdom; and to TWMA’s always welcoming front-of-house team.

I wish to acknowledge the significant contribution of Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin AO throughout the Biennial’s realisation, and express my gratitude to her for so generously sharing her cultural knowledge. I extend my thanks to Toni Ross for her illuminating essay, and to Tony Birch for the evocative water poems that are threaded through this book. His meditations on the cultural significance of the Birrarung have been a vital resource for this exhibition. I am also very appreciative of the exceptional design work produced by Paoli Smith for the catalogue, the engaging public programming devised by the Slow Art Collective. I am indebted to many colleagues around the country who provided support, guidance and insight throughout my research on the exhibition: Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow, Bianca Beetson, Tamryn Bennett, Ellie Buttrose, Ineke Dane, Charlotte Day, Tania Doropoulos, Johanna Featherstone, Anthony Fitzpatrick, Helen Hughes, Hannah Mathews, Ian McLean, Liz Nowell, Gideon Obarzanek, Tulleah Pearce, Leigh Robb, Toni Ross, Francis Russell, Emily Sexton, Nina Stromqvist, David Teh, Oliver Watts. Finally, heartfelt thanks to my parents Angela and Tristram Miall, and to my two pint-sized disruptors Felix and Dash, who remind me daily of the importance of unhurried time.

Victoria Lynn, Director; Mim Armour, Registrar; Jasmin de Wolf, Marketing & Events Manager; Tony Dutton, General Manager; Anthony Fitzpatrick, Curator; Shannon Lyons, Education Coordinator; Kali Michailidis, Manager External Relations; Michelle Mountain, Exhibitions Manager; Rachael Paintin, Office Administrator; Stacie Piper, First Nations Curator; Heather Saleeba and Steph Tesoriero, Front of House; MediaLink Productions: Katrina Raymond, and to the TarraWarra casual staff, guides, and volunteers.

TARRAWARRA BIENNIAL 2021

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CONTRIBUTORS TRIB

Tony Birch is a poet, activist and academic, as well as an acclaimed novelist and short-story writer, based in Melbourne. Birch is the author of three novels: the bestselling The White Girl, winner of the 2020 NSW Premier’s Award for Indigenous Writing; Ghost River, winner of the 2016 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing; and Blood, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. He is also the author of Shadowboxing and three short story collections, Father’s Day, The Promise and Common People. In 2017 he was awarded the Patrick White Literary Award. Birch is a frequent contributor to ABC local and national radio, a regular guest at writers’ festivals, and a climate justice campaigner.

Dr Toni Ross teaches art history and theory at UNSW Art & Design, UNSW Sydney and is Sydney reviewer for Artforum. Her recent publications include ‘Suspending Productive Time: Some Photographs by Gabriel Orozco and Jacques Rancière’s Thinking of Modern Aesthetics’ in Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images (eds. Donna West Brett and Natalya Lusty, Routledge, 2019) and ‘Slow Aesthetics and Deanthropomorphism as Ecocritical Strategies in David Claerbout’s The Pure Necessity (2016)’ in The Official: International Journal of Contemporary Humanities, 2020. She is currently researching the impact of wellness culture on contemporary art.

The TarraWarra Biennial 2021 has been generously supported by SUPPORTED BY

INAUGURAL FOUNDATION SUPPORTER

Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin AO >>> Nina Miall is an independent curator and writer based in Sydney, working across institutional, commercial and public art contexts. Primary among her curatorial concerns are socially engaged, interdisciplinary and site-specific practices, which she has explored in exhibitions she has curated in Europe, the US, Asia and Australia. From 2012–2017, Nina was the visual arts curator at Carriageworks, Sydney, curating projects with major international artists and largescale surveys of Australian art, including The National 2017: New Australian Art. Prior to Carriageworks, Nina was based in London for 12 years where she was a director of leading contemporary art gallery Haunch of Venison (2006–2011), and Head of Public Programs for the Royal Academy of Arts (2003–2005). Nina has a Masters in contemporary international art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London and she has lectured on contemporary art in Australia and the UK. She has also published widely, most recently contributing texts to the MCA’s exhibition catalogue Janet Laurence: After Nature (2019) and the Phaidon book Vitamin T: Threads and Textiles in Contemporary Art (2019).

THIS PROJECT HAS BEEN ASSISTED BY THE AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT THROUGH THE AUSTRALIA COUNCIL, ITS ARTS FUNDING AND ADVISORY BODY

MAJOR SPONSORS

MAJOR PARTNERS

PUBLIC PROGRAM SUPPORTER

EDUCATION PROGRAM SUPPORTERS

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TARRAWARRA BIENNIAL 2021

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CURATED BY NINA MIALL

27 March – 11 July 2021

TarraWarra Museum of Art 313 Healesville-Yarra Glen Road Healesville, Victoria 3777 Phone: +61 (0)3 5957 3100 Email: museum@twma.com.au Web: www.twma.com.au Opening hours Tuesday to Sunday 11:00am – 5:00pm

Catalogue editor: Nina Miall Authors: Tony Birch, Victoria Lynn, Nina Miall, Toni Ross, Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin AO Managing editor: Anthony Fitzpatrick Proofreaders: Anthony Fitzpatrick, Nina Miall Catalogue design: Paoli Smith Creative Catalogue printing: Adams Print Published by: TarraWarra Museum of Art, March 2021

ISBN 978-0-6487968-1-7

© Artist, photographers, authors and TarraWarra Museum of Art Ltd, 2021 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording or any other information storage or retrieval system, without prior consent in writing from the publisher, the artists, the photographers and the authors. Images remain copyright of the artists, photographers and appropriate authorities. All opinions expressed in the material contained in this publication are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the publisher.