Di'van | A Journal of Accounts | Issue 10

10_S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1

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CONTEMPORARY ART | CULTURE

CHARLES MEREWETHER | Doug Hall | ALIA SWASTIKA | Adam Geczy | GUO JIAN

Khadim Ali | SOUCHOU YAO | Djon Mundine | RANA ANANI | Dilpreet Bhullar

Elizabeth Pulie, Signature Painting (II) 2008. Acrylic on linen.

Courtesy: the artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney

Elizabeth Pulie: #117 (Survey) 15 January – 10 April 2022 Curator: James Gatt UNSW Galleries unsw.to/galleries

Cnr Oxford St & Greens Rd Paddington NSW 2021

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Editor Contributing Editor Publisher

Design

A Journal of Accounts Art | Culture | Theory

Alan Cruickshank Paul Gladston DIVAN ART JOURNAL | University of NSW Art & Design Alan Cruickshank

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD NANCY ADAJANIA India Cultural theorist, editor, writer and curator, Mumbai HOOR AL QASIMI United Arab Emirates President and Director, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah

ISSN 2207-1563

STEPHANIE BAILEY Hong Kong/United Kingdom Writer and editor, Hong Kong/London

© Copyright 2021 Alan Cruickshank in conjunction with the University of NSW Art & Design, Sydney, the authors and artists

UTE META BAUER Singapore Founding Director NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore; Co-Curator, 17th Istanbul Biennial

No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission

THOMAS BERGHUIS The Netherlands Independent Curator and Art Historian, Leiden

d ɪˈv a n | A Journal of Accounts is published biannually by DIVAN ART JOURNAL and University of NSW Art & Design, Sydney Editorial | Subscription | Advertising inquiries: Email: artandculturejournal@gmail.com Post: University of NSW Arts Design & Architecture Paddington Campus, Cnr Oxford St & Greens Rd, Paddington, SYDNEY NSW 2021 AUSTRALIA The views and/or opinions expressed in d ɪˈv a n | A Journal of Accounts are those of the contributing writers and not necessarily those of the editor, DIVAN ART JOURNAL or the University of NSW Art & Design, Sydney divan: from the Persian dīwān, an account book; origin dēvan, booklet; also related to debir, writer; evolved through ‘a book of poems’, ‘collection of literary passages’, ‘an archive’, ‘book of accounts’ and ‘collection of sheets’ to ‘an assembly’, ‘office of accounts’, ‘custom house’, ‘government bureau’ or ‘councils chamber’, to a long, cushioned seat, which in this sense entered European languages divan presents a shift of content and meaning over time coexistent with evolving historical relationships between the East and West. d ɪˈv a n | A Journal of Accounts offers critical interpretations on contemporary art and culture, and its broader historical, socio-political and theoretical contexts, from the greater Asia (Middle East, South/Southeast/East Asia and Asia-Pacific) regions which determine historical and current socio-cultural affinities with contemporary Australian art and society

DIANA CAMPBELL BETANCOURT Bangladesh Chief Curator, Dhaka Art Summit, Artistic Director, Samdani Art Foundation, Dhaka JOSÉ DA SILVA Australia Director, University New South Wales Galleries, Sydney FULYA ERDEMCI Turkey/Denmark Curator, KØS Museum of Art in Public Places, Denmark PATRICK FLORES The Philippines Professor of Art Studies, University of The Philippines, Manila BLAIR FRENCH Australia CEO, Carriageworks, Sydney ADAM GECZY Australia Senior Lecturer, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney; author, artist, Sydney PAUL GLADSTON Australia Judith Neilson Chair Contemporary Art, University of New South Wales Art & Design, Sydney ALEXIE GLASS-KANTOR Australia Executive Director, Artspace, Sydney REUBEN KEEHAN Australia Curator Contemporary Asian Art, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane VASIF KORTUN Turkey Curator, writer, Board Member, SALT, Istanbul LEE WENG CHOY Malaysia Independent art critic, Kuala Lumpur IAN McLEAN Australia Hugh Ramsay Chair of Australian Art, University of Melbourne, Melbourne VALI MAHLOUJI United Kingdom Curator, writer, critic and author, London GUY MANNES-ABBOTT United Kingdom Writer, essayist and critic, London CHARLES MEREWETHER Australia/Georgia Independent curator, writer, Sydney/Tbilisi NAT MULLER The Netherlands Independent curator and critic, Amsterdam DJON MUNDINE Australia Independent curator, writer and art critic, Sydney NIKOS PAPASTERGIADIS Australia Professor, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Melbourne ROBIN PECKHAM China Co-director Taipei Dangdai, writer, Taipei

Cover: Guo Jian, Do You Feel Anything?, 2021 Photo courtesy the artist and Arc One Gallery, Melbourne

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MURTAZA VALI USA/UAE Writer, art historian and curator, New York

Accounts A R T S, D E S I G N & A R C H I T E C T U R E

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ZARA STANHOPE New Zealand Director, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre, New Plymouth PHIL TINARI China Director, Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing

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A Journal

SHUBIGI RAO Singapore Artistic Director 2020 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, artist

ALA YOUNIS Jordan Curator and artist, Amman

CONTENTS 11 Parergon

ALAN CRUICKSHANK

14 Contact Zones: From Russia to China The Silk Road Revisited CHARLES MEREWETHER

28 The First Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, 1993 DOUG HALL

44 Imagination Across the Sea: Looking into the History of Connectivity of the Middle East and Southeast Asia ALIA SWASTIKA

56 What is a “National” Exhibition?

Understanding Australia’s ‘The National’ ADAM GECZY

66

GUO JIAN KHADIM ALI

84 Nation of Signs SOUCHOU YAO

94 The Colour Line: Archie Moore & W.E.B. Du Bois DJON MUNDINE

106 Don’t Forget How to Fly RANA ANANI

118 The Witness’ Account of the Other Side From Cracks in History: Azadeh Akhlaghi’s By An Eyewitness DILPREET BHULLAR

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IMAGE NOTATIONS 2|3

Rainbow Dance surveys Len Lye’s multimedia practice over his fifty-year career with essential, must-see film and sculptural works together with lesser known and recently conserved works from the Len Lye Foundation collection and archive completing the picture of one of Aotearoa’s most important artists.

Len Lye, Rainbow Dance (detail), 1935 Courtesy of the Len Lye Foundation and The British Postal Museum & Archive. From material preserved and made available by Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision.

2021

Swallowing Geography

Matt Pine Shona Rapira Davies Kate Newby Ana Iti

Working drawing (detail) F series no. 6 Te Awanga Pieces, 1979 Image courtesy Matt Pine & the Matt Pine archive

42 Queen Street Ngāmotu New Plymouth Aotearoa New Zealand

govettbrewster.com

10 DEC 10 DEC 2021– 2021– 27 MAR 27 MAR 2022 2022 Treat yourTreat senses yourtosenses a riot of tocolour, a riot ofvision colour, andvision sound and sound at the Gallery’s at the Gallery’s biggest international biggest international art show art of the show year. of the year.

Experience Experience over 180over works 180 covering works covering an impressive an impressive range range from large-scale from large-scale installations, installations, videos, altered videos,TVs altered and TVs and musical scores musicalfeaturing scores featuring collaborators collaborators such as Joseph such as Joseph Beuys, John Beuys, Cage John andCage Charlotte and Charlotte MoormanMoorman in the firstin the first major retrospective major retrospective of Nam June of Nam PaikJune in Southeast Paik in Southeast Asia.

Asia.

namjunepaik.sg namjunepaik.sg L E A D PA RT NL E R A D PA RT N E R

S T RAT E G I C SPA T RAT RT NEEGRI S C PA RT N E R S

Nam June PaikNam June Paik John Cage Robot John II Cage Robot II 1995 1995 Vintage wood television Vintage wood cabinets, television color cabinets, color television receivers, television DVD receivers, players, DVD players, multi-channel video, multi-channel piano keys, video, piano piano keys, piano hammers, pianohammers, wire, acrylic piano paint, wire, basket, acrylic paint, basket, books, wood mushrooms, books, wood andmushrooms, chessmen and chessmen 274.3 × 203.2 × 274.3 78.7×cm 203.2 × 78.7 cm Crystal BridgesCrystal Museum Bridges of American Museum Art,of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, Bentonville, 2011.17 Arkansas, 2011.17 Photography byPhotography Edward C. Robison

by Edward III C. Robison III

Chong Kim Chiew: Make Money with Money, Make Art with Art 3 September – 17 October 2021 Writer: Sharon Chin

This Time: Contemporary Watercolour

Yim Yen Sum: Line of Connection

22 October – 20 November 2021 Writer: Denise Lai Artists: Agus Suwage Ahmad Fuad Osman Chan Kok Hooi Chang Fee Ming Chang Yoong Chia Isola Tong Jon Chan Kentaro Hiroki Lena Bui Melati Suryodarmo Noor Mahnun Mohamed Nwe Soe Yu Orawan Arunrak Phuan Thai Meng Tith Kanitha

26 November – 31 December 2021 Curator: Alia Swastika

A+ Entrée (Online Exhibition) 3 – 31 December 2021 Curator: Denise Lai

Mary Parkinee: Garden in The Desert 7 January – 26 February 2022 Curator: Kittima Chareeprasit

Chong Kim Chiew, Malaya Japanese Occupation-Five Dolar, 2020, acrylic, paper and reflective tape on canvas, 90 × 180 cm

A+ WORKS of ART d6-G-8, d6 Trade Centre, 801 Jalan Sentul, 51000 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. www.aplusart.asia

aplusart.asia

Art is knowledge.

Asia Art Archive is a catalyst for new ideas that enrich our understanding of the world through the collection, creation, and sharing of knowledge around recent art in Asia.

www.aaa.org.hk

Asia Art Archive 11/F Hollywood Center 233 Hollywood Road Sheung Wan, Hong Kong T. +852 2844 1112 E. info@aaa.org.hk

AsiaArtArchive aaa.org.hk Opening hours Monday-Saturday, 10am-6pm

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17 TH I STA N B U L B I E N N I A L S E P T EM B E R – 20 N OV E M B E R F R E E OF C H A RGE

17 TH I STA N B U L B I E N N I A L S E P T EM B E R – 20 N OV E M B E R F R E E OF C H A RGE

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Rather than a great tree, laden with sweet, ripe fruit, this biennial seeks to learn from the birds’ flight, from the once teeming seas, from the earth’s slow chemistry of renewal and nourishment. There may be no great gathering, no orchestrated coming together at one time and place; instead it might be a great dispersal, an invisible fermentation. Its threads will be drawn together, but they will multiply and diverge, at different paces, crossing here and there but with no noisy culmination, no final knot. Let this biennial be compost.

It may begin before it is to begin and continue well after it is over.

CONTRIBUTORS

Rana Anani is a writer and researcher of visual arts and culture based in Ramallah. She is an art professional who has occupied several positions in this field in Palestine, including the Head of Communications, Palestinian Museum 2013–16; Project Manager Qalandiya International; curator of the Institute of Palestinian Studies conference on culture, 2016; Associate Curator, Sharjah Biennial Ramallah Project Shifting Grounds, 2017; her articles have been published in Alayyam, Ibraaz and Jadaliyya; co-authored the book Throne Village Architecture, published by Riwaq Centre for Architectural Conservation (2003).

Dilpreet Bhullar is a writer-researcher based in New Delhi, India. She has an MPhil from the University of Delhi in Comparative Literature with a dissertation titled 'Mapping Colonial Gazing(s): A Study of The People of India: A series of Photographic Illustrations with Descriptive Letterpress of the Race and Tribes of Hindustan from 1868–75'. She has been co-editor of the books Third Eye: Photography and Ways of Seeing and Voices and Images. Her essays on visual ethnography, identity politics and refugee studies have been published in books and journals including Voices and Images (Penguin Random House), South Asian Popular Culture (Taylor and Francis), Violent and Vulnerable Performances: Challenging the Gender Boundaries of Masculinities and Femininities (Inter-Disciplinary Press), and Indian Journal of Human Development (Sage Publications).

She is the associate editor of themebased Visual Arts Journal, published

by India Habitat Centre, New Delhi.

Adam Geczy is an artist and writer who teaches at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. His exhibitions across Australia and Europe have received considerable critical acclaim, and appears in numerous national collections including Queensland Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Australia. As a writer, Geczy has a longstanding reputation as a critic and theorist. With some 20 books (including those contracted) including from Bloomsbury, Routledge and Edinburgh University Press; considered one of the world’s leading theorists in art-fashion crossover. Recent books include The Artificial Body in Fashion and Art (Bloomsbury, 2017) and Transorientalism in Art, Fashion and Film: Inventions of Identity (Bloomsbury, 2019). His latest book (with Vicki Karaminas) is Gaga Aesthetics: Art, Fashion, Popular Culture and the UpEnding of Tradition (Bloomsbury, 2021).

He is currently co-authoring a book

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for Rutgers University Press on Literary Theory and Graphic Novels; founding editor of the journals The Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture, and ab-Original (both Penn State University Press).

Doug Hall was director of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, 1987–2007. Under his directorship the Gallery expanded its international focus, especially through his initiative the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. He conceived the idea for the Gallery of Modern Art and oversaw its development.

It opened on 1 December 2006. He was Commissioner for the Australian exhibitions at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 and again for the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. He has been appointed to a range of cultural organizations including a member of the Australia International Cultural Council (Department of Foreign Affairs), and an inaugural member of the Asia Art Council, Guggenheim Museum (New York). He served on the Executive Committee of the Australia-Thailand Institute and was later appointed to the board of the Australian Japan Foundation. Widely published in national and international newspapers, magazines and journals he wrote art criticism for the Australian Financial Review and contributed to The Monthly.

In 2001 he was awarded a member of the Order of Australia, and in 2006 was made a Chevalier dans l‘Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the Republic of France.

Charles Merewether is a writer and curator, having published most recently In the Sphere of the Soviets (2021) that looks at post-1991 art in Eastern Europe, notably Ukraine, Russia, Georgia and Central Asia. His publications are wideranging, including After Memory: The Art of Milenko Prvacki (2013) and Under Construction: Ai Weiwei (2008).

He was co-editor of After the Event (2010), editor Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan 1950-1970, (2007) and The Archive (2006). He has taught widely at Universities and was Curator of Contemporary Art, National Art Museum in Tbilisi, Georgia (2016 –19), Visiting Professor, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (2014) and Baptist University, Hong Kong (2015); Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Singapore (2010–13), Deputy Director of the Cultural District, Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi (2007), Artistic Director Sydney Biennale (2006), Curator, Research Institute, Getty Centre, Los Angles (1994–2003) and Inaugural Curator for the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey, Mexico, (1991–94).

Djon Mundine OAM is a curator, writer, artist and activist. He worked as Art Advisor at Milingimbi, Maningrida and Ramingining in the Northern Territory 1979–95; was Senior Consultant and Curator of Indigenous Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; has held curatorial positions at the National Museum of Australia, Canberra; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.

He was the concept artist of the Aboriginal Memorial at the National Gallery of Australia, 1988. In 1995 he was awarded the Order of Australia Medal for his services to the visual arts.

Alia Swastika is currently Director of Biennale Jogja Foundation; since 2008 Program Director, Ark Galerie, Yogyakarta. With Suman Gopinath, co-curator Jogja Biennale XI, Shadow Lines: Indonesia Meets India (2011); co-artistic director Gwangju Biennale IX: Roundtable (2012); curator of a special exhibition of works by Indonesian artists for Art Dubai’s Marker program (2012); recent curatorial projects include Europalia Arts Festival Indonesia for Contemporary Art Projects (2017); Songs for the People, Art Sonje, Seoul (2018); consultant curator Contemporary Worlds: Indonesia, National Gallery of Australia (2019); has written for Frieze, Art Forum, Broadsheet journal; worked with many Indonesian artists including Wimo Ambala Bayang, Jompet Kuswidananto, Eko Nugroho, Tintin Wulia and Iswanto Hartono; her book on Indonesian female artists during New Order was published in 2019.

Souchou Yao is a cultural anthropologist and writer based in Sydney and Malaysia. He has taught at universisties in Adelaide, Singapore, and Sydney where he was senior lecturer at the Department of Anthropology. His work deals with the anthropology of Chinese diaspora, and the relation between aesthetics and social and political theory. His essays on art and aesthetic and the cultural politics of Malaysia and Singapore have appeared in New Formation, Australian Journal of Anthropology, Australian Humanity Review, Current Anthropology, and positions: asia critique. His research on contemporary Chinese art has resulted in monographs on the artists Xu Bing, Ai Weiwei and Shen Shaomin. Among his books are Singapore: The State and the Culture of Excess (2006), Confucian Capitalism: Discourse, Practice and the Myth of Chinese Enterprise (2015), The Malayan Emergency: Essays on a Small, Distant War (2016). His latest book The Shop on High Street (2020) is an auto-ethnography of growing up in Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown.

ALAN CRUICKSHANK

Parergon At the launch of the first issue of this journal at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney five years ago, I posed the rhetorical question, why a new publication on contemporary art —of ink on paper—in this age, of the seemingly bottomless pit of imperceptibility of the Internet (with its doctrinaire adherents)? The following is an extension of those original remarks.

For those who don’t know me, and even those who do but of occupying other professional arenas, I was born into a printing family—I’m often reminded that this was quite some time ago, last century!—into the realm of the analogue, of lead typesetting and its tactile impression into paper, of chases and formes, of wood and metal ‘furniture’, of imposition stones and stonemen in leather aprons, of linotype hot metal typesetting machines (and typesetters with tips of fingers, or more, missing from a multitude of workplace misfortunes), of slugs, points, picas and ems, of Heidelberg Platens and GTOs, of rubber stereos (anybody know what they were?), of octavo, quarto and foolscap, of quires and reams. This was an odor-iferous world of tenaciously viscous inks, of pernicious fixers and cleaners, and my favourite—solvents! The perfumes of the print room!

Being therefore into ‘substance abuse’ from school age, as an artist, independent curator, writer and publisher, I had free entry for several decades to the family company printroom; Heidelberg GTOs (offset) and Platens (letterpress), metal and plastic plate-makers, bindery machines, the guillotine and other equipment. The company joke was that when I came in through the front door my father ran out the back door; he didn’t want to know what I was doing. The Heidelbergs sustained a hammering—catalogues, anthologies, posters, one-off artist prints and books. As a senior government arts functionary said years later at the Post West Gallery anthology launch (being one of its directors I decided to archive the endeavour: the publication, now the only tangible record along with another analogue, Kodak 35mm slides), the state’s visual art history had much to thank my father. These enterprises came to a halt when the printing union introduced blanket creativity-buster rules and much to my father’s wrath, broad-painted yellow lines on the printroom and bindery floors to guide us mere mortals to what was (obviously) safe or otherwise (provoking him to testily query where he might be allowed to walk in his own business. But here I digress…)

Decades of this exposure are surely responsible for my then becoming, perhaps somewhat dazed if not confused, in a career sideways shift, director of the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, which meant I was synchronously editor of Contemporary Visual Art+Culture Broadsheet magazine, a doppel role for the next fifteen years during which I commissioned and edited sixty issues of the latter; and to stretch the publishing-portfolio rubber band, fourteen artist monographs and art history anthologies, and sixty-five exhibition catalogues. In 2015, I converted to director-editor emeritus, so perhaps the part answer to my posed question at that launch was that I couldn’t help myself. I missed the effluvium of the printroom, of ink on paper.

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ALAN CRUICKSHANK

These days there’s nothing to inhale; goodbye petroleum-based inks, goodbye vertiginous solvents, printrooms having gone green with their impressing environmentally responsible “printing solutions” (the oleaginous verbalism persists). But it had to come—ISO9001 Quality Management, ISO14001 Environmental Management and ISO12647 Colour Management Systems certifications, soy-based inks, computer programmed machinery, digital printers, et alia: kowtow.

(There are some of us who can smell where a book has been printed, for example in the United States, Italy, or perhaps Australia. But to expand upon this might be too much of a digression...)

Relocating to Sydney in 2016 I thought I’d cultivate the international directors, curators, artists, writers and cultural institutions with whom I had worked over the previous twenty years, and continue my servitude to this seemingly dinosaur, now arcane thing called reading, examining and interpreting the analytical, critical printed word: ink on paper. I decided to produce a biannual journal focusing on the greater picture of the art historical, the political and the theoretical in visual art, and in strategically bypassing predominant Euro-American cultural authority, its content would engage all Asian regions from the Middle East to Southeast Asia to the Asia-Pacific, which I consider determine more relevant historical and current affinities with contemporary Australian art and society. Researching a title, evaluating numerous brainwaves only to discover I’d been beaten to the impression, so to speak, I chanced upon the word divan: from the Persian dīwān, and Turkish divan: a word with multiple connotations and narratives—an account book, a book of poems, a collection of literary passages, an archive, a book of accounts and a collection of sheets, which over time morphed into an assembly, an office of accounts, a custom house, a government bureau or councils chamber (where such documents were read), to a long-cushioned seat which in this sense entered European languages. (The modern French, Dutch, Spanish and Italian words douane, aduana, and dogana, respectively, meaning customs house, also come from dīwān.) I felt that the title should determine the content focus and be layered; as such it reflects a shift in meaning over time, coexistent with evolving historical relationships between the East and West: its rationale and philosophy being History underscores The Contemporary.

At the time of the journal’s conception I realized that it was the centenary of the SykesPicot Agreement, and the following year would be that of the Balfour Declaration, both European assertions that after 600 years of Ottoman rule had carved up the Middle East into mostly colonial subplots, the disorder and turbulence of which are still being endured today. That time also saw the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Australian referendum that amended the Constitution, the result of which effectively recognized Indigenous Australians as citizens for the first time. The histories of both underline contemporary art: in the Middle East (even pre-Arab Spring), notably Turkey, Lebanon and the Emirates, and since the 1990s Indigenous visual art has become a dynamic and resonant force in Australian contemporary culture.

So why ink on paper? Over the journal’s composition and evolution, the argument over the viability of print versus digital has been enduring. I’ve already referred to the latter form as the seemingly bottomless pit of imperceptibility, its omnipresence availing the reader lazy, and lite.

Scientific studies have shown that given reading develops imagination, induction, reflection and critical thinking as well as vocabulary, technology, in assuming an ubiquitous role in daily lives, has been responsible for the subsequent decline in critical thinking and analysis. In 2011 Pulitzer Prize Finalist Nicholas Carr examined in his book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, the physical and cultural consequences of the Internet and its subsequent effects upon the ability to read and think. As we know reading a book is a multi-sensory experience, using not just sight but l

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Parergon

also touch (and smell, perhaps!). The sensation of turning the physical page, holding the canvas bound volume makes these actions more comprehensive. Carr stated that the shift from paper to screen doesn’t just change the way a piece of writing is navigated, it also influences our degree of attention and the depth of sensory immersion. With the printed page, the writer, it is presumed, has devised a cogent narrative or line of reasoning, the reader working their way through the text or book, with the ability to stop and reflect wherever. When this conference of one has been accomplished, the book remains (in the hands, or on the shelf, always retrievable) for the process to be repeated and extended through a considered trail of logic. Contrary to this, Carr states that online hypertexts, of extensive cross-referencing between related sections of text and graphic material, are the “death” of an author-driven line of reasoning; a major detractor when attempting to read a longer, cohesive text, asserting that research demonstrates people who read linear texts comprehend and remember more, and learn more than those who read a text interrupted by a multitude of links (or advertisements).

That online and smartphone texts are not broken down into pages further exacerbates the comprehension quotient, as further studies have shown that a good spatial mental representation of the physical layout of a text leads to better reading comprehension. The length of an online text also affects multiple reading, focus and retention capabilities; Carr states that the average web page holds the reader for eighteen seconds. I recently observed, with great amusement, The Wall Street Journal online subtitles its story headings with “2 minute read,” “4 minute read,” and “long read,” etcetera, while the increased reading of “books” on smartphones presents another measure of apprehension.

In opposition to the distinct archival accessibility of the printed word there are conditions where digital discourse’s reliance upon electricity (and here we are entering into quite a different realm of debate) for its connectivity and storage becomes art criticism’s disturbance, if not disempowerment. As a national example, when political decree and economic expediency ended an aggregate of nearly 120 years of the visual art history of two local arts organizations, to be morphed into one, the subsequent fabrication was left ‘holding the baby’, of an irreplaceable (hard) archive of cultural material. Subsequent to this artifice both organization’s websites did not exist, or elements only arbitrarily so; comprizing much more than sixty issues of Broadsheet magazine, fourteen artist monographs and anthologies, and sixty-five exhibition catalogues; of at least 2,500,000 words and nearly 10,000 illustrations. While the hardcopies remain extant, apathy suggests their eventual subservience to whimsy or delinquency.

A final word about ink on paper: nearly twenty years ago the director of a national art museum especially renowned for its collection of Australian art, in the context of exhibiting and acquiring contemporary art, (in)famously asserted that living artists were “difficult” and dead artists were much preferred as they didn’t “complain” nor “demand so much.” As one of the former at the time (living artist, that is), I suggested in response that “today’s visual art is tomorrow’s cultural heritage.” Correspondingly, today’s ink on paper focused, expansive cultural critique and analysis is tomorrow’s accessible and retrievable archive of national cultural heritage. (Does anybody remember CD-ROMs? Zip disks?) Like taxes, one might be caught against one’s will at some time, death being even longer. And here is the point: of a situation experienced in the same place as that political decree and economic expediency, in the state of South Australia, its size the combined areas of France and Germany, when the wind blew too hard there wasn’t anything electric, the statewide grid collapsing like a chain of dominoes; a complete seizure for up to twenty-four hours. The cynic might respond (and it has been uttered), at least when someone’s tripped over the power cord, when your website disappears, you can read this art journal… by candlelight.

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CHARLES MEREWETHER

Contact Zones: From Russia to China The Silk Road Revisited If sixteen years after the Biennale of Sydney: Zones of Contact in 2006, we were asked to reimagine its conceptual framework and horizons, we would need to recognize the fundamental realignment between countries internationally that has occurred. Some of these changes include Australia better acknowledging Asian culture as being very much part of, if not integral to the character of Australian life; the increasingly powerful geo-political influence of China through the old Silk Road of Central Asia and across Asia (including Australia); and thirdly, the diminishing force of Western art and culture as an international standard and arbiter.

I had conceived the idea of Zones of Contact initially while visiting Hong Kong, which at the time was still a gateway and meeting point of different cultures East and West. I had thought this idea might develop further but, as I worked my way through Asia, it seemed sufficiently appropriate and a promise of human connectivity that would cross borders. The idea of zones of contact had multiple implications for the promise of cultural exchange, free of an ideological imperative or demand by one ethnicity over another. In my Introduction to the Biennale catalogue I had written of “a reflexive relation of the lived experience of the now across culture… shaped by the uneasy contradictions between cultures, the unstable transient zone of inclusion and exclusion of peoples… resolutely speaks to expose the fault-lines of the present in which the past persists and the future is uncertain.”1 Earlier Biennales of Sydney had seemed at the time predominantly Eurocentric, except for Anthony Bond’s Boundary Rider in 1992. By thinking about contemporary art across borders and not in terms of being bracketed by identity politics, Bond’s Biennale had broken with the dominant Western ideological paradigms, seeking rather a practice based on exchange between “social interaction and belief,” “perception and the material world,” “sign and signifier.”2 Immediately preceding 2004, the question of nation-building and nationalism seemed for many at the time, an almost distant and obsolete issue. There was rather the hope that the recognition of one another as equal and a transnational dialogue could build respect, alliances and exchange, regardless of ethnic differences or national borders. Hence “zones of contact” in 2004 advocated extending connections, correspondences and affinities between peoples and artists across geopolitical and social divides. This was the guiding philosophy and concept underlying the two years research and preparation leading up to the Biennale of Sydney in 2006.

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CHARLES MEREWETHER

This had been intimated and shaped by the preceding thirty years of social and cultural changes that included rethinking the terms that would best reflect the relations of cultural exchange.

Chipping away at the construction of the hegemonic and the notion of a dominant culture or defining centre, had been an ongoing endeavour since the 1960s. Some of these issues had been raised in different permeations over the years, such as the critique of the centre/periphery constructions of the world, or holistic theories of internationalism, then globalism. The advent of post-coloniality and the founding of both Subaltern Studies in India, 1982 and Third Text in London, 1987 led to a kind of writing against the grain, seeking to restore history to the subordinated.

The editorial of Third Text, at the time it was launched, proposed that the journal was dedicated to the study of the exclusionary zones of centre and periphery, and to challenge the Eurocentric and ethnocentric notions of aesthetic criteria that marginalized—and at times continue to neglect—the work of culturally diverse practitioners.3 This was further enhanced by the writings of Homi Bhabha, as The Location of Culture, published in 1994, in which he advances the concept of hybridity in crosscultural exchange and that of an interstitial space.

By 1998 Nicolas Bourriaud had published his book Relational Aesthetics, a concept developed over a number of years prior to the exhibition Traffic that he curated at the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux in 1996. Bourriaud would then publish Radicant in 2009, that aimed to define the emergence of the first global modernity, based on translation and nomadic forms, pitted against the postmodern aesthetics based on identities. Relational Aesthetics was subsequently critiqued by Claire Bishop who, in re-reading some of the artists Bourriaud discussed, arrived at different conclusions. She draws upon Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985), who argue that a fully functioning democratic society is one in which relations of conflict are sustained, not erased, and that new political frontiers are constantly being drawn and brought into debate. Bishop wrote that without such antagonism, there is only the imposed consensus of authoritarian order—a total suppression of debate and discussion —which is inimical to democracy.4 Surpassing Eurocentrism enables one to see the differences and complex processes of cultural exchange between peoples not only in Asian countries but, also across the Middle East and a broader Europe beyond its Western borders. This would include artists from both Central and Eastern Europe, as well as a deeper appreciation of Islamic culture and both its breadth and a recognition that it is very much a part of contemporary art today. We would need also to redress the breadth and strength of global First Nations and indigenous movements and voices that resound especially through the island peoples of the Pacific. This was clearly shown in the Brook Andrew curated Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN in 2020, an artist- and First Nations-led event that focused on “the edge” as the location of connection.

The critical sphere of contemporary art and culture needs to take on board the shift in the geo-political dynamics reshaping the character of cultural exchange today. The democracy/ political uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa—the Arab Spring—significantly altered the nation-power dynamics that fuelled a populist and reactionary nationalism in Europe.

This led to the political, religious and ethnic repression of others, including the ostracization of immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers. In such a climate the cause for any kind of regionalist or internationalist approach was swiftly rejected as irrelevant, if not denounced as threatening to local national interests and needs. Furthermore, we need to recognize the influence and breadth of Islamic culture that has been misidentified with the Islamic State group. l

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Contact Zones: From Russia to China The Silk Road Revisited

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In the post-Arab Spring years, significant infrastructural and artistic development of art has occurred across the Middle East, augmented by the Sharjah Art Foundation, the Abraaj Group, biennales in Sharjah and Istanbul, Art Dubai, and publications such as Bedouin and Canvas.

Complementary initiatives were instigated in the West, such as that begun by the Victoria and Albert Museum London in 2008 when it opened the museum’s newly renovated Gallery of Islamic Art and launched the Jameel Prize.5 For those advocating the need to strengthen the points and terms of reference in regard to contemporary art practice, the Jameel Prize, held every two years, was designed to award “an artist whose contemporary practice emphasized the importance of ‘Islamic traditions of art, craft and design’.”6 Not only did this challenge the ideologues of separation but would show the increasing strength of contemporary practices developing in the Islamic world and relations with other forms of contemporary art elsewhere.7 This breadth of influence extended from the Middle East to its diaspora, including Central Asia, where Islamic faith is a constituent part of those countries and to the region of Xinjiang, Northwest China, in which the majority of the twelve million plus Uyghurs are of Muslim faith.8 In the second half of these remarks, I wish to focus on what I see as the implications of a geo-political shift in which Russia has been displaced by China as a preeminent global power.

And although a new alliance was struck between Russia and China, when Russia gave its blessing to China’s Belt and Road Initiative in 2015, it is China that is now able to call the shots over substantial parts of the world, far beyond that of Western Europe and the Anglo-American sphere of North America and the UK.9 In fact, it makes Zones of Contact seem rather utopian in its assuming some kind of equal interconnectedness and community of difference. These changes have been exacerbated by the growing recognition and urgency around climate change, an increase in ecological disasters as well as the persistent COVID-19 pandemic that has continued to spread and decimate countries, as well as the international acknowledgement of the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement in their own countries. Reimagined today, Zones of Contact would become an urgent recognition of such challenges now facing the world.

In 2013 the Chinese leader Xi Jinping unveiled what became known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).10 It covered more than sixty-eight countries, encompassing 4.4 billion people and an estimated forty percent of the global GDP in 2017. The “belt” included countries on the original Silk Road across Central Asia, West Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.11 The BRI would create a very different dynamic of interconnectedness in building a cohesive economic area with both a hard infrastructure, such as rail and road links, and soft infrastructure of trade agreements and a common commercial legal structure with a court system to police the agreements. It would expand trade and increase cultural exchanges, constructing a powerful vector in shaping the profile of contemporary international culture. Three belts were proposed. The Southern belt would run from China through South and Southeast Asia and on to the Indian Ocean through Pakistan. It also includes the South Pacific region, most especially Papua New Guinea. The Central belt would pass through Central Asia and West Asia to the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean. The Northern belt would go through Central Asia, Belarus and Russia to Europe. This Northern belt integrates Central Asia with China, featuring a US$9 billion domestic stimulus plan in Kazakhstan. Given the name Nurly Zhol (Bright Path) and announced in November 2014, the infrastructure program included the development and modernization of roads, railways, ports, IT infrastructure, education and civil services. Kazakhstan enthusiastically embraced its partnership with China, projecting itself as the ‘buckle’ in the BRI project.

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END OF SOVIET DOMINANCE: THE SILK ROAD REVISITED Until the end of the Soviet period in 1991, the borders between China and the Soviet Socialist Republics were unstable. After 1991 with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, China began to settle its border disputes with and promote support of Central Asia. This ultimately led to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), agreed upon by Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in 2002.

We may think of many artists who explored if not questioned and challenged the hegemonic presence and effects of the Soviet Union/Russia in Central Asia. These artists reveal what was embedded in their county’s cultural history and address the legacy and condition of the daily lives of people. One example is the Kyzyl (RED) Tractor group, one of whose founders was Said Atabekov (b. 1965, Bes Terek, Uzbekistan). Founded in the early 1990s, the group drew upon Sufi, Shamanic and nomadic traditions, seeking to revive local indigenous traditions with its indigenous material, as distinct from the imposing Soviet model.12 Or we may view the work of the Kazakh artist Almagul Menlibaeva (b. 1969, Almaty), for example her multi-channel video Kurchatov (2012), an unerring portrait of the devastating effects on the people who were born and lived near the Soviet nuclear tests, conducted from 1949 for more than forty years around Semipalatinsk in Northeast Kazakhstan. Alternatively, Kyrgyz artists Gulnara Kasmalieva (b. 1960, Bishkek) and Muratbek Djumaliev (b. 1965, Bishkek) capture a country in the moment of change with their five-channel video A New Silk Road: ‘Algorithm of Survival and Hope’ (2007).13 They, like many other citizens of their country, witnessed the transformation of their country from the rise of the export trade using ancient transportation routes, most importantly the Silk Road, and the migration of people beyond their country to live elsewhere.

This video by Kasmalieva and Djumaliev was filmed along the highways and in small villages connecting China through Kyrgyzstan to the Western markets—one of the routes that still forms the Silk Road. They show how residents of the Kyrgyz farms and small towns exhibit entrepreneurial ingenuity in finding ways to bond with and benefit from the truck drivers of different countries. Subtitled ‘Algorithm of Survival and Hope,’ the five videos track the passage of a caravan of dilapidated trucks carrying scrap metal to China in exchange for cheap products, such as clothing. The dilapidated Soviet trucks, continually breaking down as they haul the scrap metal, are shown in contrast to the caravans of shiny, behemoth Chinese eighteen-wheelers barrelling through the narrow passes, filled with cheaply manufactured goods destined for European markets.

Reflecting upon the relationship between overlapping histories, and both globalization and local identity, they capture the determination and resourcefulness that define these people in the mountainous, poverty-stricken regions of Central Asia.

The work of Kasmalieva and Djumaliev challenges the advent of a burgeoning economy that is based on the modernization of the Silk Road as the new hub of transnational exchange between China, Russia and the West. The Silk Road is seen as a symbol of the complex process of “migration, survival and transformation” that has taken place in the Kyrgyz Republic over the last one hundred years. Kyrgyz people were originally nomads but, in the last two decades, with their independence from the Soviet Union and transition to a free-market economy, their lives have been transformed.The Silk Road itself reflects this history. Statues of former communist leaders Mao and Stalin still remain by the side of the road, and a runway for military airplanes now exists as a parking

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Contact Zones: From Russia to China The Silk Road Revisited

lot for trucks, with formerly nomadic shepherds providing food and shelter. But watching the video we witness the politically and economically harsh realities of life in Kyrgyzstan, where traditional nomadic lifestyles undergo drastic changes, transformed under former Soviet Communist rule and today tossed by the winds of global capitalism. Indeed, the central message of The New Silk Road takes on a wider poignancy as the entire world begins to reel from an economic crisis that seems to know no boundaries.

China’s growing domestic energy demand and their expanding external markets for finished goods has become increasingly critical to the need for a greater presence in and trade agreements with Central Asian countries.14 China has also been keen to invest in and import fossil fuels (including oil and gas, uranium and other minerals) from Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.15 This was reason as to why China was eager to demarcate and control its border with Kazakhstan as well with Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Mongolia.16 Moreover, there was increasing unrest in Xinjiang that, lying in the northwest of China, shared its border with Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Russia, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is therefore unsurprising that Xinjian’s status of relative autonomy from China, like Tibet, ended after the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949.17 As we see now, more than seventy years later, this has led to a history of the systematic destruction of Uyghur culture and faith with full-scale detention, re-education camps and human rights abuse of rape, torture and genocide, as China swamps the region with its own people.18 In 2019, it was estimated that Chinese authorities had detained up to 1.5 million people in internment camps, mostly Uyghurs, as well as Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and other ethnic Turkic Muslims.

THE DEAD WEIGHT OF CHINA There are few Uyghur or other artists who have been able to respond directly to this situation. Many have gone into exile and reduced to silence. How does one write about an artist whose work would seem to respond, even indirectly, without placing them in jeopardy of reprisal? One may think of the artist Zhao Zhao who was born in Xinjiang, but no longer lives there.19 He moved to Beijing after graduating in 2003 from the Department of Oil Painting in his home city’s Xinjiang Institute of Art. At the Beijing Film Academy, Zhao Zhao began to study film direction but, in the following year, he met Ai Weiwei to become his assistant for the subsequent eleven years. Although of different generations, they had much to share. Weiwei had spent sixteen years from 1961, living in exile in Shihezi, Xinjiang. Ai gave him an assignment to video document with one-minute frames at measured intervals of every fifty metres of the forty-five kilometre road that divides the city along its east-west axis with Tiananmen Square. It became a conceptual video work of Ai, titled Chang’an Boulevard from 2004.

By 2010, Zhao Zhao had begun to actively participate in exhibitions and in the following year held an exhibition of new work at Chambers Fine Art in Beijing. The exhibition included the installation Officer (2011), a limestone statue of a Chinese police officer, more than eight metres tall, whose badge number corresponds to the date of Ai Weiwei’s arrest by the Chinese police. The statue was displayed toppled over, lying in pieces on the floor. By 2012, Zhao Zhao had begun Again which he exhibited the following year. It was a cube of stone blocks cut from desecrated Buddha sculptures. He had bought the blocks from a local market after the statues had been semi-destroyed by looters, with their heads, hands and feet cut off and the remaining parts sold. Zhao Zhao reconstituted these fragmentary pieces as a block and a new work of art. It became the embodiment of a history of the destruction of the original sacred objects and a disappearing China.

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During these years Zhao Zhao returned on occasion to his home region of Xinjiang. These trips inspired him to a produce a number of works, including a video Project Taklamakan, initiated in 2007 and continued up until 2017, when the artist brought a camel and its keeper from the far western region of Xinjiang to Tang Contemporary Art Gallery in Beijing. The exhibition, Desert Camel, was a coda to his major work Project Taklamakan (2015–16) that involved himself and a team of thirty people travelling 4,000 kilometers from Beijing to the northern part of the Xinjiang’s Taklamakan Desert. They carried with them a hundred-kilometre long cable and a double-doored refrigerator. In order to pass strict inspection systems at the border of this remote region, Zhao Zhao impersonated a contractor and an advertising director during these government inspections.

After arriving in Northern city of Tailun, Zhao Zhao and his team then connected the electricity to a household in the Uyghur community, trailing the cable out toward the centre of the desert.

This journey took twenty-three days and used ten transformers, in order to prevent any loss in power transmission. At the end of it, the cable successfully powered the refrigerator full of Xinjiang beer for twenty-four hours in the desert. Through interacting with the Uyghur family, sourcing funding for the project and passing the strict government inspections as part of the project, Zhao Zhao found multiple ways to actively participate and intervene in society.

If Zones of Contact were to be held in 2022, it would need to recognize such shifts in the geo-political dynamics shaping the character of cultural exchange. As I have suggested, while the presence of China in Central Asia and Xinjiang should be differentiated, they should be also seen broadly together. Then, local cultures with their beliefs and traditions can be accepted, irrespective of the current changes taking place across Central Asia and in the larger schemes of things that are driving Russian and now Chinese imperatives. It is clear the fragility with which the recognition of this difference is sustained. Moreover, it should remind us of the region’s proximity to Australia.

For while Australia may seem to have an awkward cultural affinity or alliance with Southeast Asia and the South Pacific region, the geopolitical relations with China are simply too strong to deny.

It will be up to Australia to find an accord that allows for political differences while maintaining economic agreements of trade and exchange.

The concept of internationalism was once a structure that defined the Biennale, a term that seemed innocuous and unbiased. It promised dialogue and exchange and, as much, a recognition of commonality and connectivity between distant communities. But this overwhelming rubric of internationalism, in fact, diminished any relative autonomy of the local and regional that might counter, hold in check or relativize the international.

I return to the original question of how a Biennale of Sydney in 2022 would be different from Zones of Contact in 2006. It would be, in short, to construct the international through the local and regional. This will give substance to the international, informed by the changes and issues confronting the local and regional. Connectivity then begins with what one brings from the local and from the horizontality of regional encounters, connections and exchanges. If one wishes to enhance and keep the spirit of internationalism alive, we need recognize a point of view, a locality from where one stands, engages and make choices.

Notes 1 Charles Merewether, ‘Taking Place: Acts of Survival for a Time to Come’, Biennale of Sydney: Zones of Contact (exhibition catalogue), Biennale of Sydney, 2006, p. 45.

2

See Anthony Bond, ‘Notes on the Catalogue and Exhibition’, The Boundary Rider, 9th Biennale of Sydney, Biennale of Sydney, 1992, pp. 14–19

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Contact Zones: From Russia to China The Silk Road Revisited

3

Similarly, exhibitions like Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern at the Museum of Modern Art (1984–85) and Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Grande Halle de la Villette (1989) played a crucial role for many in broadening the map of cultural and artistic exchange. This was the subject of James Clifford’s analysis with The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1988 4 Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October 110, 2004, pp. 51–79. In mid-2004, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia all joined the European Union 5

An earlier version of this discussion was published in ‘The Jameel Prize: a shift of alternate worlds’, Contemporary Practices, vol. 5, 2009, pp. 82–91; http://www.contemporarypractices.net/essays/volume5/reviews 6 The Jameel Prize offered the winner £25,000. There were over one hundred nominations in the first year of the prize, and nine were eventually shortlisted and exhibited 7 This is also true of the Sharjah Biennial alongside that of certain commercial art galleries in the Middle East and the Gulf region, as well as magazines such as Bidoun 8 Now, more than one million Uyghurs live outside China, mostly in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkey, with much smaller numbers in the United States and Europe. The Uyghurs had started to become Islamized by the sixteenth century 9

The 2015 agreement linked the Silk Road Economic Belt, the continental component of the BRI, with the Eurasian Economic Union, the Russian-led regional integration project of which Belarus is also a member 10 An excellent account of China and the BRI is to be found in Peter Frankopan, The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018 11

Besides this, there has also been the development of the maritime Silk Road, that includes Vietnam, Indonesia and Pakistan

12

See Chapter 9 of my book, In the Sphere of the Soviets, Essays on the Cultural Legacy of the Soviet Union, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021 13 Ibid. The following section on Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev is drawn from research for this book. Their work was commissioned by the Art Institute of Chicago and also shown at Winkleman Gallery in New York, 13 November, 2008–10 January, 2009 14

China’s daily consumption of oil rose from 4.2 million barrels in 1998 to 13.5 million barrels in 2018

15

With oil reserves estimated at 40 billion barrels and natural gas reserves in excess of 500 trillion cubic feet (with Turkmenistan accounting for 350 trillion cubic feet), the Central Asian Republics helped China reduce its dependence on West Asia for its energy needs. Beijing funded the construction of a pipeline system across Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan that helped supply China’s energy needs. Central Asia is also richly endowed with uranium deposits with Kazakhstan holding the world’s second largest reserves, after Australia. In recent years Kazakhstan has emerged as the largest producer of uranium, while Uzbekistan has significant deposits 16 East Turkistan, christened by the Chinese as Xinjiang (New Territory) was annexed with the help of the Soviet Union in 1949 when the People’s Republic of China was established. Up until then it had been an autonomous region 17 In 2015, the young Chinese artist Zhao Yao first exhibited his ongoing project The Spirit Above All That Celebrated Tibet. Spanning 10,000 square metres and assembled from coloured cloth, more than 100 villagers carried and unfolded it, out in the sun on a snowy mountainside in Nangqian, Qinghai province on the Tibetan plateau. It was installed for six months alongside existing Buddhist sutra streamers, a white pagoda and murals. It was later shipped back to Beijing, where it was ceremonially installed on the field in Beijing’s Workers’ Stadium from sunrise to sunset on 18th May, 2018. This was followed by a later version of the work Something in the Air (2019), an inflatable model of the Marnyi stone, a stone engraved by a local artisan with the mantra or the Buddha in general. “Marnyi” is the abbreviation of “ommani padme hum”, the six-syllabled Sanskrit mantra 18 Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman endorsed China’s “anti-terrorism and de-extremization work for its national security.”

See Frankopan, The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World, p. 213 19

The following remarks on Zhao Zhao owe much to the curatorial exhibitions and published essays of Cui Cancan and my own research for an exhibition of his work, Repetition as Art: Zhao Zhao takes Action, Hong Kong: Osage Foundation, 2018

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The First Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, 1993 This paper is somewhat a case of looking out from the inside, and vice versa. The circumstances of how and why the first Asia Pacific Triennial (APT) were conceived, developed and happened will be a professional and personal version. The critical reaction to it and the Triennials which followed are well covered and are on the public record. Most historical accounts of the APT are accurate.

There have been some strange observations which are simply incorrect. Critical reaction was varied, usually generous, and embracing a variety of perspectives depending on peoples’ cultural circumstances and intellectual perspectives. I’m mindful that many who visited the later Triennials were young, perhaps not born at the time of the first in 1993.

It is an account that is not simply about a cultural project: that is, an idea and its realization. It is not possible to consider the APT without understanding the historical and unique circumstances of the gallery which created it. It is not a mirror of any other history you might find with the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales or the Art Gallery of South Australia. The Queensland Art Gallery—no Gallery of Modern Art at the time—didn’t secure a permanent home until 1982 in the new Robin Gibson designed Queensland Cultural Centre. The Gallery was established in 1895 and spent much of the twentieth century as a cultural squatter, which included being a tenant in the Mount Isa Mines Building in central Brisbane.

It is a story interwoven with politics and rejuvenation. It is important to discuss this because nothing like it happened elsewhere. And it is not vainglory, but a decidedly embarrassing description of a peculiar and localized history, where nothing sat mutually exclusive from anything else. I have chosen to not presuppose too much detailed pre-existing knowledge. Some of what I offer is fresh and untold. And as an aside, APT1 in 1993 was undertaken in a pre-digital age. Typing on paper recorded things and rolls of film created the visual record. In a few places in Asia, faxes were received at supporting community and business places which had little to do with the arts.

It is important to know something of the Queensland Art Gallery at the time and the broader cultural, political and geo-political circumstances to give a clear picture of why the APT seemed like a good idea at the time. But one thing needs to be made clear at the outset: the APT was a concept born out of the Gallery’s own situation. Various interests supported it, after they were inducted into what we wanted to do. It was not an inspired program of state cultural diplomacy, even though politicians on all sides were happy to promote it as such.

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The artwork detail A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/someone looks at something… Qld: 1979 PUPPET CULTURE FRAMING SYSTEM (1979) is by one of Australia’s finest and consistent artists from the 1970s, Peter Tyndall. I think it is more immediately understood than some of his work when it is placed in its particular context. It was painted in 1979 and has an intriguing provenance.

What eventually happened to the painting itself is, paradoxically, contained within what the painting represents. It speaks of something, yet anticipates something else. In 1977, Peter Tyndall won the Gallery’s L. J. Harvey Drawing Prize and in 1979 he was invited to enter The Trustees Prize of that year. This work was submitted and rejected. Tyndall sent a letter of protest about the decision to the director alleging political intimidation. He received a letter in return saying there was insufficient space for all the works. Surely an overreaction—perhaps a case of reciprocal paranoia? Not quite.

It dates to the peak of a decade when street marches were banned and where protesters were arrested or belted, or both.

Much of Queensland’s political behaviour was decidedly idiosyncratic. There are a few cameo moments that ought to be recalled. While they might appear somewhat satirical, they nonetheless serve as emblematic vignettes of much broader conduct and encapsulate fuller accounts of thinking and attitudes, and subsequent changes. They will also reveal that those with a view of politics as a game of winner takes all, and that includes making the public service—especially the police—inseparable from sectarian political ambition. Since the late 1950s in Queensland, electoral gerrymanders were entrenched.1 The arts were not remote from ideological politics.

I had never been to Brisbane until I went for an interview in the second half of 1986.

This was the time when Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s National Party remained in conflict with their coalition Liberals. The Nationals and Liberals despised each other and certainly more than their instinctive nemesis, the Labor Party. Distracted from governing became the norm.

In late 1986 I had to fly to Brisbane and meet Brian Austin who was Minister for Mines, Energy and the Arts. He was required to take the recommendation of my appointment to cabinet. I wasn’t allowed to be seen in Brisbane. I was picked up at the airport and put in a hotel. I was collected the following morning and taken to the Minister’s office a few blocks away. He burst into the room, shook my hand, apologized for being late and, distracted, said he had a cabinet meeting in an hour, adding, “I’ve got condoms on the brain.” Fortunately, I’d read the local paper. Many in cabinet were determined to roll the premier and allow condom vending machines to be installed at the University of Queensland. The premier lost. That was unheard of. It signalled that his usually capitulating cabinet had reached the end of its collective tether. I saw the minister for ten minutes and went to the airport.

In 1987 I arrived in Brisbane within a week or so after April Fool’s Day. I had various briefings piled on my desk. Among them was a note concerning a visit a recent minister had made to the Gallery in 1986. Peter McKechnie was a lay preacher and farmer. He arrived at the Gallery with his political advisor and paced the length of the Gallery’s walls, and notes were taken. He quickly formed a view of the lineal hanging space that was given to art that was unacceptable—mainly contemporary art. Seemingly the die had been long-cast, that the political winner takes all—albeit with 26% of the vote—knew no bounds.

On New Year’s Day 1987, Premier Bjelke-Petersen announced he was going to Canberra, that he would be prime minister. Amongst a mishmash of policy gibberish was a 25% flat tax and the withdrawal of Aboriginal Land Rights. The campaign morphed from “Joh for PM” to “Joh for Canberra.” On 11 May 1987, ABC TV screened the Four Corners program, ‘The Moonlight State.’ l

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The First Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, 1993

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The First Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, 1993

The premier was in the United States. Within a day or so Acting Premier, Bill Gunn ordered a commission of inquiry. Bjelke-Petersen was in Disneyland at the time it was announced. Ian Callinan QC, drafted the terms of reference. Callinan was also a Trustee of the Gallery. On 27 May, the premier was still in the US when Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke called a double dissolution of parliament. That sank Bjelke-Petersen’s delusional aspiration. He didn’t have a seat to stand in.

The subsequent Fitzgerald Inquiry (into police corruption) would be set in place. It seems unnecessary to restate the chronology of what happened. Suffice to say, the premier behaved more erratically and had no control over something the government had commissioned. The second half of 1987 was a mad house. He tried to sack a group of ministers, and the Governor of Queensland wouldn’t agree. On 27 November the parliamentary party shafted Bjelke-Petersen 39-9 and for days afterwards he still claimed he was premier. Mike Ahern was now premier and Minister for the Arts.

There was a sense of relief and it permeated throughout government and the public service. There had been a palpable sense of being watched by ideological eyes. And in many cases that was true.

My curator of Australian Art had once been taken out for a drink by members of the Special Branch.

It was to check on his ideological soundness.

None of the mayhem bothered me. I was left unencumbered by any political imperative and given a long leash to implement change and rethink the Gallery. But some things were tricky —prospective Gallery sponsors were cautious. While wanting to support the Gallery, they were uncertain about such support being seen as offering a default approval of government. Like everyone else, they wanted an election. Former minister Austin was later to be jailed as a result of charges laid in the wake of the Fitzgerald Inquiry. I provided testimony which was somewhat unhelpful in explaining some of the twenty-five counts of misappropriating public funds. He went to jail for fifteen months.

World Expo 88 preoccupied Brisbane for half the year. The Queensland Cultural Centre, which included the Gallery, was next to it. Many will be familiar with its architecture. It’s one of Australia’s finest works of concrete minimalism built by Australia’s most reactionary government.

The Queensland Art Gallery building is important for its considerations of how a contemporary art museum might function. It was certainly the first in Australia to recognize that the phenomenon of ‘the blockbuster’ and that intense exhibition programming wasn’t going away. It was a fabulous building to work with—its logic and clarity of expression is pristine. Its large temporary exhibition space was in the centre of the building and built for purpose.

The blockbuster exhibition was well and truly ensconced as part of civic self-esteem —from the Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851 and all those international exhibitions which followed.

The phenomenon of the blockbuster as being critical to art museum conduct has raged for the past forty years. Exhibition programming has influenced changes in art museum architecture more than most other aspects of their conduct. The huge rise globally of biennials and triennials is something of an echo of the colonial idea of acting locally and embracing the world. When the Gallery opened in 1982 it was said to be Brisbane’s coming of age. In fact, most things that happened in Brisbane were a coming of age. What does this mean? What does it say about civic selfdoubt, or parochial self-importance? The Commonwealth Games in 1982, a new airport in 1988, Expo and, more recently, a Ferris wheel—a heritage modernist experience from 1893, Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition—are markers of coming of age. Very odd. Until 1982 the Gallery never had a permanent home. I had the opportunity to rethink almost everything about what its future might be.

And staff were exuberant with the opportunity.

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Australian state galleries are creations of the nineteenth century, and Queensland’s is one of the youngest. It collected in the traditional areas of Australian, British and European art, but it could never compare itself with the expansive, sometimes encyclopaedic character of its sister institutions, especially the AGNSW and the NGV. There were subtle and interesting distinctions to the Queensland Art Gallery’s collections. Nonetheless, the Australian collection was of lesser interest to the collections in the country towns of Ballarat, Bendigo and Geelong.

Government and private support were comparatively strong. But if the Gallery wanted to play catch-up and try to become a mirror of its sister institutions, it would diminish its reputation.

Major artists were represented with minor works, and quite a few like Eugene von Guerard2 were not represented at all. There were no epic Heidelberg School narrative works.3 If there were to be an historical regional emphasis, what might it look like? I posed the question, “Name the ten finest nineteenth century Queensland painters.” I couldn’t find anyone who could name ten, let alone the finest. Lesser known artists were collected because a state gallery must also be local. And acquiring contemporary Aboriginal art happened relatively late in time. Any prospect of becoming a timid version of other state galleries made no sense. Masterpieces were rare. We couldn’t collect in depth and tell a coherent story, and we would pay exorbitant sums to collect lesser works by major artists.

The best-known aspects of the Gallery’s Asian collections were Edo ukiyo-e woodblock prints, a collection of netsuke and objects from various places but without a coherent thread, the familiar museum predicament of occasional purchases and private bequests. But it continued to put together a very fine vignette of Asian collections. These included extending the ukiyo-e print collection and purchasing masterpieces from the Six Old Kilns of Japan—Shigaraki, Tamba, Echizen, Seto, Bizen and Tokoname. These connected nicely with a good collection of Australian pottery from the 1950s and 1960s. In other words, the Gallery began to collect disparately but more tightly focused than it had in the past. Contemporary Asia would soon follow.

Queensland developed Sister State, or Prefecture relationships: Shanghai, and Saitama, an hour from Tokyo, were two important ones. Institutions tend to balk at the obligations expected with such arrangements. But they can work and work well. In late 1987 the Gallery co-curated a large exhibition of contemporary Australian art which was presented at the Museum of Modern Art, Saitama. In return, the Gallery presented Japanese Ways, Western Means. Art of the 80s in Japan in 1989 and purchased work from it for the permanent collection. Today it’s an exhibition title which makes little sense, and that was probably the case then. An important exhibition of historical work was drawn from the Shanghai Museum. In return, a hugely well-received exhibition of contemporary Australian jewellery was presented in Shanghai. There was no logical historical connection the Gallery had with the arts of Asia. The idea of the Asia Pacific Triennial was a construct: just that, an idea. I’d become consumed with the observation that as the twentieth century marched on, Western museums collected less and less Asian art of its time.

In December 1989 the inevitable happened: a Wayne Goss government was elected. He took on the arts portfolio too. Many people think that marked the triumph of good over evil—well, that’s largely true. The premier’s Chief of Staff, Kevin Rudd,4 sent Bjelke-Petersen acolytes to what was colloquially known as the Spring Hill Gulag. Two thirds of public servant heads were isolated.

After the demise of what (ex-PM) Gough Whitlam5 called the “Ancien Régime,” a sense of new possibilities took hold. The APT, a major project, and the idea that something emerging from a small base and might fail, is not a common part of current museum nomenclature. Premier Goss’ reaction was telling. He told me he took on the arts because political and administrative reform was certain. l

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He wanted Queenslanders to think differently about themselves, and “that’s where the arts come in.”

I worked closely with Goss—and later, post-politics, when he became my chairman. When I went to see him as premier in 1990 to ask for additional money for the first Asia Pacific Triennial, he thought it was a risk, but an acceptable risk, and gave me the ex gratia grant of $600,000 I asked for.

The concept of regional cultural diplomacy wasn’t lost on him either.

What marked the Asia Pacific Triennial as different from the proliferation of other biennials and triennials over the past three decades is that it is institutionally based, becoming inseparable from the conduct of a well-established art museum. It was not conceived as a project of gratuitous cultural-dollar-grandeur (as some blockbusters have been, and I can plead guilty to that), nor as an effort at soft diplomacy. In fact, we weren’t sure what we were in for, and we announced we’d do three and if they failed, we’d end them.

In Australian collections, Asian art was largely art history—the more Asia changed and became interested in ideas beyond their traditional cultures, there was a corresponding decreasing interest in what Asian artists produced, and they weren’t collected. Internationalism was seemingly the prerogative of the West. To deal with geo-cultural specifics a national consultative committee was established. It offered informed project guidance with no role as curatorial selectors. It included Gallery staff, a regional gallery director, David Williams, an art school head, Asialink’s Alison Carroll, Neil Manton from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and other occasional participants.

One of its earlier meetings was in Kuala Lumpur. Thailand’s renowned curator, Apinan Poshyananda, attended along with our Malaysian colleagues. There was no uniform or rigid organizational model, it had to be flexible. Developing relationships and, eventually, pulling together the logistical arrangements was never going to be the same in Vietnam as it is in Korea.

Equally, it is important to observe that certain Western typecast ideas of what contemporary art might look like in Asia was going to mute expectations. Vietnam easily accommodated the high modernism of the School of Paris with culturally specific folk and colloquial figuration. Unlike the Venice Biennale, countries were not represented by artists. The APT represented the work of artists who lived in particular countries. Some post-Tiananmen Chinese artists didn’t live in China.

The assistance and support of various government agencies was welcomed, but none had a role in selection. This was not always an easy undertaking. Well-established protocols of curatorial conduct expanded into a new model. Some staff across disciplines—all with art historical backgrounds —would perform curatorial roles, each with important curatorial contacts in particular countries.

Some were informal, others were connected with institutions. It was relationship-based where local voices were heard, local cultural politics somewhat understood and where the APT didn’t brazenly invoke its Western dominated imprimatur. The Pacific required a different approach. Despite our wish to make everything happen in person, the vastness of geography and logistics meant that for the first APT, extensive curatorial travel and visits at the time were not possible. That would later change. But for 1993 our relationship with the Pacific was mediated through New Zealand and their well-established networks and deep understanding of cultural contexts. Queensland itself had a close-knit Pacific community.

The APT was speculative and not risk averse. We sought to engage people directly and had a substantial budget for curatorial travel to each of the participating countries so that unofficial and interdependent connections could be established. Above all we wanted to connect the ideas and the institution to people in a collegial sense. That was why we had a large budget for bringing artists, writers, curators and others to Brisbane, and took the risk of being a venue for ambitious projects 36 | 37

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that artists wanted to undertake but had never had the opportunity to realize. It was also important to bring—at the Gallery’s expense—as many artists as possible to Brisbane.

Its legacy endures within an art museum context, not as an event which lingers in one’s memory or through ephemera and publications which underpin a particular cultural moment.

The APT had a few early doubters who later became its strongest advocates, the records reveal wavering to eventual vigorous devotees. The purchases made from APT1 helped consolidate the dovetailing of a major project and the manner in which the Gallery would operate. It developed a distinctive cultural mindset which spread across every department. Works across all media were acquired by artists from every country. Trustees never rejected a curatorial proposal. It was a case of trustees and professional staff in cultural and institutional alignment. Dadang Christanto’s For those who have been killed (1993) was an installation which included a performance component.

The Gallery acquired it. It was also a participatory work for the public: private notes were made, left under a suspended bamboo arrangement and collected daily.

The APT came to represent the Gallery, not only as an event but also as an enduring commitment to our region. It also reveals that many professional and museological practices altered because of the APT. Changes happened from within and not always observing and taking the exemplar of others. APT2 expanded to fifteen curatorial teams and further extended artistic, intellectual and intuitional networks. While I’m keen to embrace curatorial unilateralism as a virtue, it is not possible to think about the APT being developed and respected without the intense collaboration of so much disparateness.

At the time the APT was viewed as an unclear venture as the Gallery sought to identify a unique international role without aping the activity of other state or national institutions.

Governments of all persuasions embraced it and used it intelligently as a marker of cultural diplomacy of what the State of Queensland might represent. The scale of the APT was ambitious, but it didn’t emerge from a vacuum. Australians, such as author and then cultural counsellor, Nicholas Jose, and art historian, Claire Roberts, were in Beijing in the late 1970s and 1980s, and were deeply engaged with the contemporary art scene. Their intellectual and practical advocacy for artists was hugely important. Roberts curated the important exhibition, New Art from China: Post-Mao Pop, which toured various Australian venues in 1992–93.

At an early stage the word spread about the APT’s aspirations. I remember being in Tokyo in late 1989, four years before the first APT, and being told that a few Tiananmen self-exiled Chinese artists were in Tokyo and wanted to meet me. The Gallery’s intentions were already being talked about. I was tracked down by Gu Wenda, Cai Guo Qiang, and others. In a sense, that’s a marker of the Triennial’s conduct. There was no convenient pre-existing network, and the informality of relationships that developed set a pattern of how things would be done. What emerged from this was a distinctive ‘personality’ which the Gallery enjoyed, especially the ease with which it undertook projects which were speculative. In later Triennials it was prepared to look retrospectively, to think about artists—Lee Ufan is an excellent example—who were well regarded but had remained distant from serious accounts of late twentieth century non-Asian art and deserved to be part of a fuller international story.

It’s self-evident to note that the contemporary Asian art market took off and overheated.

In the space of a decade the Gallery was in the hypothetical position of being unable to go out and buy the collection it already owned. In some cases the Queensland Art Gallery was the first major Western museum to exhibit or collect substantial work by artists such as Cai Guo Qiang, Xu Bing, l

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Montien Boonma, Takashi Murakami, Lee Bul and Zhang Xiaogang. Artists were helpful in accommodating a public gallery’s limited acquisitions budget. Yayoi Kusama is well represented including a major room installation, Soul Under the Moon (2002). Ai Weiwei was first collected before his near-cult celebrity status took hold. And now QAGOMA’s research library is vast.

The APT was the product of a cultural policy imperative, an institutional realignment, and how the Gallery sought to avoid becoming a pale reflection of other Australian curatorial conduct.

It never tried to match what other collections had brilliantly achieved, where it had no chance of emulating. Perhaps the most unanticipated characteristic of the APT is its broader public reception.

A couple of decades earlier most people would have accepted the one-liner that the public doesn’t respond to contemporary art. But what’s fascinating is that new art, made by artists the broader public had never heard of, from cultures they often know little about, aroused considerable curiosity.

In 1996, Nicholas Serota, Director of the Tate Gallery, gave a lecture titled, ‘Experience or Interpretation. The Dilemma of Museums of Modern Art’. He spoke of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, which opened in 1977, that sought to establish a new model for the interaction of creative disciplines in the twentieth century—an open museum, a place where there is a natural contact between artists and the public in developing the most contemporary elements of creativity. He closed his essay with this final paragraph: “Our aim must be to generate a condition in which visitors can experience a sense of discovery in looking at particular paintings, sculptures or installations in a particular room at a particular moment, rather than finding themselves standing on the conveyor belt of history.”

The first APT opened with close to two hundred works by seventy-six artists from Southeast Asia, East Asia and the South Pacific. And it grew exponentially from a beginning which drew interest not only locally and from the region, but also North America and Europe. Whatever expectations people might have had about historical Asian continuity were, on occasions, ruptured.

Korea’s Lee Bul’s performance made an amusing and poignant point about cultural and gender constructs. The opening crowd knew nothing about the planned and unannounced performance.

It was an ongoing sequence of clothes-swapping involving audience participation. At the end of the performance the artist was wearing none of her own clothes. Many in the audience had to find and negotiate the exchange of their own.

To invoke a cliché, the excitement and energy levels surrounding APT1 were high and people were keen to be there from the start. The official opening was held outside the gallery—in the underpass—the road was closed off. The APTs have always included Australia. And this poses the question why so few Asian-Australians were included. It was a deliberate curatorial decision not to make the exhibition about ourselves. They were other exhibitions, and a separate collecting activity.

The focus was to be elsewhere—Australia as one amongst equals.

POSTSCRIPT The Gallery had begun to buy contemporary Asian art, mainly Japanese, before the first APT. It was always planned that each APT—and the activity in between—would provide the opportunity to acquire work for the collection. As we know, the APT didn’t cease after its third iteration. It became central to the Gallery’s role and reputation. It was a cornerstone of advocacy for the case for a Gallery of Modern Art and this enjoyed bipartisan political support. It was an idea which took a long time to realize—about sixteen years from first thoughts to official opening. When Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party won eleven seats in the state election of 1998, Labor ruled with the support of an independent. One Nation’s support base was largely regional. Premier Beattie told me that he l

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couldn’t announce a Gallery of Modern Art—so much money going into South Brisbane. He said it wouldn’t last, to quietly get on with things and say nothing, that after the next election he’d come to the Gallery and announce GOMA. He did. After the next election One Nation had three members and a couple of weeks later Beattie came to the Gallery and announced GOMA was going to happen.

The media offered nothing but straightforward reporting and support. APTs aroused curiosity locally for an exhibition where, for the general public, artists were unknown, cultures not fully understood and where the more you knew the greater the experience. The collection developed, Asian programming between APTs increased and interests ranging from government, academia, museums and business were consolidated. Its success attracted international interest. In 2002, I was asked to speak at the Association of American Art Museum Directors Conference in Honolulu, where the questions were posed, how did the APT happen, how did it become the cultural marker of the Queensland Art Gallery’s international profile? I recall the comment of one museum director whose Asian collections were regarded as one of the finest in America. It was more a lament than comment: “We have 4,000 years of Asian art history and nothing after 1930.” The example of the APT was to help in changing that.

The idea that the West changes, effortlessly internationalizes and that Asian cultures must be true to their heritage and fodder for the West has collapsed in the past three decades. A particular art historical imperialism has vanished. One thing which pleased me most when I left the Gallery of Modern Art twenty years to the day after I had arrived was my farewell gift. But it wasn’t for me.

Anish Kapoor was commissioned for a work in recognition of the Gallery’s commitment to the region and my role in it. He made a huge work, and it was pretty much done and delivered at cost. If there’s a marker for the first APT and those that followed it is reciprocated generosity. The APTs were never exercises in doctrinaire ambition but careful and considered projects in profiling what is important and unfamiliar. As Premier Wayne Goss said, it makes us think differently about ourselves.

This is an edited transcript of ‘Defining Moments: The First Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, 1993 with Doug Hall’, part of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art’s Lecture Series, ‘Defining Moments: Australian Exhibition Histories 1968–1999’, that takes a deeper look at the moments that have shaped Australian art since 1968, addressing key contemporary art exhibitions staged over the last three decades of the twentieth century and reflecting on the ways these exhibitions shaped art history and contemporary Australian culture more broadly.

For further information on this series, see https://acca.melbourne/program/defining-momentsfirst-asia-pacific-triennial-of-contemporary-art/.

Note 1 Gerrymander, to manipulate the boundaries of an electoral constituency so as to favour one party or class 2 Eugene von Guerard, an Austrian-born artist active in Australia from 1852 to 1882, known for his finely detailed landscapes in the tradition of the Dusseldorf school of painting 3

The Heidelberg School was an Australian art movement in the late nineteenth century, latterly described as Australian Impressionism

4

Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister of Australia, 2007–10 and 2013

5

Gough Whitlam, Prime Minister of Australia, 1972–75

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Imagination Across the Sea: Looking into the History of Connectivity of the Middle East and Southeast Asia

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Looking back at how the history of postcolonialism and decolonization unfolded across Southeast Asia after the end of the Second World War, we can see that the once dominant imperialism of Great Britain, the United States, The Netherlands, France and other European nations collapsed in the political tensions of the Cold War, where the US and the Soviet Union (and their respective allies) fought for dominance, while individual countries (some not existing as nation-states preWorld War Two: for example, Indonesia) jostled for their independence.

Given this, the way that the Southeast Asia region might be related to other regions in regard to differing cultural contexts but with similar complexities, is through a consideration of the development of their nation-state identities. A great deal of post-independence literature regarding the connectivity of Southeast Asia with other regions (especially in Indonesia, as history text books: e.g., sourcing the journals of Marco Polo), referred to those early periods of mobility in the ninth and tenth centuries—including Arab merchants who were then living in Malacca, Sumatra and Java, as noted by historical author Jadul Maula—bringing about cultural exchange through extensive networks of trade and migration. Jadul noted that cultural contact through trade is evidenced in the existence of Arabic words absorbed into the old Javanese language dating from the Kingdom of Kediri in the twelfth century. And in later periods, not only language but various cultural expressions enriched and reshaped the local cultural conditions of the Malay-Indonesian archipelago.1 In over four hundred years of European colonialism and the resulting complexities of that history, the relationship between Southeast Asian and Arab countries has greatly shifted, most significantly, political and diplomatic issues following post-World War II independence, both in Asia and Africa. Southeast Asian postcolonialism/decolonization became an important focus for competing powers during the Cold War, particularly as the newly independent countries began to see the importance of a neutral and independent geopolitical concept. A turning point in the relations between these newly created countries in Asia, Africa and the Arab region was the AsianAfrican Conference (Konferensi Asia-Africa) in Bandung, Indonesia, that took place in April 1955.

The conference was initiated by Sukarno, First President of Indonesia, Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India, and other Asian leaders, its aim to oppose colonialism and neo-colonialism, promote Afro-Asian cultural and economic co-operation, which included declarations of greater solidarity for artists, intellectuals and activists in the Global South.

This essay aims to establish referential points in the relationship between the contemporary art sectors in Southeast Asia and Arab countries, in particular the Sharjah Biennial that has delivered significant contributions to reconnect and rewrite the history of scattered, shared experiences of cultural movements from both regions, the first instance being the collaboration of the Sharjah Biennial and Biennale Jogja Equator series in 2013, and the second being the presence of a large number of Southeast Asian artists in the 2019 Sharjah Biennial: Leaving The Echo Chamber.

It needs to be highlighted that the terminology of “Arab region” refers to the political outlook of the Biennale Jogja Foundation given the discrepancies of ideological construction within current geopolitics. In the context of international social discourse, Indonesian politics tends to use the term “Middle East” to refer to such countries as Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran and others. But on the world map the location of these countries is seen not to be east of Indonesia, but rather the opposite. This terminology is a political construction more relevant to the context of the US, if not the West in general, without considering any critical understanding of it in the Southeast Asian region. As a result, the Biennale Jogja Foundation proposed, from its own context, to confront this Western influence in the way various regions are viewed and classified.

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BIENNALE JOGJA AND SHARJAH BIENNIAL The Biennale Jogja Equator Series (BJE) is an initiative undertaken by artists and arts professionals from Yogyakarta, to investigate geopolitical frameworks and power relations in the equatorial regions, eg. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Yemen, India, Nigeria and so on. This critical dialogue not only relates to the postcolonial dominance of the political and economic systems of participating countries as can be seen by such global divisions as G-7, G-20 etc., but in addition, the indifference of such established global orientations towards these equatorial countries’ systems of knowledge production and art practices. The BJE seeks to provide alternative perspectives on the international art stage which so far have mainly been focused on the concepts of centre and edge, North and South, developed and developing, and other binary applications. By drawing on the equator as a concept for solidarity and being largely inspired by the 1955 Asian-African Conference, the BJE attempts to expand its partnerships through cultural diplomacy with equatorial countries in order to ensure its broader international scope.

The major influences in early postcolonial Southeast Asia, especially in Indonesia, involved India and countries from the Arab region. The relationships between Indonesia and these countries can be easily traced back to the long history of the spread of religion and cultural assimilation through ocean and land-based trade routes. In the context of art, Arab culture fused into various kinds of music, performing arts, calligraphy, architecture, etc.

The significant change in Indonesia’s political orientation from the 1960s to the early 1970s markedly altered the international political landscape. Stronger relations with the United States served as the main foundation of Indonesia’s international political platform during President Suharto’s New Order regime, which was followed by the establishment of relations with cultural organizations with countries such as France, Great Britain, The Netherlands and Germany.

The participating countries of the Bandung Conference and the Non-Aligned Movement2 were no longer the Indonesian government’s main focus. As such, politically and culturally, this brought about a discontinuity of those decolonization solidarity initiatives. With the post-WWII onset of rapid global economic growth and connectivity, through what Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan called the “global village”3 that produced a world-wide uniformity in popular culture, mass media reach and the incorporation of Western education systems, Indonesia’s collective knowledge, of its long history of regional associations, as well as the bonds established between these nation-states was set aside, if not forgotten.

While it is often stated that Indonesia has the largest Muslim population of all countries in the world, the crucial political shift after the Cold War significantly reduced, apart from economic links, connectivity between Indonesia and Arab countries. After the 1960s, the latter, especially Saudi Arabia, became closely aligned to the US, through trade (oil) and political relationships. Yogyakarta scholar Al Makin, writes in ‘Patching Up the Cracks: Nusantara and the Arab World’ that the US’ political preservation of the Saudis had been long underway, even contributing to regional wars during 1980s and 1990s (Iraq–Iran; Iraq–Kuwait), while Indonesia was too burdened by Islamic historiography and theology, the Arab region being the source of its religious knowledge structure, to take notice.4 Al Makin argued that many Indonesian religious groups see the Arab as defender of Islam and in opposition, the West as Islam’s enemy. But this binary is neither simple nor straightforward; the two positionings do not completely demarcate the entire perspective. With such limitations, of the long history of relationships being taught in Indonesia’s educational system, it is not surprising that there are such simplifications and stereotypes within both Indonesian and Arab communities. l

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The BJE’s engagement with the Arab region has provided opportunities to develop and expand partnerships and contemporary art practices relevant to the discourses of related periods in shared histories. With the burgeoning momentum of Reformasi after the fall of Suharto in 1998, Muslim communities gained a stronger position in the political arena, leading to their growing following and in some instances an increase in fundamentalism—with tensions heightening between Islam and non-Islam, and Arab and the West, becoming the discourse of everyday life, coinciding with the advent of Islam Nusantara,5 that offered a more open-minded perspective of the notion of being Muslim within the context of a diverse Indonesian society. *** Indonesian artists Prilla Tania and Tintin Wulia were each in Sharjah for one month working with artists and local communities as part of the 2013 Biennale Jogja XIII Equator 2 projects. It was the first international residency program organized by Biennale Jogja using funds allocated from the state budget. Based on a meeting between Biennale Jogja and the Sharjah Biennial through the Sharjah Art Foundation, it was agreed that future long-term collaborations were necessary to strengthen partnerships across countries in the southern hemisphere and to review the partnerships of the past. During her time in Sharjah, Prilla Tania was captivated by the cityscape and the movement of people going about their daily activities. Sharjah’s port, in its historical and contemporary context is the city’s most striking feature, an entrance and exit point, a gate through which people have come and gone, settle and visit. On her exploration of the cityscape, Prilla Tania documented the alleys and streets and people’s movements. The most populated areas, such as the old town with its iconic landmarks of museums, galleries and historical houses, are located next to the harbour and market.

The configuration of Sharjah’s downtown, of markets, mosques and palace on the same main axis is replicated in ports in Indonesia, particularly those located on Java Island. In addition to alleyways with white coral stone walls, these iconic locations in Sharjah’s cityscape include courtyards, around which Yuko Hasegawa constructed her curatorial framework for the 2013 Sharjah Biennial: Towards a New Cultural Cartography. Tania’s artwork, Takhtet Al Qaleb (2013), in contrast, was a video projection of Sharjah’s cityscape alongside an installation made from paper, depicting the streets of the city.

Tintin Wulia’s first time in Sharjah resulted in the work Terra Incognita, Et Cetera (2013) for the 2013 Sharjah Biennial, a performative-participatory installation in the form of a map, exhibited previously in its initial form in The Netherlands, Singapore and Indonesia. At Sharjah, visitors wrote their names in different languages and scripts on the painted wall map displayed at the nineteenth century Baiq Al- Sherkal exhibition venue, with its open archway and courtyard spaces, presenting another imagination of an ‘insider-outsider’ project. This became a landmark presentation for Wulia and the artwork due to its ability to engage wider audiences across the Arab region, Africa, and South Asia. When invited later in that year to participate in a residency at the Sharjah Art Foundation, Wulia proposed the project Babel (2013), based on her meeting with Emirati-Palestinian artist-poet, Hamsa Younis, who introduced her to differening perspectives on Muslim identity.

Wulia reconsidered how Muslim identity might be defined by those who live in different contexts, focusing on languages that demonstrated the broader perspectives of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism. She saw how Arabic—moving along the trade routes that predated the European colonization of Southeast Asia—had a major influence on the development of local languages, 48 | 49

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including those communities whose dialects at that time were largely influenced by the Pallava script,6 identifying some Arabic words that had been borrowed by Indonesia languages. In addition, in a contemporary context of post-Cold War global conditions, Wulia perceived what she saw as the rise of the new global nomadism initially outlined in her proposal for Biennale Jogja. Babel thus became a reflection of her experience living in a place where different voices are simultaneously heard. In addition to Prilla Tania’s and Tintin Wulia’s residencies in Sharjah, Biennale Jogja has also partnered with curator Sarah Rifky to provide opportunities for two Indonesian artists, Duto Hardono and Venzha Christiawan to participate in residencies in Cairo with the art initiative and education-focused cultural space, Beirut, co-founded by Rifky. The timing of these residencies in Sharjah and Cairo was compelling given the political dynamics in the region with the then ongoing Arab Spring uprisings. As one of the artists in this residency program, Duto Hardono, coming from the generation which did not directly experience the Reformasi movement after 1998, the great political tensions in Cairo at that time were a revelation.

Returning to Al Makin’s focus on the relationship between Islam and democracy, in questioning if democracy is relevant in Islamic society, these artists preferred to absorb the spirit of rethinking their own position as Indonesian in this complex global political movement and reflecting upon their own position related to the West.

SOUTHEAST ASIAN ARTISTS IN SHARJAH BIENNALE 2019 One of the three sections in the 2019 Sharjah Biennial: Leaving the Echo Chamber was curated by Vietnam-based Zoe Butt, titled Journey Beyond the Arrow. (The other curators were Claire Tancons and Omar Kholeif.) Sharjah Biennial’s choice to invite three curators was surprising given the previous decade they had appointed a single curator (most of them female). Each section was thematically separate, the three curators’ exhibitions introducing their different areas of research focus and interconnected frameworks, in particular hybrid identity, postcolonialism, and speculative history. Zoe Butt has been working in the Southeast Asian region for more than two decades, and her extensive practice of engaging regional artistic communities has significantly contributed to various approaches of art making and discourse. In Journey Beyond the Arrow, Butt chose a provocative approach to examine transnationalism from its early history of colonialism and trade-mobility since the early sixteenth century, and how that has shaped diaspora and multiculturalism—including their darker historical aspects often hidden from the mainstream. These issues, for example, were clearly depicted in the works of Indonesian artist Jompet Kuswidananto, US-Vietnamese artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Malaysian artist Ahmad Fuad Osman and Thai artist Ampannee Satoh.

Jompet Kuswidananto’s Sharjah Biennial work Keroncong Concordia (2019), is a search into the post-WWII liminal condition connecting Indonesia, The Netherlands, Africa and Suriname during 1940s to early 1950s. The scattered stories of these places—narrated by those who are still alive and witnesses to history, as well as through researching archives highlighting the boundaries between heroes and villains, victims and perpetrators, freedom and building new colonies, meetings and farewells—become transparent in the relationships between the people involved. Modern structures and ideas of nation-states and new social systems imperceptibly appeared within the symbolism of scattered but interconnected decorative lights, with a three-channel video projection deliberating on the historical context of violence and disengagement in these places. Butt notes on how Africa and Indonesia were connected through different encounters, including the Black Dutchmen that she found in Ghana; l

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There, the Belanda Hitam, or Black Dutchmen, are given memorial, the story of their trade as ‘trophies’ to the Dutch East Indies recorded in this little-known house on a hill. Keroncong Concordia, while anchored in Bandung (a club whose building hosted the Bandung Conference in 1955), is also an artistic gesture that speaks to a broader community, whose experience of assimilation as ‘intercolonial subjects’ deserves further visibility and consideration.7 Ahmad Fuad Osman’s Enrique de Malacca Memorial Project (2016–) focuses on the historical narratives of early cosmopolitanism throughout the Indonesian archipelago, beginning with the trading of spices in Banda and Melacca, to the arrival of Europeans in the region. Osman’s ongoing project is a fictional memorial built from fragments of archaeological evidence, scholarly interviews, popular folklore and oral religious histories. It is an attempt to reconstruct a lost character and a vanished archive; an undertaking to negotiate the identity of a man celebrated today in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines as Enrique de Malacca, Enrique de Cebu, Enrique Maluku, Daeng Malik Siluak, and Panglima Awang. This extensive archive is constructed in the form of a museum display with wall texts, prints, paintings and other artefacts which lead the audience to imagine the figure of Enrique within the context and narratives that have become part of the foundation of the greater Southeast Asia community. His project connects the interweaving historical narratives of different regions, of South Asia and Arab traders, of European explorers and the Indonesian-Malay archipelago, that has shaped the understanding of the region’s cosmopolitanism.

An equally entangled historical context of ‘the idea’ of Southeast Asia appears in Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019), a four-channel video and multiple photographic print installation in an outdoor courtyard in the Sharjah heritage area, of imagined scenes of conversations highlighting the nuances in strategies of remembering by families of French-Senegalese soldiers who have returned to Dakkar in West Africa with their Vietnamese wives after the fall of French rule in Indochina. The nocturnal installation not only provides an emotional experience because of its dramatic story but also the experience of the viewer’s bodily presence within this outer and inner being, there and here, past and present. The returned soldiers reflect upon the meaning of military victories and trophies, and they share their grief in front of family and friends’ graves, with their ghosts and dreams. This conjunction of different lives of Vietnamese, African and European protagonists and their descendants depicts how war brings about dark human encounters and new possibilities of time and space.

Ampannee Satoh is a Thai artist from Pattani, a southern region that remains under significant stress due to four decades of political conflict. Culturally, Pattani people (Narathiwat) are more inclined towards, given their geographic closeness to Malaysia, Malay culture and (the religion of) Islam. For decades, Pattani people have experienced a broad spectrum of violence, ranging from attacks by the Thai military to ethnic and religious separatist bombings. Her video and photography installation, TUGU 1370 : 1425 (2019) explores an era marked by the abolition of the Thai sultanate system by King Rama V (1853–1910) and the subsequent centralization of power, which led to increased tensions between dominant Buddhist society and the Malay (Muslim) community. Satoh focused on two landmarks in urban Pattani built as historical witness to continuous conflict between militarized Buddhism and the Muslim inhabitants. One is the bullet shaped Police Monument erected in Dusun Nyor to honour the victims of the 1948 rebellion between Malay-Muslim villagers and Thai police and soldiers (rumoured to house the remains of the latter involved in bloody confrontations), about which today’s people of Narathiwat have little idea or understanding of l

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its representation and meaning. The other is the Tak Bai Memorial, commemorating the Tak Bai Massacre of eighty-five people in Narathiwat province in 2004 (at the time Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s government had been targeted by bomb blasts attributed to terrorists) when the Thai military arrested protestors from the local community who were demonstrating against the arrest of fellow villagers. Satoh contrasts these two monuments as a reflection upon her Muslim identity within this complex historical narrative, and for the Sharjah audience to gain a perception on these different contexts and positions. l

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*** In the context of the guileful, well-established relations between countries in the Arab region (of which the relationship between the Emirate of Sharjah and the Arabian Peninsula constitutes a small element) and Southeast Asia, one should not only focus on the complex histories traced and elucidated through these artist projects but also their interconnected postcolonial tensions and increasingly complex modern power relations of which the politics of religion plays a significant role. These artists’ reflections provide us with a mechanism to question concepts of representation and identity, not only related to the collective construct of race, ethnicity or nation-state, but also considerations that facilitate an examination of the blurring of established lines between classifications, thus advancing diversity.

Religiosity and spirituality have been important aspects of Southeast Asian communities before the advent and institutionalization of modern religions. The Southeast Asian region was strongly spiritual, based on animistic beliefs which powerfully shaped cultural expression, from its ancient to the modern periods with rituals and traditions incorporated into architecture, performing arts, music, dance, literature and much more. In contrast, contemporary art practices have been generated as an organic encounter between the institutionalization of art with the living heritage of various traditions and beliefs, their form and application undeniably unique and specifically related to their local context and circumstances. While there is an extensive influence of Arab culture in the art practices of Southeast Asia, its assimilation enriching language of expression and discourses, it has nonetheless been often compliant to, and ‘under the shadow’ of the hegemony of Western art and history. The artworks discussed here feature how these artists are willing to reach beyond the nostalgia of this connectivity and reflect more upon the critical position of their current geopolitical situations. Their art, as a political stance, presents their personal perspective for the immense potential for new knowledge and understanding that fosters a drive towards an acceptance of difference.

Notes 1 Jadul Maula, ‘Arab Adapted, Java Embraced: Creativity in the Cultural Relationship between Nusantara and the Arab Region’, A Path of Pot-Holes: Navigating the Edges and Vortex of the Indonesian–Arab Region Relationship through Biennale Jogja XII 2013, Biennale Jogja Foundation, 2013 2 A forum of 120 developing world states not formally aligned with or against the major power blocs, drawing upon the principles established by the Bandung Conference in 1955 3

McLuhan coined the term in his books The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press, 1962) and Understanding Media (McGraw-Hill, 1964) in which he describes the phenomenon of the entire world becoming more interconnected as the result of the daily production and consumption of media, images and content by global audiences 4

Al Makin, ‘Patching Up the Cracks: Nusantara and the Arab World’, A Path of Pot-Holes: Navigating the Edges and Vortex of the Indonesian– Arab Region Relationship through Biennale Jogja XII 2013 5 Islam Nusantara is a distinctive brand of Islam as a result of indigenization and contextualization of the universal Islamic values according to the socio-cultural realities of Indonesia, as an alternative to global Islam dominated by Arabization, ie. Saudi Wahhabism 6 The Pallava script is a Brahmic script named after the Pallava dynasty of South India from the fourth century AD, which spread to Southeast Asia and evolved into various Indonesian scripts such as Balinese, Javanese, Kawi and Sundanese 7

Zoe Butt, ‘Journey Beyond the Arrow’, Sharjah Biennale 14: Leaving The Echo Chamber (exhibition catalogue), Sharjah Art Foundation, 2019

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What is a “National” Exhibition? Understanding Australia’s‘The National’ Any exhibition that invokes nationhood courts an interrogative position. It makes a claim, or rather a number of claims that it must address, one of which begs the acceptance of the viewer, namely, to know and accept what that nation is, in this particular case, Australia. To do so is to be able to proceed relatively seamlessly to what that nation consists of, how it is reflected, how it is represented—in this case with regard to its artistic production. Moreover, the undertaking assumes that such a premise is tenable from the outset: socially, historically and philosophically. Then again, all such considerations are perhaps just a case of exhaustive overthinking: invoking “nation” may be a necessary convenience for making sense where there is none, in the effort to support a handful of artists and to give them a sufficiently appreciative audience. For the purposes of this discussion, let us shelve the last caveat as it hangs under the weight of the Australian Perspecta (1981–99), of which The National is a rebadged revival,1 except of course with the exception of the many assumptions and promises pregnant in the naming itself. The final interrogatory is whether such a title can bask in the same sureness or innocence in its simple factuality as it thought it might. For could it ever? No, but the forces that threaten to discredit and debunk it are more salient than ever. There has arguably never been a time when global events and forces have not pressed home to us that nationhood, far from being an imperturbable socio-historical monolith, is far more a set of shifting circumstances, a linguistic carapace, and a horizon of possibility. But that horizon is no longer so optimistic, because we have come to know too much about the world, as we have learned how little we know, shaken as we are by the lapse of the old certainties, accelerated by fragile ecologies: political, technological, natural.

Perhaps only twenty years ago, it was customary to analyze the status, meaning and relevance of an exhibition with such a title, using an example from one of the main Euro-American cities as a nodal point, such as London, New York, Paris, or Berlin. Instead, to begin with Australia is arguably more apposite for a number of notable reasons. One is its very contested nature as a sovereign nation against the background of its relatively recent colonial past, formally settled by Great Britain in 1788, and only federated as an independent nation-state in 1901. Another is the marked difference of Australia’s history from that of most other countries in terms of the relationship between political and religious upheaval and national identity. Let us call this Australia’s relational global narrative: this is the narrative that stands alongside that of other major (Western and related peripheral) states in terms of shared historic experience, which includes wars of religion and Reformation, or revolution. On these terms, relative to the evolution of other Euro-American, and also South American and Asian histories, Australia has never experienced a global war on its soil, a civil war, or any such upheaval that has become the rallying point for a national identity.

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Many of such upheavals come from a supplanted, displaced (or rebadged) ruling class, the change of which is associated with heroism and freedom. There is nothing in this nation’s fabric to celebrate any graphic glory, only the surmounting of hardship, thereby aligning us with the Irish contingent of settlers, whose consolations are those of the oppressed, of survival as opposed to conquer. Thus Australia’s rural heroes, for example, of ‘the swagman’ and ‘the drover’2 simply cannot compete with the likes of Japanese Samurai, Napoleonic vainglory or a Russian revolutionary. If anything, Australia’s rogues gallery of legends that have grown out of the twentiethcentury have been strongly if not overwhelmingly, drawn from sport. (A key area of national contention continues to be Test Cricket with England, a battle against “the mother country” which is yet another affirmation of increasingly otiose national links.)3 The point about the comparative anaemia of Australian national symbology needs to be treated gently, however, because to the Indigenous population it has its heroes, and it certainly has had its cataclysms, but they are deemed incommensurate or irrelevant. Finally, there is the conundrum of what I have called “The Australia Effect.”4 This is the condition in art and culture of being of minimal consequence as a country, partly because of its relatively colourless (white) history, because it is remote, not sufficiently exotic, and insufficiently war-torn or deprived, or needing the kind of condescending attention for which the artworld is so good at lavishing. Within Australia, it is a now an accepted feature of culture to expect guidance from others, although still specifically oriented toward Euro-America, not Asia, whose artists are ‘guests’ as opposed to figures of deference. This patter is so strong that it is fair to assert that the ‘cultural cringe’ as it is long called in Australia, is now firmly built into the national pathology. A mutated form of hordemasochism, it is an expectation that any large scale exhibition enjoys the patronizing from specific elsewheres (London, New York and to a lesser extent, Berlin), or else have artists pay lipservice to their counterparts in such hyperzones of cultural power. V. S. Naipaul stirred up a great deal of antagonism in his assessment of Indian culture after it gained independence from Britain in 1947, to the extent at which he titled one of his earlier books, The Mimic Men (1967). While Australian art is one of profound mimicry, it is also one based on so many unquestioned certainties, especially regarding whom to mimic, where Euro-America still casts a long dark shadow.

For an example of the symptoms of the ‘Australia Effect’, let me give this a more concrete reference. Steve McQueen’s Gravesend (2007) shown in the 2008 Biennale of Sydney, is a work that continues to be referenced today, mainly due to the artist’s successes in mainstream film, as an alibi to his artistic and especially moral credentials. The film is a claustrophobic documentation of anonymous miners in the Congo digging for coltan, the mineral essential for mobile phones and related digital devices. The concept and message were clear, too clear, where the viewer is in thrall with the-artist-as-brand and intimidated by the grisly circumstances that it blandly describes. Its frankness is unmistakable and is of an artistic genus that is now trusted, fêted fare in contemporary art, in rapping a comfortable gallery-going public over the knuckles for their privilege. Luckily, not all critics saw it for what it was, another savaging of capitalism, neo-imperialism, etc. Yet the question remains whether an Australian artist would attempt such an artwork. While there is now a steady stream of Indigenous protest art—to the extent that it has become a genre unto itself—it is uncertain whether an Australian artist would be so brazen to make and take such a commentary off-shore, which exposes the imperialism that McQueen, being British, is taking advantage of at the same time he criticizes it. And if Australian artists would not venture outward with such chutzpah, it is also questionable whether an artist like McQueen would choose to make such an artwork in Australia.

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From a contemporary perspective—the worker slave-trade in Dubai to the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip—Australia is not a place of horrors or dangers, nor is it a capitalist hub. And if it is a place of migration it is nugatory in comparison to states such as Pakistan, Egypt or Germany, nor does it share common borders with other countries from which come histories of overlapping ambition and struggle. In short, Australia is a continent without a lobby. Where does this leave The National, three exhibitions in six years presenting over 160 artists? McQueen arguably made an error with Gravesend (although his work still enjoys notoriety) but the kinds of errors that Australian artists might make, are too culturally specific and too local, to capture anything but a short interval of national (not international) attention.

Another insight about the ambiguities facing Australian artists comes from South African author J. M. Coetzee, who settled in Australia in 2002, the year before he won the Nobel Prize.

In a book from 2003, Elizabeth Costello, when his perceptions of the country were by accounts still relatively fresh, he makes a remarkable statement about the interwovenness of extremes of distance and cultural obscurity, and what that does to the cultural psyche. A character in the novel, Elizabeth is asked about being an Australian writer on “the far edges,” and she replies: The far edges. That is an interesting expression. You won’t find many Australians nowadays willing to accept it. Far from what? they would say. Nevertheless, it has a certain meaning, even if it is a meaning foisted by history. We’re not a country of extremes—I’d say we’re rather pacific—but we are a country of extremities. We have lived out extremities because there hasn’t been a great deal of resistance in any direction. If you begin to fall, there isn’t much to stop you.5 The first is intentionally clichéd (Australians are part of the global village, extremes depend on the vantage point, etc.), then elliptical, and then the punchline, suggesting a lack of tension and of having lamentably little at stake. While Indigenous artists contemplate the tragedies of their history, the omnipresent cultural tragedies of the ‘Australia Effect’ have yet to find their deepest recognition.

Most likely it never will.

Thus, on the scales of cultural performativity, Australia doesn’t much rate. Leaving Indigenous history out of the equation, Australia’s national image is insufficiently heroic or tragic.

As a (relatively) safe and fun place to travel, and as a haven for natural resources, the socio-economic benefits of being an innocuously benign country have their dividends, but in art and culture, far more questionably6—the ‘Australia Effect’ that of having no discernible effect, globally.

EXHIBITIONS AND NATIONALISM Anyone beginning to consider such issues in any depth would best be alerted to the fact that the origin of ‘the exhibition’ is closely aligned to national-affirming missions, from statecraft to revolution to colonialism. Before the inception of public museums, the first museums were instigated largely through science and the advancement of naval trade. The Wunderkammern or “cabinets of curiosities” that originated in the sixteenth century were confused collections of all manner of objects, more profane than sacred, intended to inspire awe, conversation and scientific inquiry.

From an artistic perspective, and uncannily relevant here, the first major showings of art en masse came with the establishment of the art academy (then known as the Academy of Painting and Sculpture) in 1648, which was the first of a succession of other academies (science in 1666, architecture in 1671 and music in 1672). While naturally at the service of advancing these disciplines, the tacit motivation was centralization, to be able to control and observe what was taught and l

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which people were chosen as representative of the discipline. It quickly became a powerful, if not implacable legislative body. From 1667, under the auspices of the Academy of Fine Arts, came the Salon, an annual or biannual event featuring the work of artists largely trained by the academy and chosen by its recognized officials. The first major event for exhibiting art in the world, which would be a benchmark for what is sanctioned and seen for the next two centuries or more, was state-owned and state-driven. Artists’ reputations rested on the level of approbation that the Salon bestowed.

Its executive leadership arbited on the significance of genres (still life at the bottom, history painting at the top), while divvying out medals, all mirroring a grand artistic horse race. Like all such ventures unto our present day, it was subject to the capriciousness of taste, to cronyism, nepotism and labyrinthine chains of prejudice and self-interest. It is sobering to reflect how a significant portion of our grasp of Western art until the end of the nineteenth century was effectively shaped by the Salon and the artists and works it chose to lionize, and only later with the birth of the avant-garde, whom they chose to reject.

The resonances with today are persistent and uncannily clear. As a centralized body established by the state, it was expected to uphold state values and intended for the state’s aggrandizement. While we are not necessarily dealing with literalizing socialist realism here, lapses into what we now call socialist realism were many and frequent, which we now know retrospectively is a casualty of art that affiliates too closely with governmental power and policy. Works of art (painting and sculpture) were expected to maintain moral values, and were rewarded accordingly.

Both explicitly and tacitly, artists were expected to make favourable commentary on the regnant state of affairs. One famous example of slipping under the institutional radar was Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii (1784), to which Louis XVI responded favourably and purchased, since it seemed to offer the message of family loyalty. The upraised arms of the brothers depicted in the painting became an emblematic gesture of fraternity rallied by the Revolution to which the king eventually lost his head. It was also the Revolution that made available a newly nationalized collection to the public. While enlightened princes and monarchs had made their collections available to viewing by a select few, the first public museum space was the Louvre, which opened its doors in 1793.

Consisting then of works gleaned from royalty and confiscated from the church, it was the first time a public was given the prospect of a national collection while also having the opportunity to consider, against the work from other countries, what might constitute a national art.

It might need restating that notions of national art and national style are attendant upon the burgeoning concept of a state consisting of a free and active citizenry, hence the enlightened relationship between state and polis. In Germany, thinkers like Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Georg Hamann drew attention to the properties of national character in relation to language and cultural inheritance, such as local architecture and folklore. Artists would begin to draw from such influences in depicting scenes and activities that were germane to their locality, belonging to their known and experienced life-world, as opposed to relying on the purported universals of antiquity. Even when Greco-Roman tropes were used, they were given a particularly national (French, German, English) inflection that tended to emphasize how they could be adapted according to the materially present codes and practices that aggregated to mean a nation. Folklore, that is, the stories that were deemed to have grown organically from the soil of one locality with its features (forests, mountains, weather), were by the early nineteenth century given greater value than before, not just in and for themselves, but as they were graphic records of the constituents that comprized personal identity in its material and historical belonging to a place. l

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From a more recent perspective, the ‘national’ exhibitions that appeared after the slow rebuilding following the Second World War, such as documenta in Kassel, were strongly informed by the devastation of those recent events. While not limited to German art, its raison d’être was strongly informed by it: the first documenta in 1955 curated by Arnold Bode was a return to the avantgarde artists (mostly German, but not exclusively) that the Nazi regime had tried to discredit under the Entartene Kunst (Degenerate Art) label. This exhibition, while not contemporary, tended to set a tone for artists, from Germany and internationally, to consider works about ethics and inclusion. In 2002, documenta XI had its first non-German director, the late Okwui Enwezor, an exhibition that remains a landmark in thinking about the nature, trajectory and responsibilities of both art and curation for the millennium. For our purposes here, it is worth considering how a ‘national’ exhibition—not billed as such but firmly tied to Germany, its history and its political mission of acknowledgment and rebirth after WWII—is defined first as a response to crisis, and from its beginning reticent, of confining itself to German art and artists. It persisted in the legacy of how noxious such an idea of national art, when pushed to its uttermost conclusion, can have grotesque consequences. documenta and its history is something of an alibi to knowing that to uphold the need for a national art will beg more questions than it answers, given that nationhood is a concept becoming more porous and fragile by the day, exemplified yet again in the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis.

Two other predominant national exhibitions are the Whitney Biennial in New York and the Tate Prize in London, conveniently citable as occurring in the two principal commercial art hubs.

The Whitney Biennial is confined in its selection to US citizens and for artists who have been residents for a length of time (several Australian artists have shown there), held in the original Whitney Museum of American Art designed by Marcel Breuer, one of the Bauhaus greats. It would be disingenuous, however, to compare it to Australia’s The National, if only for the weight of history and persistence. It also grew out of a time when the exhibition of national artists was less questionable, in an effort to see what something like a national art might look at, a mode of inquiry that is today far less tenable. Founded in 1930, it arrived at a time when there was immense pressure to define a national art and to nurture American culture which had already benefitted immeasurably from the influx of art treasures before and after the First World War, and would continue to do so as a result of the second. Moreover, its emphasis is on younger and lesser-known artists to assist them in the next stage of their careers, an aim that has tended to overshadow the earlier one of making claims about national styles or tendencies. (The subheading to the Australian exhibition “New Australian Art” was more a promise about the art, not that of the age of the artists.) The Tate Prize, also with its focus on supporting young and emerging artists can only be called a national exhibition by default, not design, and it hardly insists on being representative of artistic tendencies or tastes.

BACK TO ‘AUSTRALIA’ Postmodern and Contemporary Art (if we can agree on that term as to what follows Postmodernism), with its return in large part to figuration, revels in crisis, guilt, injustice and discord. This is (again) where Australia falls short. In 2021, with the television miniseries Gallipoli launched on Netflix on the same weekend as the commemorative celebrations of ANZAC Day,7 Australians were given little doubt that the identification with this event had not yet abated. It has long been said that the Gallipoli Campaign’s failure in Turkey by allied forces in 1915 was Australia ‘coming of age’, given that it had been federated as an autonomous nation-state in 1901, only fourteen years before.

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as a nation. It was the event where the people of the vast states and territories of a continent as spatially expansive as Europe, could feel commonality. If anything, it (reasonably) emphasized its continued reliance upon and identification with Great Britain. While the commemorative day is now an opportunity for recognizing servicemen and servicewomen (from all wars and United Nations peacekeeping operations), the inescapable tenacity of its symbolism tends to highlight the imbrication in white, male colonial history.

The other national day, Australia Day, on 26 January, remembers the landing of the First Fleet8 of British convicts and settlers at what is now Sydney Harbour, thus inscribing Australia’s nationhood along Anglo-Saxon lines. While there have been efforts to recognize the Aboriginal servicemen who fought in both world wars, and demonstrations by both white and black Australians over what they prefer to call “Invasion Day” instead of the national holiday, these efforts have as yet not altered the regnant myths and narratives. While there have been accelerating debates about having a national day that is more expressive of unity rather than division, it is as yet hard to envisage what such discussions will amount to from a tangible perspective. A conclusion we may draw is that the national image, despite its dogged and increasingly untenable symbolic dependence on Great Britain, is rooted in uncertainty. Hence the question: is the need to title an exhibition “The National” the very symptom of such epistemic fragility, as a symptom of a deep crevasse of disavowal?

Writing for the inaugural catalogue for the 2017 exhibition, art critic Helen Hughes states from the beginning of her essay that “[t]he historiography of Australian art has, from the very first attempts, been vexed by the notion of ‘Australia’.”9 However, she denies the provocation devised and publicized by the Indigenous artist Richard Bell via the incendiary text on an award-winning painting that “Australia does not exist.” Hughes admits that Australia had a rather nebulous beginning, citing the various historical names since ancient Greek, Roman and Christian cultures, and Ptolemy’s hypothetical unknown land, terra incognita, all of which emphasized its remoteness and obscurity. When settled (as a penal colony) it was already a continent of different Indigenous languages and customs comparable to Europe at the time, but it was quickly renamed. It was earlier called New Holland, the name first applied by Dutch seafarer Abel Tasman in 1644. The first colony was called New South Wales, which was then over an unknown horizon more an amorphous landmass than belonging to a homogenous country. As a result, ‘Australia’ is built of an amalgamated set of fragments and rebadgings, never birthed as a noble idea, such as the nineteenth century unifications of Germany or Italy, or originated after a protracted struggle for independence, as for example what Simón Bolivar achieved from Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia and several other South American states. Hughes concludes in her essay by stating that ‘Australia’ may exist but not as a unified type—what in Marxist language would be called a “universal”—but rather as the moniker for an ongoing shifting of co-ordinates and “multiple perspectives.”10 This conclusion, as sound as it is philosophically, still needs to be held for scrutiny against an exhibition that courts such a title. For the most pressing question is whether any other country would think to do the same in this present global climate.

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GUO JIAN

Guo Jian (郭健) and his art, are products of the last fifty years of violence and tumultuousness in China, from the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s to the Sino-Vietnam war at the beginning of the 1980s, through to the horrors of the Tiananmen Square Incident. At the end of the 1970s at age seventeen, he enlisted in the People’s Liberation Army during a recruitment drive to support the Sino-Vietnamese war, initiated by the country’s then leader Deng Xiaoping. The grim reality of his military experiences permanently transformed him from the idealistic young promoter of the ideology of the army and communist party as he served as a propaganda poster painter. As with many of his peers, his military experiences left him both cynical and with a new found critical perspective. His time in the army would later serve as fertile source material for his artwork. In 1989, as a former soldier, he was nearly killed by the PLA in Tiananmen Square. Guo Jian now lives in Australia.

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I became other. I became one of the wearied, dusty faces from across the border. And although there was no boundary between us, and we were all citizens of one country, suddenly an invisible border of horror was drawn around me that made it impossible to get out. Khadim Ali Hazara artist Khadim Ali explores the normalization of war and the experience of refugees through a series of poetic installations and paintings. Ali’s interest in tapestries developed soon after his parents’ home in Quetta, Pakistan was destroyed by suicide bombers. Amongst the rubble and debris left from the blast, a collection of rugs and weavings remained the only thing intact: miraculously able to withstand the reign of terror inflicted upon his family and community.

Ali explores the impact of war, trauma and displacement drawing parallels from the Book of Shahnameh, a Persian literary masterpiece comprising of 50,000 couplets and written between c. 977 and 1010 CE. Just like the many great mythic tales in the Shahnameh, Ali’s intricate works depict stories of demons and angels, conquest and war through the lens of the persecuted Hazara community.

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DIASPORA, INDIGENEITY, BLACK LIVES MATTER AND REFUGEEISM “Refugeeism” is a relatively new terminology necessitated by the increasing flows of enforced migration over the last four decades. Multiculturalism, sounded in pride or scorn, developed out of the 1970s when Australia rethought its post WWII Assimilation Policy to begin to accept a wider variety of migrants, partly sparked by the calamity of the aftermath of the Vietnam War. But multiculturalism has tended to lapse into a rather vague term, as opposed to a challenge to what had been a largely British-oriented status quo—this notwithstanding European migrants fleeing during and after the Second World War (when the byword used to be “tolerance”). Refugeeism, along with its attendant conditions of forced migration, statelessness and transitionality, is now the new ‘state’ of the new millennium, the state-without-a state, or meta-state, where people live in protracted expectation, hollow hope and despair. Thus temporary is the new permanent. This is not to disregard the favela and ghetto-dwellers, and the societies based in undefined peripheries, such as the large number of people amassed at the edges of Indian airports, surviving off the airlines’ detritus.

What becomes of these groups in light of COVID-19, we can only begin to speculate. What is sure is that there are now a multiplicity of social subgroups whose very status is that of not being accounted for, a voiceless underclass with no provision for any kind of upward mobility. Regarding the new configuration of stateless people, Slavoj Zizek offers a useful gloss: In our global world, commodities circulate freely, but not people… new forms of apartheid are emerging. The topic of porous walls, of the threat of being inundated by foreigners, is strictly immanent to global capitalism: it is an index of what is false about capitalist globalization.

It is as if the refugees want to extend free global circulation from commodities to people…

The way the universe of capital relates to the freedom of movement of individuals is thus inherently contradictory: it needs “free” individuals as cheap labour forces, but it simultaneously needs to control their movement since it cannot afford the same freedom and rights for all people.11 That such a statement seems to have cursory importance to Australia’s case only helps to advance the points made so far. Australia, relatively insulated from the recent crises at the doorstep of Europe and the Middle East, can continue to presume upon a ‘national’ exhibition unperturbed and untrammelled. Countries like France and England are feeling the pressure, especially among those who thought they had a firm grasp on what their state constituted. Uncertainty has spilled from disgruntlement (always a healthy feeling in society) to hysteria, manifested in the gilet jaunes (yellow-vests) in Paris and in the debacle of Brexit. Meanwhile, Germany wheezes politically with a rise of the far Right after its intake of over a million refugees (constituting about 1.5% of the population). Despite this, recent commentary suggests that these numbers are salutary, as they will accommodate for dwindling ageing workforce numbers as against Germany’s continuing industrial growth.12 Under such conditions it would be quixotic to mount an exhibition called ‘The National’. It would be greeted with contempt as a solecism, or just a misfired attempt at humour.

Or as a veiled attempt at scabbling for vestiges of nationalism in support of neoconservative agendas?

While multiculturalism is always a convenient crutch—device, strategy—of a curator of exhibitions small or large to demonstrate acceptance, the concept of multiplicity and difference runs aground with refugeeism when it comes to an exhibition touting some form of national representation in particular. There are perhaps more artists than ever in Australia’s history who identify as ‘hyphenated’ (Chinese/Indian/Lebanese/Iranian-Australian), have dual citizenship, or 80 | 81

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indeed identify more with their cultural original while at the same time comfortably affirming that Australia is their home. These are all destabilizing factors. The criteria, including the most prosaic, of having citizenship, are simply too diverse and porous. If the criterion is art produced in Australia, is citizenship necessary? What of Australian nationals working abroad? What if the work was made in the few weeks when an Australian skipped town to London, New York, Paris, or Berlin?

In short, an exhibition named “The National” crumbles under the weight of its own contradictions, its concept made yet more fragile by the very precarity of global events.

When we consider current global racial sensitivities we are faced with yet more problems regarding divisions that are cultural, economic, linguistic and demographic, not to mention the sorry proportions of Indigenous people, and ‘people of colour’ in prisons. Here, Australia does have a competitive edge on the United States, which has an acknowledged incarceration crisis—except that the statistics are more parlous. For Australia is not in the same critical situation and yet its Indigenous population is proportionately the most incarcerated, a fact that is conveniently relegated to one remote side of both public education and popular discourse. What a ‘national’ exhibition might mean or entail, needless to say, to an Indigenous person is immeasurably disproportionate to someone indifferent to their history or present plight. Zizek has made a very good point on YouTube that the riposte against Black Lives Matter, that “all lives matter” is misplaced since it ignores that the BLM call is more than a categoric statement, it is a push against those lives that have long had a negative status. It is a spillage of anger to correct that state of -1 to be mere degree zero.

BACK TO THE ART The National was an initiative to support and exhibit Australian art. It was given a narrow time -frame and not intended to be an indefinite affair in the way that, by contrast, the Biennale of Sydney is something of an entrenched, and expected, cultural fixture. Looking at the three exhibitions as an aggregate, one can observe a decisive partitioning between black and white.13 This may be a needed corrective to years of repression, but in broader terms, that decision is left to the observer, especially one that is not Australian. It is a binary that, one suspects, is driven by the expectations of those who fund such exhibitions, which drives us back to the venerable history of state-driven presentations as following a state-driven agenda. (Let the Indigenous artists complain in the artworld so it can look like there is something being done—a cheap alternative to government policy and resolute action.) Unfortunately, the cultural binary that these exhibitions have presented is neither in dialogue with other internationally perceived binaries—it has been exceedingly inward-looking—and at the expense of cultural shades of grey. It is as if such exhibitions in Australia that tout Australian-ness are built in reprisal: that a more representative (if that’s possible anymore) breadth (Chinese, Pacific Islanders, from West Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia, etc.) would dilute the, or even vitiate, the concept of ‘Australia’ from the outset in ways I have attempted to describe. It may be worth reflecting on what such exhibitions seek to achieve for their audiences, whether it is serving a local public, which it does logistically, or a hypothetical international audience, which it might consider philosophically. In so doing, there is a confrontation with the ideological motives of artist, curator, and funding body. And thus we are confronted with myth and propaganda on one hand, and an opportunity for new perspectives and strategies on the other.

There is an urgency to our present that requires more than compliance to vague certainties.

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sake of social cohesion and economic coherence—should begin to reflect such uncertainty with courageous and rebarbative vigour. The burden should also not fall on the curators and exhibition organizers but the artists as well, who believe that there is success in following orders. A messy situation calls for art that is not messy in the same way. Any exhibition named ‘The National’ is surely a call to social and historical coherence. It is not a title that accommodates the truth behind any nation-state, but is that of being a constant work-in-progress, an agonistic working-through, and that the age of abiding by the fixed notions of nationhood is a redundant and damaging illusion.

Notes 1 Australian Perspecta was a biennial event first presented by the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1981 to showcase Australian contemporary art. In 1997, it expanded to include the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Australian Centre for Photography.

For Australian Perspecta 1999, the curators were asked to address the theme ‘Living Here Now–Art/Politics’, taking a critical look at contemporary Australian nationhood and testing the limits of Australian nationalism. Similarly, to suggest that curatorial envisioning had not changed much in nearly two decades, the directive for the first presentation of The National in 2017, was “not pitched at presenting an identifiably ‘national’ (Australian) art, or at composing statements regarding national tendencies, characteristics or identities. On the contrary, there is a provocation in the title, certainly towards the manner in which concepts of nationhood and the nation-state are engaged and destabilized by the practice of contemporary artists… In so much as they address any idea of ‘Australia’, these works do so through a questioning lens and a wider regional and global consciousness.” The National catalogue introduction; https://www.the-national.com.au/ essays/curatorial-introduction/; accessed 11 May 2021 2 Propagated around the end of the nineteenth century, the swagman, or itinerant labourer, and the drover, the cross-country cattle herder, are not exclusive, but are cited here as among a number of low-key types that are part of Australia’s (white European) past. It is also worth mentioning that Australia is the world’s most urbanized country that nonetheless defines itself predominately using rural tropes 3 Test cricket between Australia and England continues to be held over a series of five games, an exception to the three-game scheduling for most other countries 4

Adam Geczy, ‘The Australia Effect’, Contemporary Visual Art+Culture Broadsheet, vol. 39, no. 4, 2010, pp. 239–40

5

J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, New York: Vintage, 2003, p. 15, emphasis in the original

6

To extend the argument a little, the recent Australian film, Palm Beach, released by Netflix early in 2021 can be said to typify much of what is intransigent and anodine in art and culture. As a post-millennial, Australian version of the Big Chill, it was rightly criticized as overly Anglo-white, having poor dialogue and weak direction—in short it lacked edginess 7 ANZAC is the acronym formed from the initial letters of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. This was the formation in which Australian and New Zealand soldiers in Egypt were grouped before the landing on Gallipoli in April 1915 8 The First Fleet, comprising eleven ships carrying between 1000 and 1500 convicts, marines, seamen, officers and free settlers, established the penal colony of New South Wales in 1788. The first ships reached what is now Botany Bay on 18 January, 1788, the original proposed site for the colony, but relocated to what is now Sydney Harbour, landing at Sydney Cove on the 26 January, now celebrated as Australia Day. In between these two dates, on 24 January, two French ships on a scientific expedition also arrived at Botany Bay 9 Helen Hughes, ‘Upside down/right way up: Historiography of contemporary ‘Australian’ art’, The National New Australian Art, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales/Carriageworks/Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2017, pp.44–49; see also https://www.the-national. com.au/essays/upside-downright-way-up-historiography-of-contemporary-australian-art/ 10

Ibid.

11

Slavoj Zizek, Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles With Neighbours, London: Penguin/Allen Lane, 2016, p. 54

12

For example Thomas Rogers, ‘Welcome to Germany’, The New York Review of Books, 29 April, 2021, pp. 29–31

13

Only circa 12% of the participating artists in the three exhibitions identity as Asian-Australian

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Avid WhatsApp users, my family’s latest message comes as I write. It is not the usual snapshots of Hakka peasant dishes of their culinary attempts, of a grandchild’s birthday, or a European tour to celebrate a wedding anniversary. The COVID19 pandemic has put a stop to overseas travelling, so people’s attention turns to what is happening at home. Malaysians, fractured by ethnic division and power struggles within the ruling party Barisan Nasional, are being put to the test.

Astonishingly, a kind of COVID-nationalism has arisen: a feeling that Malaysians are ‘in it together’ as the pandemic does not select its victims along racial lines. In one of the photos, my brother and sister and their spouses are waiting for their COVID19 shots at the Malaya University Hospital vaccination centre. The waiting hall is sparse and orderly, everyone—Malays, Chinese, Indians —wear masks and social distancing breaks the usual Third World chaos. My family is proud of getting the vaccine. “We have received the shots earlier than you in Sydney,” my sister writes.

The pandemic has brought out the best in people; ethnic dissension is replaced by a sentiment of collective purpose. It has achieved what the state has failed since independence in 1957. COVIDnationalism is nationalism of amnesia. The ethnic grievances and contentions are for the time being forgotten. Perhaps this is an immigrant’s fancy; people in the home country deserve to live in peace. Yet the tranquillity at the university clinic feels awkward; like when you ‘jack-rabbit’ restart your car that has broken down on the highway. You are lucky, but you do well to remember the incident, the serenity may not last, the car might stop again.

LIFELINE “The National 2021: New Australian Art is a celebration of contemporary Australian art,” the exhibition website usefully informs. “The third in a series of biennial survey exhibitions, it showcases work being made across the country by artists of different generations and cultural backgrounds.”1 Thirty-nine artists were commissioned to produce new work that would respond “to the times in which they live, presenting observations that are provocative, political and poetic.”2 True to the curatorial statement, the exhibition was overwhelming its range of artists and subjects, it was epic, and expressly political. The progressive agendas—from social justice to diversity, from anti-racism to addressing the social deprivation of the Aboriginal communities—pulled you in and thumped you with their feverish expression.

The National was first opened in 2017; its original aims were to commission new Australian art that observes “moments in our collective histories,”3 and would “in some modest way shape the conditions of our immediate futures.”4 These aims have not changed. As Matt Cox, of The National 2021 curatorial team opines, “[W]e find in this third iteration practices that share time with the past and remain, despite post-modern and post-truth cynicism, optimistic of the transformative value of art.”5 The other curators, evident in their essays, comradely aligned themselves with Cox’s sentiment. Much of The National 2021 was an emanation of what it boldly proclaimed. The overambition, the theoretical wrong-headedness, the sweeping Leftism, the confident functionalism (“the transformative value of art”): they stalked every step of the curatorial approach that chaperoned the audience at their viewing. To the overwhelmed audience however, Cox has thrown a lifeline, through his essay ‘Sharing time with the past and caring for the future’, but the assuring tone is self-undermining. The “post-modern and post-truth cynicism” appears in the first paragraph, but the ringing words sound like a rush to judgement. Post-modern is not post-truth. As for cynicism, it belittles the grand philosophic suspicion of postmodernism and post-structuralism which, though impoverished in historical materialism, derive their analytical thrust from post-Marxism. In the 84 | 85

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vast and uneven terrain, we find too the postcolonial critics of the subaltern studies, and the work of Edward Said, always a blend of brilliant insight and promiscuous hope for the oppressed. Still, deficient academicism should not here matter; art professionals need not get into that racket.

PAST AND PRESENT In art writing, Cox believes, “there remains a risk of reciting formulaic interpretations of ‘our’ times as ‘challenging’, ‘uncertain’ and ‘unprecedented’, with the inference that we stand at the cusp of a rupture between present and past.”6 The ‘past in the present’ notion of history is a reminder that time’s passing does not brush off the cobwebs of yesteryears. The sentiment evokes the old despairs in Australia, the old wound of history festers. The National of 2021, as did that of the previous years, featured prominently the deprivation of Indigenous people since British colonization. The experience persists; it is the language of resilience and adaptation, Cox believes, that denies the truth about its real effects. On this issue, The National 2021 called for a radical correction. And that is how it should be, what little ‘transformative power’ art can muster should address this issue of national trauma.

Yet, The National 2021 is a survey exhibition. It is meant to cover the latest in the Australian society as reflected by the (visual) arts. Thus, an ecumenical slant is forced upon it. The Indigenous peoples’ painful past and present is of national concern—so is multiculturalism, refugees and immigration, impacts of late capitalism and globalization. The National is pressed to show up the virulent effects of these national and global happenings. Clearly though, it does not see itself only as a survey. More ambitiously, it wants to submit what it sees as the pulse of the Australian nation as it lives through the past and present, in the context of local and transnational forces. All the same, it is “the national” that hangs most heavily over the exhibition. “The national” dictates the theme; it cannot sidestep the fraught notion of nation and nationalism. Its hands are tied, so to speak, by the progressive agendas it proudly proclaims. As it sets down the fault-lines of Australia’s social and political life, if only to list the wrongs and their remedies, what figures The Nation is the collective stain of horror—less joy, contentment and even patriotism. It comes across almost as an aside.

The National has to deal with an inconvenient fact: The Nation, any nation, is not recognized only by its fractures; it is more powerfully identified by the sharing of customary commitments and values that give a nation a sense of solidity amongst its people.

MAGICAL COMMUNITY The Nation is up to its sleeve in trickery; a shibboleth, constructed, a made-up job; yet it demands from us obeyance and loyalty. We are sentimental about our nation, and in the right circumstances, will easily set ourselves against our collective enemies. In Imagined Communities (2007), Benedict Anderson sets out the social and historical conditions that explain how and why we take The Nation for real.7 The book is replete with terms like “dream,” “sleep,” “awakening,” “invention,” “fantasy” as it explores the nature of nationalism, particularly in modern Southeast Asia. The idea of The Nation is lodged in the cavern of secrets. When allied with the state, nation or nation-state, it comes across as something we know, yet it’s true appearance and purposes we can barely latch on to. “Imagined Communities” is an enticing title, but a substantial part of the book describes the institutions—the state apparatus, the print media and so on—that are at least half the reason why nationalism works.

The “imagined” of “imagined communities” comes across as somewhat misleading.

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Nonetheless, when we give over to the pull of The Nation much of it is experienced in our imagination, as a force in our consciousness. The idea of The Nation is invariably associated with a certain legerdemain; that is true. As it makes a claim in our mental realm, nationalism delivers a set of munificent feelings largely positive: collective identification, the joy of communal belonging, the virtue of sacrifice and loyalty. The Nation may be a fantasy, but for its citizens it is also real and morally affirming. And this is because it is always married to a particular history. Nationalism invites the notion of a nation’s heroic arising from a momentous event in the past—revolution, war, the fall of old regimes, the end of empires, the opening of the country by settlers. The vessel of national consciousness is filled with the sense of historical break: an optimism and a new opportunity to achieve social-economic progress.

The question is, out of the events and prevalent passions of the past, which ones we would choose to remember, and which ones cast into oblivion? This is recognizably a question of politics.

In the selective remembering and forgetting, all kinds of political interests are at play. In the shaping of communal memory, the struggle for progress and social improvement would not be the only game in town. “If nationalism was the expression of a radically changed form of consciousness,” Anderson asks, “should not awareness of that break, and the necessary forgetting of the older consciousness, create its own [false] narrative?”8 Everyone falsifies, so it seems—the nationalists, the conservatives, the reformers, and the Left.

THE MAGICAL NATION With nation and nationalism, our feeling is always half bafflement. The Nation both oppresses and inspires, it brings out the best and the worst in people—loyalty, sacrifice, collective impulse over individual interests, xenophobia, the (WWII-)Blitz spirit of the British people. The Australian nation is no exception. It is marked by conservatism and systematic inequality and injustices, and many believe in it as a commonwealth of collective good, the best institutional form to achieve democracy and security for its citizens. In many people’s eyes, each high and low of The Nation somehow compensates for the other.

But the mystery lingers. Australia is more than what The National has so harrowingly depicted; nor is it about the good life people—not least the immigrants and refugees—enjoy and are grateful for. The National is notable for the way it flattens the uneven relief of the Australian nation and the ways it is imagined. It is as if the singular aim has been to dust the continent of its inscrutability.

The curators’ habit of affixing “Australia” to its multiple political ills and their passionate agendasetting in righting the wrongs: they tend to make this rumbling discord the dominant face of Australia.

Remember the ontology of The Nation? It is communal, it inspires loyalty—just as it conceals the strife and dissension within the social collective. The opposites never manage to reconcile; a terse polarity drives The Nation. For The National, no matter how many historical and ideological connections it makes with Australia’s past (and present), the viewers retain their curiosities and convictions.

They hold fast to their puzzlement. And this may well be the biennial exhibition’s dilemma: The Real in the Australian nation is consolidated by the institutions and perceptions; it is even more so by the Byzantine process of exegesis and the making of meaning.

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POETICS OF THE REAL My first encounter with Australia, as a sixteen-year-old, was the discovery of Patrick White’s novel The Tree of Man (1955) at the British Council Library in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. White’s is a harsh, forbidding territory; there are no suburban greens of the quarter acre blocks, no beaches, nor the innocence of television’s Skippy the kangaroo. At a farm in the outback, life for the husband and wife is a Darwinian struggle for survival. It is a shocking depiction. Decades on, at a Sydney University first-year anthropology class, my quiz on which Australian writer won the Noble Prize for literature elicited no reply. But the students knew about the more populist Steve Erwin, the naturalist TV entertainer who had just drowned at sea. You take your pick what best represents Australia. The Tree of Man is not for everyone. But over the years—as a student, then as a lecturer—I have held on to White’s epic novel as a counterpoint to the simple pleasures and generous amenities of life ‘down under.’ I have never forgotten the dark abyss in which the book’s protagonists Stan and Amy Parker have fallen into, a sign of the other side of ‘The Lucky Country.’9 These days even more agile judgement is demanded of me. As an immigrant, I find little relevance in the annual ANZAC Day celebration, with its Dawn Service for the fallen and ‘two-up’ (heads or tails coin) game at the pub afterwards. Coming from an ex-British possession, I, unfairly, take the national event as hankering for the post-imperial nostalgia turned emblem of Australian nationalism. Yet one holds back the postcolonial grudge. The men and women on the ANZAC Day march, spirited in their advanced years, have done their duty and served the nation, while we are ‘guests’ graciously admitted by the host country. Call it good manners. And one is reminded how unfair any similar censure can be. Once, spending my sabbatical in a university in Melbourne, the vice-Chancellor’s Christmas greeting embraced a multicultural compromise. His email reminded the staff to tone down the exuberance of Christmas parties, so as not to upset colleagues of other faiths. We, the Buddhists and Koranic worshippers, were made to feel a tad small-minded, like snowflakes in the ‘culture war’; not what the Vice-Chancellor had in mind.

DEMOGRAPHICS Of course, the truth about Australia is a matter of social and economic facts, too. The changing population, its age structure, the economic-industrial changes, the pattern of social and economic parity, the volume of the annual immigrant and refugee intake: they spur and decelerate the changes and how we think about Australia. Then there is the question: do facts come before perception, or does perception decipher and transcribe the meanings of facts? The effects of social and economic lives are uneven. The capitalist economy exploits and oppresses, but there are just enough winners in it to make it a viable system for most people. And to say a good word for the immigrants: who is to say the Australian Dream of a job and house ownership is a fantasy they have been duped into believing? However, social and economic reality and our mode of perception do not lock into each other like two pieces of Lego blocks. There is no simple ontology where perception would correctly align itself with facts (as we understand them). For where would we leave the hope, the optimism, the future-altering project we dream up for ourselves and our families? Faced with these questions, the temptation is to erect an iron cage in which facts are lodged and understood: the method of conventional social science. The facts and their meaning cannot be shifted; they are innocently transparent and speak only for themselves. In the battle against social injustices and crossgeneration deprivation, those of the progressive Left should do well to remember the enigma, the impenetrability, that clouds table-turning.

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ART THE REDEEMER The National has pitched us a listing of Australia’s ills and art the great redeemer is urged to do its job. Not for it the mystification, emotions and dreams that complicate The Nation. The clarification of ills and remedies is a major misstep: it forgets how elusive the situation is, how indeterminate is the horizon of the social facts that define the exhibition. The National has banished the mystery, while in political life as in art we are giddy with colliding realities pressed upon our minds.

Our (postmodern) age is an age of uncertain semantics and fragmentation of significations. Everything is a moving target in the psychic economy that infects the way The Nation is imagined. Only a certain kind of philosophic fancy would take the social and the political as having a solid façade, innocent of mystery, free from the phantasmagorical. In the terrain of radical metaphysics, what appears as social fact is full of epistemological tricks, where outward mien is the child of concealment, meaning is actually meaning-making. In any political agenda, even that enunciated by The National, social facts present themselves as truth, then as discourse, and finally as authority for action.

Perhaps there is no simple resolution of the epistemological problems of our age.

The splintering and decoupling of certainties make us question the central structures of social forms and values. The National has tried to save us from the confusion and incoherence which plagues our thinking on politics and art—and on political art. It is a strange gift, for what aids our contemplation of late capitalism is precisely the confusion and incoherence that firm up what we experience of the world. The clarity and agenda-setting offer, in contrast, poor comfort. For what we need is to have one’s face rubbed in the sludge of existential anguish where nothing stands still, where “all that is solid melts into air.”10 We need the deep experiences of drowning, the wisdom of near death before we can harvest the confidence that the world can indeed be saved through art’s power.

ALTERNATIVE IMAGININGS Eventually, in regards to philosophy and art, what we can hope for is to fix The Nation, the floating signifier of its wavering referents and align its agendas with a set of ethical standards. However, each political interest, each ethnic community, would want to imagine its own version of The Nation.

Each mode of imagining would massage The Real, and mould it to embrace its own desires and preferences. As a process of democracy, it is a dilemma that The National cannot escape absolutely.

But then through The Nation’s ills it avidly accounts, through the multiple wrongs it aims to undo, through the remedial moves invested in the arts, The National, too, is deeply in the game of authorizing The Real. All the curatorial rhetoric is devoted to reinventing the poetics of actuality in the way of advancing progressive causes. To say again: people imagine the idea of ‘the national’ differently; they are busily drawing and redrawing the symbolic relief of Australia in order to imprint on it their own wishes and propositions. In this enterprise, The National aims to be a participant. It stands out by its blustering self-confidence, by its counter-hegemonic mission, and by the understanding it is ideologically on the right track.

Try as it did to cover a diversity of forms and themes of engagement, this sample of contemporary Australian art felt confined, caged in. Some of the artists are of diverse ethnic backgrounds, each with a particular tie—local born, through marriage, through migration—to Australia: Korean, Indian, Balinese, Thai, Pakistani, Malaysian/Filipino, notably. However, as ‘Australia’-the-signifier casts its shadow over the artwork, the artists’ ethnic origins and their multiple cultural positions are muted. To me, their unity and coherence felt unsettling. The National/ l

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‘the national’ is supreme and insoluble in the way of corralling the artwork into a singular frame of reference, but comes across as half-attempted, unfinished. Is it fair to expect from it an apprehension, a self-problematizing of the aims and execution it so prodigiously laid out? So assured it is of its mission that one may ask: who are the culprits of wrong-doing and false consciousness that this (three-part) biennial has heroically set out to redeem? At its end, The National comes across as a project of double irony. If the viewers and the Australian public are victims of The Real, is it this that The National has helped to construct and reify? You need a certain kind of Australia to make real the ills and their perpetuators.

DISCOURSE OF HISTORY Power and its effects are objective, coherent, intelligible. It is little trouble to know where to look, and power’s oppression and injustice presents no mystery. A totalizing vision—a national unity—forces itself through diverse social practices and clumsy desires that constitute Australian culture. This is the conceit of The National. After Foucault and de Certeau, we have come to see power as doublefaced; its effects both exacerbate and undermine the potency of oppression. With state power, the administration of justice and social delivery is half the story. The other half are systematic ills, the way it is in league with The Real, how its sense of actuality is discursively ratified.

For Roland Barthes, history writes itself (in the manner of ‘facts speak for themselves’).

A literary theorist, he saw history as narrative, one that keeps company with fiction, myth, and the ancient epics. History is in every aspect infected by the author’s presence. Barthes urges the reading of history as discourse, as literary form packed full of authorial labour and desires. The apparent objectivity, the transparency of historical discourse is achieved by artful concealment in the writer’s design and purposes. Barthes shunned this talk of aim and design and achievement, however.

For the authorial presence features in traces, in shards of signs, not in formal, recognizable intimations. The reading of history is an onerous task, requiring both a philosophic mind and a penetrating eye. Since history conceals, the best approach is to make historical referents stand outside the discourse that shapes them. Historical events have to be wrenched out of the womb of discourse, so that it appears in the world innocent, naked. This from ‘The Discourse of History’: Historical discourse supposes, one might say, a double operation, one that is extremely complex.

In the first phrase, at one point (this decomposition is, of course, only metaphorical), the referent is detached from the discourse, it becomes exterior to it, grounds it and is supposed to ground it… but in a second phase, it is the signified itself which is repulsed, merged in the referent; the referent enters into direct relation with the signifier, and the discourse, meant only to express the real, believes it elides the fundamental term of imaginary structures, which is the signified.11 Note the two-step manoeuvre. First the referent’s detachment from what authorizes its meaning and significations. Next, the referent’s return to its signifier nestled in the system of discourse; and discourse, lest we forget, is sorely “meant to express the real.”12 The result is that “‘objective’ history, the ‘real’ is never more than an unformulated signified, sheltering behind the apparently all-powerful referent.”13 What chance of understanding history do we stand against discourse’s stunning feat?

Barthes’ answer is to have us return to the philosophic suspicion of conventional epistemology.

He quoted Nietzsche who said, “There are no facts in themselves. It is always necessary to begin by introducing a meaning in order that there can be a fact.”14 To which Barthes adds, in history as discourse, “what is noted derives from the notable… from what is worthy of being noted.”15 So what l

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do we want from The National? As from any art exhibition, to immerse ourselves in its ambivalence and complexity. We want it to guide us through the labyrinth of what defines the Australian nation and leave us to find our way out. The National took the lid off a troubled world, then smoothed this world into summation. The Nation is indeed full of grieving, we want an art project to let us explore this lament and discover the feasibility of its correction. It is perplexity, less the agenda-setting, that we prize.

Notes 1 https://everi.events/event/13324728-a/the-national-2021-at-agnsw 2

Ibid.

3 Michael Brand, Lisa Havilah, Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, ‘Directors foreword’, The National 2017: New Australian Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Carriageworks, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2017, p. 9 4

Blair French, ‘Through time: Continuity in the contemporary’, The National 2017: New Australian Art, p. 30

5 Matt Cox, ‘Sharing time with the past and caring for the future’; https://www.the-national.com.au/essays/sharing-time-with-the-past-andcaring-for-the-future/ 6

Ibid.

7

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, London: Verso, 2006

8

Anderson, p. xiv

9

“The Lucky Country” has become an epithet to describe Australia since academic and public intellectual Donald Horne’s 1964 book of that title, in its context the phrase being negative, but generally used favourably. He portrayed Australia’s power and wealth based mostly on luck, as opposed to a national strength of its political or economic structure, while also bemoaning the absence of art and an indifference to intellectual matters 10

Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air, New York: Penguin Books, 1988. The title comes from The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels, chapter 1, in The Portable Karl Marx, Eugene Kamenka ed., New York: Penguin Books, 1983, p. 207 11

Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, Richard Howard trans., New York: Hill and Wang, 1986, pp. 138–139

12

Barthes, p. 138

13

Barthes, p. 139

14

Barthes, p. 138. Barthes does not give the source of this quote

15

Ibid.

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The Colour Line: Archie Moore & W.E.B. Du Bois I Am Somebody!1 Bundjalung elder and Christian minister Lyle Roberts Snr.2 set down three principles in the 1950s for his descendants to live by: retain pride of race and colour, retain identity and language, and consider other people to make the best of life. All foods in the garden (landscape) were deemed edible and used by the Indigenous people, and they should interact and thrive in this present society. In the same decade, Caribbean postcolonial intellectual Franz Fanon posited that a colonized society would move through three phases of self-realization. Firstly, the colonized group would attempt to imitate the colonizer’s culture and lifestyle to be more French than the French, to be faux English lords and ladies. Secondly, usually upon liberation, to caste-off all remnants of the colonizers and an embrace all pre-colonization cultural practices, bordering on an essentialist position. Thirdly, a rationalizing of present life, a rich positive creolization. Each line of thought understood that a present-day concept of oneself came from a strong historical line, but that you positively lived in the present.

An exhibition by Indigenous Australian artist Archie Moore is always special, and different. It is different in the focus on an idea or concept that is strongly personal, clear and direct, but is wider in the Australian and world context and history. He employs out of left field insightful materials with which to engage the viewer. Identity is that consciousness of self-being, physically, mentally and emotionally. This is of course also created by how your family and society you live with, and in, see you. It is central to Moore’s three facets-faces of Australia’s incipient racism, hidden in plain view. It is this concept of self that the Kamilaroi/Bigambul3 artist stimulates us to think about with three carefully formed, profound artworks in the exhibition The Colour Line: Archie Moore & W.E.B. Du Bois,4 and lead us in this discussion with Blood Fraction (2015), (one hundred self-portrait photographs); Family Tree (2021), (Conté crayon on blackboard paint on board); and Graph of Perennial Disadvantage (2020) (acrylic paint on handmade paper made from pages of Hansard, Parliament of Australia).

I don’t speak my father’s native tongue I was born under the Southern sun I don’t know where I belong.

Mo’ju, Native Tongue, 20185 The thought of what is Aboriginal self-consciousness has been tied with the ‘official invisibility’ of Aboriginal people in the national consciousness; the symbolic order of a national history and identity. Archie Moore has referenced two periods of Australian history; the first of which is the difficult time of national construction of identity around federation of the six colonies into a new 94 | 95

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nation-state in 1901. The second period is that of his own life; born in poverty in 1970 on the edge of a regional hamlet where his family, although of Aboriginal descent, struggled to achieve poor ‘white trash’ status. Archie Moore references the writings of Australian surveyor and amateur anthropologist R. H. Matthews6 on the belated defining, listing and recording the Aboriginal tribes and nations of the Australian continent after over a century of attempted genocide. Matthews’ work would not however, move the new nation to include his Indigenous subjects into the Constitution of the newborn nation. Aboriginal people were defined by their absence. Archie Moore used Matthews’ lists and descriptions of Aboriginal nations to create large totemic flags for each ‘Neytion’ (United Neytions, 2017), now installed in the International Departure Lounge at Sydney Airport, after their exhibition in the first iteration of the exhibition of contemporary Australian art, The National, in 2017.

The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the colour-line.

W. E. B. Du Bois7 It was around that time (of Australian federation) that African-American academic and intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois would write of American Negroes carrying a dual consciousness of their own idea of themselves and the largely negative stereotype that white society carried of their fellow black citizens. His The Souls of Black Folk (1903), spoke of a similar social environment where black people were living invisible lives in the minds of the people in power; ‘behind the veil’ of discrimination and the psychological experience in never being recognized as a full human being.

I am a one in ten a number on a list I am a one in ten even though I don’t exist Nobody knows me, but I’m always there A statistic, a reminder of a world that doesn’t care.

One in Ten, UB408 (Archie Moore: “I first heard this song in Croatia in 2001, my most felt line was, ‘I’m another teenage suicide, in a street that has no trees’.”9) There are lies, goddam lies, and statistics. Bureaucracy can use numbers, figures, correlations to erroneously prove for good or bad. To counter negative, unsupported ideas of black Americans crippling American society economically and socially, Du Bois had already carried out social research on the African-American population in Philadelphia, in his book The Philadelphia Negro, in 1899. He later wrote a study on white Americans blaming Negroes for spiking the reconstruction of the southern states following the Civil War, in his 1935 book Black Reconstruction in America. In a prescient action, Du Bois had earlier turned the later figures of Negro contributions to the US economy into coloured Venn type diagrams, indicating how the two races are positively the same but different, and positive black and white images of African-Americans at work and play contributing to US society. (Archie Moore: “I haven't seen a Venn diagram from Du Bois. Most diagrams I've seen are pie charts, bar graphs or infographs.”)

These were presented in an exhibition he organized against the existing racial stereotypes and caricatures, The Exhibit of American Negroes at the Exposition Universelle, held at the Palace of Social Economy at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris; now housed in the Library of Congress, Washington DC.

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For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay.

Robert F. Kennedy10 Archie Moore’s observation on institutional racism takes the form of a colour-striped paper blanket made from the pulped pages from one copy (selected from one hundred copies) of Hansard, Parliament of Australia, where many debates were recorded on the “Aboriginal problem.”

This paper-pulp blanket is slightly thicker than the thin spare blankets handed out to Aboriginal people in compensation for the murder, rapes, dispossession, theft of over seven million square kilometres of land, and other colonial crimes. They remained Property of the Crown even after being given out every Queen’s Birthday, one blanket per person. (Archie Moore: “After all the debate, it was the most minimal needed action you could get away with.”) After legislation brought into being para-military regiments of Native Police under the command of white Australian officers from the mid-1800s, these forces were despatched over Queensland to “disperse” groups of Aboriginal people (often at the request of colonial land holders). The term “disperse” that appears often in these Parliament records, was a euphemism for massacres of Aboriginal people who got in the way of colonial expansion, often just for their existence. Moore’s response to Du Bois’ numbers, figures and graph artworks is Graph of Perennial Disadvantage, where the term “disperse” often appears. In the late 1800s, after decades of attempted annihilation, two positions of Protector of Aboriginals were established in the Aborigines Protection Act of 1897, to relocate surviving populations onto reserves where they would be supplied with poor quality European food and blankets. In previous British colonial actions in North America, blankets carrying smallpox were knowingly given to Native Americans who were subsequently infected and died. The Queensland blankets were colour-coded with yellow, blue or red stripes, setting ones for Aboriginals apart from those for horses and police.

The ‘blanket lists’ would later be used to discover Aboriginal population numbers in particular areas. … there are strange hells in the mind that the desert makes…

Night Parrot Stories11 I have written prior on Family Tree in its 2019 iteration at Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane (‘The Night Parrot: the Entire Contents of Archie Moore’s Mind’) and quote, in part, from it here.

A family life can be an artwork—it is usually a combination of facts and faction/extended facts, an Aboriginal extended family. A large twelve metre-long, five metre-high chalk on blackboard Aboriginal family tree drawing dominates the space. The descent-line record reaches back thousands of years from known, named people like Archie himself; a box on a long limb, low down at the bottom enclosing “Me,” back into the past, to descriptive names; Johnny Come-lately was one, “a Full-blood Aboriginal,” an old gin,12 and those existing only as numbered individuals (subject).

It speaks to the awareness of the enormity of Aboriginal people’s existence on the continent and the magnitude of the colonial crime in the national history. Archie Moore: I left out most of my father’s line but looked and found more names on my mother’s side.

My mother used to tell me stuff that I didn’t know to believe it, but now I’ve been able to cross-check and validate funerals, marriages and births; back to Queen Susan of Welltown (a sheep station, Goondiwindi). The family and my mother are supposed to have a reunion there

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The Colour Line: Archie Moore & W.E.B. Du Bois

later this year that I’m looking forward to. Both my grandparents had German names; Fitz and Clevens. I don’t know how that came about. People in those days weren’t really concerned in recording their real names. It was common for Aboriginal people to adopt or be given their bosses name or the station name. Aboriginal names were often thought to be too hard to spell.13 Normally these family diagrams drawn up by anthropologists revolve around an ‘ego’ depicted by a triangle for males (to the left) joined to circles for females (to the right). Social workers now depict an apparently non-gendered ego as a square/flat rectangle called “genograms” and interestingly in using the social worker boxes system Archie’s family tree could appear to be (intentionally or not) described in ‘post-colonial’ terms, about the dominant social worker interaction in Aboriginal life in the now, than that of traditional anthropologist fieldwork of the past. I imagined Moore drawing this like a scene of someone like Einstein constructing an algebraic equation to solve an intangible, immeasurable, problem—trying to find one small entity far out in the universe. A small individual surviving in the world of internally displaced people from the war of annihilation against them.

Traditionally God can appear in Aboriginal life as a flash of ‘white’ light or a refraction of light into the seven rainbow spectrum colours. Certain creatures display this refraction; the skin of reptiles, wings of certain insects, shellfish, and the scales of fish. Archie Moore meticulously drew row upon row of flat rectangular boxes in his family tree, that run down the wall like chanting names of dead people, as scallops-oyster beds, like fish scales, or a dripping broken honeycomb.

Both metaphors are very evocative of life, sex, regeneration, vitality, and potency. And very totemic and very Aboriginal. … these are remnants of behaviour…

Night Parrot Stories14 There are three black, reasonably large holes in this constellation of ancestral star heroes around three quarters of the way up the board—one I’m told was a major massacre event that leaves a gap ‘in the record’, another black empty space to the right around the same time records a devastating smallpox outbreak, and the third represents a destroying of records from negligence, fire, other natural disasters, or a deliberate act to cover crimes of embezzlement, murder, or mismanagement.

Bill Carey: Do the whites accept these half-castes?

Father Antoine: No, they only create them.

Lady of the Tropics15 In the 1970s I worked in a city office where we would spend Friday night drinking at a nearby pub.

Here, relaxed after a few drinks, my white Australian colleagues made the, for them, comforting comments that there was no ‘Aboriginal problem’, they’d already “shot nearly all the ‘Abo’ men” and were now “fucking the ‘Abo’ women” out of existence!” Around the end of the Victorian era (coinciding with Australian federation), following the abatement of colonial policy of the physical elimination of Aboriginal populations, the survivors were moved onto reservations or Christian missions, to break generational bonds. As a result of many genuine cross-racial marriages, with a mixed-race population then existing, the Australian authorities came to reason that in order to save the ‘whiteness’ of the children of these unions from Aboriginal ‘contamination’, and ‘civilize’ them 100 | 101

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as ‘good white British citizens’, a graduation of what was the crossing of this line, between black and white, came into bureaucratic practice: full blood, half-caste, quarter-castes/quadroon, octoroon, and so on.

Light nigga, dark nigga, faux nigga, real nigga Rich nigga, poor nigga, house nigga, field nigga Still nigga, still nigga!!

The Story of OJ16 The official Australian Commonwealth Department of Aboriginal Affairs’ definition of Aboriginality, from Review of the Administration of the Working Definition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (Canberra, 1981), came to be in three measures—“Are you of Aboriginal blood descent, do you want to publicly declare yourself as of Aboriginal descent, and lastly are you accepted by the Aboriginal community you work and socialize in, as being Aboriginal. You are required to satisfy all three criteria.” In response, Archie Moore’s third work, Blood Fraction talks to this most insidious graduation view of racial identity. His one hundred self-portraits move in a continuum around the room, from a strong black through one percent degrees to a real ‘fairdinkum’ average Australian. A feature of Aboriginal descent is that skin tone/colour is a recessive gene for Aboriginal people; skin tone can vary incredibly. A moving arbitrary line in colour decided whether you could live on a reserve or wherever you could survive in a shanty town on the edge of country townships, whether you could find work, determine where you lived, who you could marry —until late into the twentieth century. An Aboriginal person could apply for exemption from these controls if they could convince authorities they were sufficiently Westernized; civilized. My father, Roy Mundine had worked during WWII with a construction company in the Northern Territory engaged in building airstrips and the Darwin to Alice Springs highway. Despite this, after the war, and like apartheid in South Africa, he was given a small passport to be carried “at all times” that allowed him and his family to live and work off-reserve, to buy a house and move about relatively freely. In the last issuing of that document, when he was forty-two years old in 1961 and I was ten, he was defined as a “half-caste Aborigine.”

This prejudice continues into the present times, but with a twist. In the 2021 King Wood Mollison Indigenous Art Award, skin tone politics appeared in the artwork Branded (2019), a minor award-winner by the artist Carmen Glynn-Braun, born in Alice Springs. Her textile artwork of four large white sheets of Organza was dyed in graduated flesh colours of face foundation make-up.

The sheets are hung overlapping one behind the other from fairest to darkest. She describes the definitional “branding” in full-blood, half-caste, quarter-caste, and so on. She was however, referring to the prejudice by other Aboriginal people as much as white Australians in the present day.

Harry Angel: [almost sobbing] I Know Who I Am Louis Cyphere: [smugly] That’s it Johnny... take a good look... No matter how cleverly you sneak up on a mirror, your reflection always looks you straight in the eye.

Harry Angel: [voice breaking as he sees his reflection] I Know Who I Am [starts screaming as Cyphre makes him remember all the homicides] Harry Angel: I Know Who I AM! Angel Heart17 l

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The Colour Line: Archie Moore & W.E.B. Du Bois

Aboriginal people are always deemed to be suffering from numerous social problems when in fact, it’s possible we only mirror an image of wider Australian society issues. If Aboriginal people suffer an identity consciousness and were victims, murdered, raped, robbed and pushed off their land in an undeclared war, then what of the criminal perpetrators of this attempted genocide?

It appears to me that every generation in Australia approaches an awkward acceptance of the colonial-national birthing crimes and a discussion in resolving a repentance. This comes near at certain celebratory centenary and bicentenary times, though conservative forces in society force a recoiling in terror that they could become so responsible, so adult, so human. It is this identity crisis, this consciousness, to achieve absolution, that is the focal point of our national society trauma and haunts us. We, the nation, have known this for a long time. Will we allow it to shadow and stain us for eternity?

Notes 1 The Bundjalung people are Aboriginal Australians who are the original custodians of the northern coastal area of New South Wales, located approximately 550 kilometres northeast of Sydney. The poem ‘I am Somebody’, was written by Dr. William Holmes Borders, Sr., senior pastor at the Greater Wheat Street Baptist Church and civil rights activist in Atlanta, Georgia 2 Lyle Roberts Senior was the last initiated man of the Bundjalung Nation who set down three principles for his descendants to live by; see www.monumentaustralia.org.au 3 The Kamilaroi people are Aboriginal Australians whose lands extend from New South Wales to southern Queensland, and the Bigambul people are Aboriginal Australians of the Northern Tablelands and Border Rivers regions of New South Wales and Queensland 4

University New South Wales Galleries, Sydney January–March 2021; see https://artdesign.unsw.edu.au/unsw-galleries/the-colour-line

5

Mo’ju, Native Tongue, featuring Pasefika Vitoria Choir, 2018

6

Robert Hamilton Mathews (1841–1918) was an Australian surveyor and self-taught anthropologist who studied the Aboriginal cultures of Australia, especially in the states of Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. He was in his early fifties when he began the investigations of Aboriginal society that would dominate the last twenty-five years of his life 7

W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903

8

‘One in Ten’, a single by UB40, from their second album Present Arms, 1981

9

Archie Moore, all quotes from a conversation with the author, 5 July 2021

10

Robert F. Kennedy, remarks to the Cleveland City Club, Ohio, 5 April 1968

11

Night Parrot Stories, documentary film, Rod Nugent director, 2016; lookingglasspictures.com.au

12

An offensive term for an Aboriginal woman

13

Archie Moore, op cit.

14

Night Parrot Stories, ibid.

15

1939 American Hollywood drama film set in Saigon

16

The Story of OJ, by hip hop artist Jay-Z from his album 4.44, 2017

17

American film directed by Alan Parker, 1987

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In 2006, the Palestinian conceptual artist Khalil Rabah introduced a satirical project titled The United States of Palestine Airlines, announcing the opening of four airline offices in London, Beirut, Kuwait and Hamburg. Each office consisted of a large model of a fiberglass plane with a logo made from fragments of airline brands, aluminum clocks frozen at different times, a glazed world map on the wall with vague borders, and a leather sofa. They looked like stylish 1960s airline offices, except there were no clients. In this project, Rabah, whose art practice is based on linguistic manipulation, navigates through the ironies of living under occupation and touches upon the notion of isolation. The United States of Palestine Airlines project compels one to confront the impossibility of realizing such a project, for not only the creation of a ‘Palestine Airlines’ is out of question, but also the unification of the fragmented ‘states’ of Palestine is impossible, or so it seemed then. l

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But what if Rabah had clients who managed to source a flight to Palestine, where would they fly to? In Palestine, there are no airports at which Rabah’s planes might land. The only airport that Palestinians were permitted to build and operate was the Yasser Arafat International Airport in Gaza. Constructed in 1998, it operated until October 2000 until the Second Intifada; Israel bombed it the following year and bulldozed it in 2002. Recently, a Palestinian Authority decision was made to close the Palestinian Airlines company and to sell its two planes parked for over twenty years in Amman and Cairo. There was a hope that both would operate if the two-state solution materialized, yet maintenance costs became high, and the pilots are now retired due to their age and lack of “modern flight training.”1 In the past, Palestinians used two airports constructed during the British Mandate to connect with the world—Jerusalem and Lydda Airports, but both are also no longer accessible to Palestinians. Jerusalem Airport, also known as Qalandiya Airport, is the oldest and is being turned into an Israeli settlement. It was built several kilometres north of Jerusalem next to Qalandiya village in 19252 and connected Jerusalem to Beirut, Cairo, Kuwait, Aden and other cities, receiving pilgrims from Jerusalem and the Arab world. Following Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in the Six-Day War in 1967 it seized the airport, flights to and from the Arab countries stopped and Israel used the airport for internal flights until 2000.

Today, the abandoned art deco building is turning into a ruin due to negligence. Cracks and grass cover the runaway. High rise buildings surround the airport on one side and the industrial zone of Atarout settlement and the eight-metre high Separation Wall encloses it from the other sides.

Entry to the site is forbidden. The young Palestinian generation who grew up with the Separation Wall blocking their view of the airport know hardly anything about its existence, let alone its history.3 106 | 107

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As part of its policy to re-shape the demographics of the Jerusalem area in particular,4 Israel announced plans in February 2020 to build a settlement on the airport site and the surrounding area consisting of 11,000 housing units.5 Land confiscation and building demolition are expected to make space for the settlement and its road network. The connection with the world that the airport once represented will be transformed into a source of dispossession, obstruction and an evershrinking geography. The name Qalandiya is now associated with the infamous checkpoint, built in early 2000s adjacent to the airport site to limit Palestinians access to Jerusalem.

In 2012, an art initiative used the name Qalandiya to draw international attention to the area and the contradictions it represents. With the title Qalandiya International, the initiative was led initially by Jack Persekian, as Artistic Director and launched by eight Palestinian art institutions: Al Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, A.M. Qattan Foundation, Palestinian Art CourtAl Hoash, International Art Academy Palestine, Sakakini Cultural Center, Riwaq, and Eltiqa and Shababeek initiatives in Gaza. At a later stage more institutions joined, including the Arab Culture Association in Haifa, Dar El Nimer in Beirut, and Darat Al Funun in Amman. Their aim was to consolidate resources and work collectively to promote Palestinian visual art across the fragmented Palestinian geographies and to build bridges with the international art sector. The initiative was launched in Qalandiya village, as a reminder of the origins of the name. Why Qalandiya?

Qalandiya has been associated with the infamous Israeli checkpoint that continues to suffocate the West Bank, disconnecting it from Jerusalem and the rest of the world… However, Qalandiya has other connotations that have been deliberately smeared or totally erased over the years… There is the Qalandiya Airport, for example… the Qalandiya refugee camp, and Qalandiya village (which the Wall has divided into two separate parts). Qalandiya is where many paradoxes meet. It was the point of connection with the rest of the world until 1967, but has become the symbol of disconnection, isolation, segregation, and fragmentation.6 Qalandiya International represented the power and agency of a group of art professionals and artists in creating change: rather than giving in to isolation, they sought ways to connect with the world. The reputable The Jerusalem Show came under the umbrella of Qalandiya International as well as the Riwaq Biennale and the Young Artist of the Year Award. The resulting biennale-type event managed to attract both Palestinian and international artists through four editions, organized between 2012 and 2018 (now paused due to the COVID-19 pandemic). It attracted international visitors and media, but most of all instigated collaborative artistic projects and offered a platform for young Palestinian artists to engage with international art sectors despite their isolation and disconnection. Qalandiya International also prompted international artists to produce artworks inspired by the Palestinian Cause. A series of art works by Australian artist Tom Nicholson, who participated in three editions, referenced the historical connection of colonialism in both Australia and Palestine. British artist Cornelia Parker presented a video work Made in Bethlehem (2012) in which she drew a comparison between crowns of thorns made by craftsmen in Bethlehem for Easter pilgrims, with the barbed wire found throughout the West Bank. Swiss artist Uriel Orlow presented Unmade Film (2013), an audio-visual project on the Deir Yassin massacre7 committed by Zionist paramilitary groups near Jerusalem in 1948. Another Australian artist, Richard Bell participated in Qalandiya International in 2016, presenting his Embassy (tent) project on the rooftop of Al Ma’mal in the old city of Jerusalem, highlighting the plight of Australian aborigines and the Bedouins in Araqib village in Naqab, both of whom have been subject to continual attempts of erasure. l

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Comparable to the attempts of erasure of the Qalandiya Airport from the landscape and historical narratives, Lydda Airport’s history has also been obliterated. Located in the northern outskirts of the Palestinian city of Lydda, southeast of Jaffa, the airport was constructed in 1930 as a stop along the Empire Route for the British national airline, Imperial Airways.8 In 1948, a few days before committing the massacre in adjacent Lydda killing 400 Palestinians, the Israeli army seized the airport.9 They also seized the town and forced out thousands of its indigenous inhabitants.

The airport’s name was altered to Lod Airport until 1973 when it was renamed after Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion. Now it is the main international airport in Israel. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are not allowed to use it as part of segregation policies.

Interested in silenced historical narratives, Palestinian artist Emily Jacir chose this site as an imaginary location of her work Lydda Airport (2009). In the black and white single-channel animation video, she echoes a story told by Palestinian sociologist Salim Tamari about his father Edmond Tamari from Jaffa. Edmond Tamari, who was a transport employee in the 1930s, was asked to take a bouquet of flowers to Lydda Airport and wait for the arrival of the aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart to welcome her to Palestine. Tamari waited for a long time but Earhart’s plane never arrived. Jacir, who performs in the video, stands in front of the empty airport building—which appears to be under construction—then she reappears on one of its terraces holding a bouquet of flowers waiting for someone to arrive. No one can be seen in the airport except her. An aircraft emerges on the runway, and another ascends into the sky, yet still no one arrives. On the aircraft front we see the words Palestine Airways Limited, written in Arabic English and Hebrew. The rotation of the l

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plane’s propellers in the looping video generates a sense of repetition amid silence and anticipation, as Jacir keeps looking into the empty void of the horizon. Her continued presence exhibits an acute sense of anxiety, of helplessness and inability to control the pace of events, and a repetition of inaction and non-arrival that echoes the endless act of ‘waiting’ in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot.

Jacir’s artwork can be seen as a reflection of an endless situation of waiting for the unknown, of the Palestinian situation, her bouquet of flowers an optimistic look of high expectations.

LINGERING PRESENTNESS Although Palestinian airports do not exist, they remain a strong metaphor for the ongoing Palestinian condition. They represent the current moment, of interstitial spaces for transition, places of temporality where passengers do not undertake any action; instead they wait for the future to arrive. In these anonymous zones solitude and individuality manifest as opposed to communality.

Palestinians live in an airport state of mind: although they live in “Palestine” they still dream about (the other, real) Palestine. The Palestine they live in is occupied, while the one they dream of is free.10 Palestinians living in exile experience a similar situation, they can see Palestine on a map but in reality it is not accessible to them. They cannot return to their homes.

Regarded as the Palestinian national poet, Mahmoud Darwish, originally from Al-Birweh village near the Acre coast, which was occupied and depopulated by Israeli forces in 1948, lived in exile long enough to sum up the absurdity of living in a lingering present. Eloquently he writes about Athens airport, as a metaphor for Palestinian exile: 110 | 111

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Athens airport disperses us to other airports. Where can I fight? asks the fighter.

Where can I deliver your child? a pregnant woman shouts back.

Where can I invest my money? asks the officer.

This is none of my business, the intellectual says.

Where did you come from? asks the customs official.

And we answer: From the sea!

Where are you going?

To the sea, we answer.

What is your address?

A woman of our group says: My village is my bundle on my back.

We have waited in the Athens airport for years. …

Athens airport welcomes its visitors without end.

Yet, like the benches in the terminal, we remain, impatiently waiting for the sea.

How many more years longer, O Athens airport?11 Numerous Palestinian artists have explored the concepts of suspended time, and waiting.

Living in exile, artist Taysir Batniji explores the static present and disconnected geographies in his artworks. After moving to France, Batniji attempted resettling in Gaza three times, the last being in 2005. Soon after in 2006, he had to abruptly leave following the kidnap of an Israeli soldier and the subsequent bombardment and siege of Gaza by Israeli forces. Overnight Batniji found himself in Paris without his belongings, losing both sense of time and geography. Batniji produced a series of artworks inspired by this phase of disorientation. In Suspended Time (2006), Batniji used an hourglass to reflect time that has come to a standstill. He placed the hourglass on its side, the sand resting at the bottom of the two conjoined glass orbs. Gravity interrupts the sand’s movement; time freezes, the sand ceases to progress from the future to the present. Instead it remains static in the two glass orbs, demonstrating the discontinuation of time and the disconnection between two geographies; homeland and exile.

Majd Abdelhamid has similarly used an hourglass, in Hourglass (2012), in which he substitutes sand with crushed cement taken from the Separation Wall in the West Bank. In recent decades, this cement barrier has been invading the landscape, becoming instrumental in Israel’s expansion of controlling structures and colonization of Palestinian land. Using cement powder in the hourglass conveys the artist’s pessimistic perspective of both Palestinian present and future.

Unlike sand, this deep grey powder passes slowly down the handmade hourglass creating a heavy ambiance. Abdelhamid’s hourglass gives a feeling of a bleak present and future in occupied lands.

From a different perspective, Hani Zurob examined the concept of waiting from the viewpoint of his relationship with his son Qoudsi, in two series of artworks titled Waiting (2009) and Flying Lesson (2009). Qoudsi has to fly with his mother from Paris where they live, to Jerusalem twice a year, each time for three months, for them to be able to keep their Jerusalem residency which Israel would otherwise revoke if they did not, and so they would never be able to return.

Since Zurob has a Gazan identity card he cannot join them on these trips; like every Gazan, he is not permitted to visit Jerusalem, nor the West Bank. In Flying Lesson and Waiting, Zurob discusses exile, separation, virtual means of transportation, as well as virtual spaces of encounter. During the visits to Jerusalem, his son imagines various means of connection with his father by acquiring different l

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transportation toys to recompense their parting. The father attempts to overcome this separation by suggesting imaginative spaces of encounters. Attempts to traverse the Separation Wall are strongly present in the artworks while the layers of colours and lines on the canvas emphasize emotional and material barriers.

On the rubble of a demolished home, artist Raeda Saadeh sits knitting, using an oversized ball of yarn, in Penelope (2010). The photographic self-portrait shows Saadeh vaguely looking towards the horizon as she patiently works to complete her knitting. Her posture and expression reflect a mixture of determination, calmness and contemplation amidst the surrounding devastation.

In this work, Saadeh is practically trapped in a long present moment, as long as the thread of yarn she is weaving. She is waiting for something to happen, perhaps to salvage herself from the enclosing destruction. Saadeh, who normally places herself at the core of her artistic practice, relying heavily upon performance, reflects a familiar scenario of the Palestinian landscape that has been repeatedly documented by media and human rights organizations. Yet it still shocks, and accentuates the contradictions of this reality. It also suggests the necessity to carry on armed with patience and determination. Her looks are full of hope that salvation is on the way.

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Lecturer of philosophy and cultural studies at Birzeit University, Rami Salameh finds the Palestinian obsession with documenting Israel’s violations of their human rights has actually substituted their act of resistance against this colonial regime. In his opinion, it has contributed to the present state of waiting, that Palestinians have been living in since the Oslo Accords.12 Writing about imagining the future of Palestine, analyst and writer Yara Hawari explains that by “facing a constant process of erasure, Palestinians find themselves in a situation in which their past and their futures are denied. They are locked in a continuous present in which the settler colonial power, Israel, determines temporal and spatial boundaries.”13 Hawari places emphasis on this by suggesting that in seeking to control perceptions of reality, the settler-colonial project aims “to bind Indigenous and colonized people in a seemingly perpetual state of being, or normalized stasis. Imagining a future beyond this state is thus a rebellious and radical act and is by no means an easy one.”14 UNITED GEOGRAPHIES In Divine Intervention (2002), Palestinian film director, Elia Suleiman proposes a rebellious moment, in a sardonic setting at an Israeli checkpoint. Suleiman, who performs in the film, endlessly waits for his girlfriend at the checkpoint. Sometimes she arrives, many other times, when the checkpoint is closed, she does not. As the situation becomes frustrating for the two lovers, the girlfriend decides to act. She parks her car at the closed checkpoint and decides to cross it on foot, no matter the consequences, against the instructions of Israeli soldiers. She steps out of the car in an elegant outfit with sunglasses and crosses the checkpoint with steady confident strides. The shouting soldiers stand in a line and fire shots into the air, but she doesn’t stop. The watchtower suddenly collapses leading to the destruction of the entire checkpoint structure, as the girlfriend passes to the other side without even noticing.

Dividing a land into geographies and applying different laws in every section, under the umbrella of the colonial state, is geared towards preventing moments of collective rebellion from taking place. Qalandiya International was a revolutionary attempt in the visual art arena which connected geographies, even for a limited period of time. Yet, what has become more obvious recently was the Jerusalem Uprising in May 2021. In that moment the ‘States of Palestine’, of Khalil Rabah’s imagined project, became united for the first time. Palestinians living in fragmented geographies realized their collective power and their ability to act rather than wait for someone to act on their behalf. The people, wherever they lived, became the map, rather than living within the lines and borders designed to restrain their movement. This culminated in the General Strike on 18 May 2021, when Palestinians in historic Palestine exercised their agency, went on strike and marched in protest against the Israel’s continued violence and discrimination.15 In 1996, shortly after the signing of the Oslo Accords, Palestinian artist, Mona Hatoum presented her installation Present Tense in Gallery Anadiel in Jerusalem. Hatoum used 2,200 square blocks of Nablus soap, a traditional olive oil soap, as her canvas. She applied tiny red beads on the surface to create an outline of the new shrunken map of Palestine which came about as a result of the Oslo Accords. The fact that soap dissolves with water emphasizes the temporality of this suggested version of the map of Palestine, its title conveying a form of tension, or unstable present.

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Don’t Forget How to Fly

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Don’t Forget How to Fly

A decade later, Hatoum produced a work titled Waiting is Forbidden (2006). The blue enamel sign in Arabic and English is similar to the signs found on streets giving directions to passersby. Not only does this work symbolize the perpetual state of waiting of Palestinians, as time has taken possession of them, but it is also a clear invitation against subordination to the present. It can be understood as a warning against accepting the status quo: waiting to return home (in the case of millions of Palestinians in the diaspora and refugee camps) or waiting for home to return (in the case of millions of Palestinians living in occupied Palestine). Waiting has become integral to the Palestinian condition since 1948: and this is when Hatoum’s work gives directions: Do not wait. It is forbidden.

Notes 1 Ahmad Abu Amer, ‘PA shuts down Palestinian Airlines, shuttering hopes for airport’, Al Monitor, 6 January 202; https://www.al-monitor.com/ originals/2021/01/palestinian-airlines-cease-operations-airport-financial.html; accessed July 2021 2

Eldad Brin, ‘Gateway to the World: The Golden Age of Jerusalem Airport, 1948–67’, Jerusalem Quarterly 85, Institute for Palestine Studies, Beirut, Spring 2021, p. 63 3

Nahed Awwad, Five Minutes from Home, documentary film, 2007. Produced by Akka Films, Monarch Films and Caravan Films

4 Check the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (B’tselem) website section on Jerusalem; https://www.btselem.org/jerusalem/ 5

Daoud Kutttab, ‘Another push to make Qalandia Airport a Jewish settlement’, Al Monitor, 26 February 2020; https://www.al-monitor.com/ originals/2020/02/israel-plan-settlement-qalandia-airport-jerusalem-palestine.html; accessed July 2021

6 Qalandiya International, Biennial Foundation; https://www.biennialfoundation.org/biennials/qalandiya-international-palestine-2/; accessed July 2021 7 For more information about the Deir Yassin massacre see; https://www.paljourneys.org/en/timelineoverallchronology?synopses[]= 21194&nid=21194 8

Emily Jacir, Lydda Airport (2009); see http://sharjahart.org/sharjah-art-foundation/projects/lydda-airport; accessed July 2021

9

‘Lydda, 9–13 July 1948: A city-wide massacre culminating in the Death March’, Palestinian Journeys, Timeline; https://www.paljourneys.org/ en/timeline/highlight/24073/lydda-9-13-july-1948; accessed July 2021 10 Rana Barakat, ‘The Right to Wait: Exile, Home and Return’, Seeking Palestine, New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home, Penny Johnson and Raja Shehadeh eds, Northampton MA: Olive Branch Press, 2013 11 Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems, eds and trans. Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein, Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2003 12

Rami Salameh, ‘Place, Law and Daily Life Awareness in Palestine’, lecture given at Sakakini Cultural Centre, 27 August 2019.

Rami Salameh is a lecturer of philosophy and cultural studies at Birzeit University 13 Yara Hawari, ‘Radical Futures: When Palestinians Imagine’, Al Shabaka: the Palestinian Policy Network, 24 March 2020; https://al-shabaka. org/commentaries/radical-futures-when-palestinians-imagine/; accessed July 2021 14

Ibid.

15

‘In Pictures: In show of unity, Palestinians go on strike’, Al Jazeera, 18 May 2021; https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/5/18/in-picturespalestinians-unite-with-a-general-strike

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The Witness’ Account of the Other Side From Cracks in History: Azadeh Akhlaghi’s

By An Eyewitness

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We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.

Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces1 The Enlightenment concept of history as a natural progression of ideas punctuated by binary oppositions envisioned the world in a hierarchical order. Instrumental to colonial expansion, the scientific expedition to discover the new world, a tabula rasa, was itself in need of a rescue from the timelessness of chaos. The dominant as the progenitor of meaning finds the essentialist subject as ontologically faulty and fit to be appropriated, in accordance with the Empire’s logics of origin.

The two World Wars, decolonization, and the political revolutions of the twentieth century decentred the notions of linear movement of time, thereby propelling discussions away from the necessity of homogeneity, towards the multiple vantage points of heterogeneity. The transformation to the “epoch of simultaneity,” for Michel Foucault in Of Other Spaces, sets the course for heterotopia.

If, determined by the progression and evolution of history, the spaces of the past eschewed the possibility of divergent perspectives, then in the “the epoch of juxtaposition,” the heterotopias “simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” the conventional sites.2 This redressal of spatio-temporal politics offers a fecund site to explore Iran-based photographer Azadeh Akhlaghi’s series By An Eyewitness (2012), as an alternative view of what is garbed under normalcy in the dominant political landscape of Iran.

Akhlaghi’s reconstruction of historical events in the form of the restaged photographs, illustrating the moment of the death of seventeen people standing in opposition to the then political regime, was presented in the exhibition By An Eyewitness, at Mohsen Gallery, Tehran in March 2013. Imbricated in the turbulent politics of Iran, By An Eyewitness is an affirmation of the indelible impression the historical events of the Constitutional Revolution (1905–11) and the Iranian Revolution (1978–79) have had on the subsequent generations of the country. Despite the fact that the idea of a constitution, the focal feature of Western democracy, was opposed to “the fibre of political thought in Islam,”3 it was adopted into the political fabric in Iran as a means to oppose the rising impact of imperialism. The increasing awareness of the existence of democracy and legalism outside the world of Iran triggered the surge of the Constitutional Revolution. In 1906, the reigning king Mozaffar ad-Din Shah Qajar approved legislative reforms that paved the way for democratic resistance against autocratic tendencies in Iranian politics. The intervening years before the Iranian Revolution were punctuated by social and economic unrest, culminating in protests against the last reigning king of Iran, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. The resulting Iranian Revolution ushered in the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran under the authority of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Iran was never colonized by a Western power in the strictest sense, yet the shadow of the West persisted, leaving the country in a state of constant political anxiety and social turmoil.

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The incidents that Akhlaghi portrays are those for which no easily accessible photographic documentation—apart from isolated examples—is available, especially in the public domain.

Akhlaghi reconstructs the incidents through staged photography, recreating seventeen deaths between the two revolutions. Born in 1978—thus being a member of the Nasl-e Sevvom, or the Third Generation, of the post-Islamic Revolutionary decades—Akhlaghi has witnessed the recurrent imposition of dominant narratives on history and cultural legacies.4 The creative intervention by Akhlaghi, born a year before the culmination of the Iranian Revolution, attempts to fill the lacuna of an official history that has been marked by a system of filtered knowledge and circumvented law.

Akhlaghi’s work directly speaks to rising trends at the dawn of the new millennium, where the art world saw a plethora of creative minds that spoke about social turmoil, a corollary of political authority. What remains excluded from the realm of the political agenda finds space in the work of these artists. In doing so, the artists engage their audiences to relook at the silences to avoid its reoccurrence. As part of this Third Generation, the artist’s transnational positioning (shuttling between Melbourne and Tehran) enables reconciliation, by approaching her artistic idea though a critical distance sans emotional angst. Speaking about the bearing of her own transnational identity upon her work, Akhlaghi says, “I studied computer science, not photography at RMIT University.

However, living in Australia for eight years, and travelling around the world during the past fifteen years, gave me the opportunity to understand the same request of people with various cultures for human rights and freedom.”5 When the promises of globalization—of equality and solidarity—were broken, the artist reconfigured the world’s complexities driven by disparities.

Akhlaghi’s interest in creating this photographic project stems from the Green Movement of 2009 in Iran and the pan-Arabic 2010 uprising of the Arab Spring.6 The Third Generation witnessed a segue from the years of political reformation under President Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005) to the conformist rule of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005–13). Beginning in 2005, peaceful demonstrations against Ahmadinejad were systematically squashed. In 2009, when Ahmadinejad won his second presidential term, mass protests were taken over by millennials confronting authority with the question, “Where is my vote?” To stifle accusations against the Ahmadinejad government of hijacking the election, many protestors were taken into custody.

These nationwide arrests (incurring fatalities) could not stop the second term of Ahmadinejad; yet it ushered in what is known as the Green Movement. For Akhlaghi, it was the killing of the student Neda Agha-Soltan during a peaceful demonstration in Tehran, that set the clock back to the days of the previous two revolutions. Despite state censorship, the protestors took to the digital platforms of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to mobilize large-scale demonstrations, and to take an antithetical stand to the conservative political discourse.

This also triggered a crackdown on photographers by Iranian government authorities.

Photographic images of political agitation, once circulated in print and social media, metamorphose into archival documents. Threatened by this potency of image-representation—an act of veracity upon the event—government authorities implemented a rule requiring permits for documentary photographers working in certain locations. To outmanoeuvre these restrictions, photographers took recourse to the tradition of staged photography: this genre has been synonymous with the history of Iranian photography since the nineteenth century. This alternative pursuit in the hands of the artist strives to exercise the creative freedom that has been otherwise denied. Against this socio-political fabric, Akhlaghi, like her contemporaries, takes refuge in staged photography, by

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The Witness’ Account of the Other Side From Cracks in History: Azadeh Akhlaghi’s By An Eyewitness

using technical and theatrical innovation to reconstruct the events from political history that have been otherwise erased from public collective memory.7 The aim of this essay is not to reiterate the complicated network of body, place, props and time that informs the art of making this form of photography. Rather, it is based on the premise that photography is the evidence of an event that is non-recurring in linear time. Yet, it has the potential to call for an act of redemption. Even if the higher political officials are far removed from the circle of redemption, then the artist, sensitive to the loss of life, extends her solidarity to the family and friends who have lost their loved ones in the fight against totalitarianism. The first step to achieve redemption is to acknowledge the misdoing. Through her photographs, Akhlaghi removes the cover from the varnished ‘truth’ and revisits the events which bear the scars of trauma, thereby reintroducing the acts of political failing.

When the struggle to document political agitation has remained a consistent phenomenon, from the period of the 1979 Revolution to those events of 2009, Akhlaghi ‘turns the pages’ of history by retracing the events that denied a citizen’s right to live. As a witness, Akhlaghi becomes a politically charged figure who recognizes the events of the past rendered silent in official histories.

Instead of perpetuating denial, as history highlights and aggravates the pain and trauma of the disenfranchized, Akhlaghi’s visual representation paves the way for remembrance and reconciliation. This act of making visibile the untoward event participates in the recollections of the past.

By An Eyewitness has garnered attention in addressing the discursive ideas of the posttraumatic experiences of the Third Generation, and as an opportunity to implement a meaningmaking exercise by looking at an array of events embedded within the semiotics of photography.

Akhlaghi’s photographic works hark back to the collective memory of the past and use creative imagination to refashion an ensemble of “miniatures of reality.”8 If Barthes ties the umbilical cord between the photograph and viewer,9 it is Azoulay’s “civic skill”10 that opens an opportunity to turn the irrevocable past, evoked in the fictionalized world, into a fecund site enabling a shift towards the unseen reality. The orchestrated framing of each photograph anchors a possibility to dissect the powerplay in the dominant discourse that has reduced the dead to disenfranchized citizens.

The ensuing considerations critique the heterotopic world of Akhlaghi’s photographs by following Rentschler’s understanding of John Peters’ article on ‘Witnessing,’11 as a testament of “the veracity of what a first-person witness sees often use pain as their medium.”12 Both the English word “martyr” as well as the Arabic equivalent “shaheed” originally signified “witness”; to add shaheed in Farsi means “beloved”. The overlap of the terms—witness and martyr—has a long history of political and religious connotation, where the witness’ testimony on the visibility of the sacrifice made by the martyr underlines the importance attached to remembrance of loss. In this essay, the notion of Akhlaghi’s images as heterotopic domains, explores a three-pronged reality of witness.

First, as experienced by the kin of the dead. Second, the collective memory of the past shared by the witness serves as one of the many building blocks to the orchestration of staged photography (Akhlaghi as a member of the ensemble cast of the photographs is a double witness to the re-enactment, as photographer and subject.) Thirdly, the audience, while viewing the scenes of death, reinvigorates the position of witness to the restaged historical event, which has otherwise been erased from the mainstream narrative.

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IN MEDIAS RES When and where the subject of the photograph is a person who has suffered some form of injury, a viewing of the photograph that reconstructs the photographic situation and allows a reading of the injury inflicted on others becomes a civic skill, not an exercise in aesthetic appreciation.

Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography13 Viewing the seventeen works in By An Eyewitness is akin to entering in medias res: chaos permeates the scene of each dissenter’s death. The overall scene in each photograph raises a strident voice to the exigent event of killing and death that it aims to revisit. The scale of the mise-en-scène is proportionate to the souring atmosphere, fraught with socio-political tension. The act of elimination by state agencies disrobes the citizens of the right to live, to consequently enforce an erasure of a defiant voice from the political narrative. Following the definition of in medias res, the triad: the photographer, subject of the photographs and the viewers unravel the knowledge of the situation in which they find themselves participating, via the channels of backstories: in this case with the aid of archival and oral histories.

The photographs in By An Eyewitness are lacerated by the truth of history and act as “transit visas.”14 Here, Akhlaghi dons the role of witness, a political agency to play out “participatory citizenship” —the act of taking and viewing images assures citizenship that transcends borders between mediums, between reality and fiction, and between nations. Underpinning this participatory citizenship is an affirmation of the role of subject and viewer as entrenched in civic engagement and political action—that the witness creating meaning in the photograph ceases to be a perpetrator of official history but engages in an ethical practice which bridges the gap between citizen and one dispossessed.

The dramatic effect of Akhlaghi’s life-size landscape images—of the demise of filmmakers, poets, political prisoners, politicians, social scientists, an athlete, and university students—is realized through a large team of professionals, to mention the cinematographer and director Mahmoud Kalari, Asghar Farhadi is the chief photographer, and the costume designer is Iraj Raminfar. The catalogue published in conjunction with the exhibition has lengthy accounts of the available oral histories and newspaper reports, allowing the audience to have a reasonable knowledge of the events leading up to the deaths. In the pre-production stage of the images, storyboards were populated with references to famous paintings and images by photojournalists, to prepare the actors for the series of steps to be undertaken to prepare the sets of the staged photographs. Works of painters such as Edvard Munch, Francisco de Goya, Kathe Kollwitz, Jacques-Louis David and Caravaggio, as well as the works of photojournalists Georges Merillion, Kaveh Golestan, John Filo and Jürgen Henschel served as points of reference for the flow of the actors’ performances in the front of the camera.

For instance, in the image Azar Shariat Razavi, Ahmad Ghandchi, Mostafa Bozorgnia, 7 December 1953 (2012), in order to add historical value, Akhlaghi draws excerpts from the Ettela’at newspaper and Memoirs of an Odd Physician (2005) by Shariat Razavi and Gholam Reza, to suggest how three students of the engineering department of Tehran University were killed. To compound these words with a visual composition that authenticates a sense of anarchy, the motion of the people running in panic is frozen within the photograph. To achieve this impression of frozen movement, images by photojournalist Kaveh Golestan, from his Revolution in Iran collection, determine the visual arrangement, as does Jürgen Henschel’s photograph, The Death of Benno Ohnesorg (1967).

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The Witness’ Account of the Other Side From Cracks in History: Azadeh Akhlaghi’s By An Eyewitness

This is the only image in the series that showcases disorder in the social fabric following the Iranian coup d’état in 1953—supported by Great Britain and the United States—which overthrew democracy in Iran. The military coup deposed Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and placed Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in power. The public outcry metamorphosed into a slew of demonstrations against the shah. Sites of education were also not immune from political tension, the shah’s soldiers entering the campus of Tehran University. On the morning of 7 December 1953, a day on which there had been no demonstrations, soldiers entered the Faculty of Engineering, killing three students—Azar Shariat Razavi, Ahmad Ghandchi and Mostafa Bozorgnia. Witness accounts of the gory sight of hot water from a broken radiator mixed with blood flowing in streams across the faculty floors are available in the print media. In Akhlaghi’s photographic re-enactment, three predominant colours—the mostly black-grey attire of the students, the beige coloured corridors and the red blood splattered on the floor—act as layers to add depth to the form of the image. And, among the students rushing down the stairs, Akhlaghi in her signature black attire and dark red scarf, can be seen looking at the dead student at the foot of the stairs, an almost unmoving witness to murder.

Adjoining both past and present, the mises-en-scène of the staged photographs is recreated from the memories documented contemporaneously to events, both visual documentation and oral history, to give real shape to the fictionalized history. Professor in Iranian Studies, Hamid Dabashi observes, “The formal audacity of the pictures is in sharp contrast with the foggy memory that the blissful history has cast upon them—they are the strident visual interpretations of otherwise selfeffacing memories.”15 The hermeneutic framework of witnessing the heterotopic world of staged photographs underscores the question posed by Akhlaghi in the catalogue, about springboarding a change in historical perspective: “Is it possible that we come upon a radical opening in the course of the history, a crack in which we see the spirits of the past, the people who fought and died tragically for the cause that we believe in, and walk with them along the streets of our contemporary cities?”16 When Akhlaghi addresses her question, to not a select few but multiple witnesses encompassed within “we,” she disturbs the conventional patterns of time and space to let the experience of past define the present for a better future, as a collective practice. The possibility of heterotopias laid out by Foucault serves as a fertile platform to achieve divergent meanings within her works. The images of poet, journalist and politician Mohammad Farrokhi Yazdi in Qasr Prison, and Olympic athlete Gholamreza Takhti in the Atlantic Hotel, speak to Foucault’s ideas of heterotopias as a mechanism to confront the illusion of reality—the sites of prison and hotel are attentive to the function of heterotopia as a means to expose real space by remaining its other.

But Akhlaghi takes a step further to complicate the promise of pluriformity that Foucault seeks in heterotopia, to suggest the impossibility of escape from reality, even in the form of illusion, in its entirety against imperious power. The prison, as a heterotopia, shatters the illusion of creative freedom of the poet Farrokhi Yazdi when a doctor forcibly administered him poison. The hotel, that conjures the illusion of hope against the reality of isolation, does not fail to ensure the feasibility of Takhti’s death, to cut short a soaring voice against the shah’s rule.

More often than not, heterotopias are experienced as a break from the conventional understanding of time and space to act as a counter site, where the tropes of conventional sites are incessantly contested and inverted. In a similar vein, the locations in Akhlaghi’s series are turned into counter-spaces to accomplish acts incongruous to their conventional function. Unlike many photographers who produce work from the amenity of their studio, Akhlaghi’s stage is delimited to a singular place. Her images are an invitation to her audience to witness Iranian life lived and 124 | 125

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experienced immediately after the death of the subject, or when the news of assassination is received. This is followed by a period of mourning, either in public or inside the closed walls of private homes, or by picturesque mountains and rivers under an open sky. As Foucault proposes, heterotopias are isolated, yet penetrable places. The incidents of killings for a moment breach these locations and beyond, to disavow the undertakings of daily activities and reveal the lesser-seen side of life, rampant with absurdities.

The viewer enters the mise-en-scène of the killing of Marzieh Ahmadi Oskuie, a member of the organization Fedayan of Iran (Fedai), who raised her voice against rising economic inequality and censorship of the press. At a crossroads, Oskuie’s chador floats in the air as she is caught in mid-fall after being shot by the police. On the right side of the two-point perspective image, we see Hamid Ashraf, Oskuie’s friend, being pushed aside by Akhlaghi, who is an active witness to the scene, an exception to her passive presence in the other images. Ashraf’s presence is a reference to the personal lives of the two who were believed to be partners. It was unusual for Fedai members to attend the covert meetings of comrades, so it was an exception that Ashraf tried to save Oskuie.

Giving an equal emphasis to the archetypal symbols of Iranian culture omnipresent in city streets, Akhlaghi populates the scene with a baker holding nan barbari (a typical Iranian bread) at the right side of the image.

When the poet Forough Farrokhzad was killed in a car accident in the Darrous district in northern Tehran, the people on the street rushed to save her. The impact of the accident was forceful enough to open the driver’s door; consequently, she hit her head against the curb. The official version of her death has the unconscious Farrokhzad dying while being taken to hospital. The urgency with which people on the street tried to help seems antithetical to the social treatment meted out to her when she was alive. The poet promoted the ideas of women’s desires and sexuality through her works that remained unaligned with those notions espoused by the shah. Living alone with her young son after her divorce, Farrokhzad epitomized the individuality denied to the Iranian women of her times.

Unlike the people in real life who shied away from her, the people on the street at least in Akhlaghi’s reimagination extend a helping hand before her demise. The driver of the school van along with school children and the photographer do not hesitate to help the dying poet. To recreate the sense of oneness and the significance to inculcate it at a young age, Akhlaghi locates the children as witness to an unjustified death, cutting short the life of a poet and film maker who voiced the necessity of emancipation of women. In the face of an exponential rise of patriarchy, Farrokhzad’s work was perceived as a reflection of socio-cultural transgression. Since Farrokhzad had a son aged fourteen years when she was martyred, the scene populated by school children underlines the togetherness shared among a series of witnesses, both in public and in the home.

The killing of Hamid Ashraf and members of the Organization of Iranian People’s Fedai Guerrillas (OIPFG) in a covert operation by SAVAK17 agents in their safe house was part of a larger scheme to crack down on dissenters. Chaos on the streets of Tehran finds a route to enter the safe house of the OIPFG members. The mise-en-scène suggests the long hours of tussle between agents and Fedai members before the latter succumb to their mortal fate. Ashraf, along with his comrades, lies on the floor strewn with books. A personal account in the catalogue, of a detained member testifies he was summoned soon after the encounter to recognize the body. In a large sun-lit room, a few steps away from the body of Ashraf, an agent directs a finger towards Ashraf in a gesture asking the members to confirm his identity, illuminated by the bright beams of sun rays. l

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The Witness’ Account of the Other Side From Cracks in History: Azadeh Akhlaghi’s By An Eyewitness

The reflection of Akhlaghi in the mirror, hanging right beside the two living members, enables her to extend her presence as a witness, from the vantage point of a viewer to the image.

In the image Ali Shariati, 19 June 1977 (2012) medical attendants move the body of sociologist Ali Shariati from his home in Southampton, England to a hospital. To document the inevitability of death in exile, Akhlaghi restages the passing away of Shariati, who as a leading figure of the Mujahedeen-e Khalq Organization (MKO) frequently lectured on social inequalities and the role of citizens against the shah’s dictatorship, irrevocably holding the attention of SAVAK. In an effort to survive and promote the ideas of socialism among the Iranian diaspora, he moved to England where he died within a few days of his arrival. The medical reports stated cardiac arrest as the cause of death, though the real reason remains shrouded in mystery. Unlike most of the images in the series, where the entire scene is re-enacted on a single plane, here Akhlaghi populates the photograph with the protagonist Shariati, his daughters, their cousin and herself spread through different locations of the home: on the ground and first floor, near the door and a staircase. Akhlaghi, who witnesses the scene from the floor above while embracing the daughter who is in shock, could be substituted for a mother figure. The actor at the door holds a blue umbrella—indicating England, synonymous with rainy weather. The weather of that day implicitly traces the sombre tone of the image. The chaos in the streets in the other images is replaced here by the dazed look of the family that wakes up to the news of bereavement, in their newly arrived home. When political unrest seizes the lives of the intimates of a dissenter, the chaos is less about its physical reality and more about how it is internalized to metamorphose into a looking-glass of memory: fragile and in continuous necessity of negotiation.

Like Shariati, Sohrab Shahid Saless died in his home outside Iran. The director of Roses of Africa (1992) could not make another film for six years afterwards: “I had three great screenplays, which people in the know thought could be made into a successful film. Unfortunately, one by one they were rejected by the producers, who wanted films with a happy ending—the type of film I’d never made before.”18 If the poet Farrokhzad wrote about the emancipation of women, Shahid was known for his movies that critiqued the social situation in Iran. Infamous within SAVAK, he was forced to leave Tehran and find a home first in Germany, and later in the US. After a few quiet years, he died alone in his apartment in Chicago. His inability to accept America’s stand on both Hiroshima and Vietnam is referred to in the publication that accompanies the photographs: “I feel happy when I get back to my apartment because I don’t like this world outside my apartment.”19 To recreate the microcosmic world of Saless, Akhlaghi pays acute attention to the presentation of the apartment. Saless’ attraction to the writings of Anton Chekhov is indicated by a portrait on the wall in his apartment on the left side of the image. On the extreme right of the apartment, in the open kitchen hangs the poster of Saless’ movie Diary of a Lover (1976). Nestled between these two is the body of Saless lying near the door. The image is a seamless composition of the first few shots of Diary of a Lover, taking the audience on a tour through the apartment. Contrary to most of the images in the series, Akhlaghi is not directly witnessing the body of Saless. She stands far from the scene of death in a corner of the kitchen, to indicate that his body was not immediately discovered, that it took four days for his friends to discover his untimely death from chronic liver disease.

Not restricted to the insides of the home or open places for public viewing, Akhlaghi’s presentation of the revolutionary poet Mirzadeh Eshghi’s death at a liminal space—in a courtyard —converges the members of family and neighbourhood. The courtyard and pool, the “heterotopia of illusion” in Foucauldian terms, in the moment of killing ceases to convey a sense of perfection 128 | 129

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but acts as a rite of passage between truth of life on earth and the promise of paradise after death.

Viewing Akhlaghi’s depiction of this murder, the viewer would note the earthy colour of the image rendered in deep contrast, like the majority of the images in the series. The image allows the audience to enter the scene of chaos to unravel the sequence of events. From the perspective of the viewer, to the right of the frame, the poet lies on his stomach, head slightly raised, and one hand slightly stretched towards papers that are strewn on the ground beside him. His lover, with an expression of shock on her face and arms spread wide, is frozen in the act of falling to her knees beside Eshghi.

On the left of the image, we see the assailants being tackled by a servant. At the top of the image, three neighbours stand on a rooftop as spectators to the event. Two children run along a low parapet while, below them, in the extreme right of the image, Akhlaghi stands wearing a red scarf, framed in a dark doorway as if emerging from a subterranean level, as mute witness.

Death is not restricted to the home or public streets, but as in some of Akhlaghi’s images, the natural landscape serves as a potential milieu to perform such a covert operation. Even for a limited timespan heterotopia is a space to congregate the incompatible: the picturesque settings of Evin Hills, Aras River and Majnoon Island become a living embodiment of the duality of everevolving nature and the killing of the dissenters. Samad Behrangi was a schoolteacher who wrote children’s literature embedded with political motifs that escaped censorship for a while but could not go unnoticed by eventual moral policing. His close family discovered Behrangi’s body in the Aras River after a two-day hunt. The exact circumstances of his death remain unknown, yet Behrangi is hailed as the first Fedai martyr.20 To lend an impression of scale to the river, it extends beyond the frames of the image. At a distance Akhlaghi is perched on a stone of the riverbank witnessing the entire episode of retrieval: the villagers are seen to be reaching a place where friends behold the lifeless Behrangi.

Along with Hamid Ashraf, the sociologist Bijan Jazani was one of the founding members of Fedai. A year after the death of Marzieh Ahmadi Oskuie, Jazani and eight other prisoners were shot and killed without trial by SAVAK officers in the hills behind Evin Prison on 18 April 1975.

To restage a closer-to-life experience for the audience, Akhlaghi prefers panoramic photos.

The scale and dimensions of Jazani’s image, Bijan Jazani, 18 April 1975 (2012), is close to the photos of Eshghi and Taleghani: here the blindfolded prisoners are facing their executioners with Jazani’s arms raised to the sky. Since it was an undercover operation, Akhlaghi’s absence is made inconspicuous by the red scarf lying just behind the line of prisoners on the left side of the image.

The absence of the physical body of Akhlaghi obliquely undermines the (omni)presence of the witness; yet the presence of her scarf acts as a reminder of the covert nature of the event and hints at the erasure of its true account from the pages of the history. The reference to Jahangir Razmi’s photograph Firing Squad in Iran (1979), awarded the Pulitzer Prize, is quite clear. Firing Squad in Iran was taken in the early days of the Iranian Revolution when officials feared Kurds would demand independence. As an act to instil terror, Kurdish men, who were claimed to be counterrevolutionaries were executed in Sanandaj, the capital of Kurdistan. While the blindfolds and white bandages of the prisoners in Razmi’s image are replicated in Akhlaghi’s image, the executioners are made to look more prominent with their perfectly matching uniforms and identical poses.

More often than not, war literature reinvigorates the essence of the claim, “In war, the dead pay the debts of the living.”21 Implicitly, it raises an inquiry if the living acknowledge this debt. In the image Mehdi Bakeri, 14 February 1985 (2012), of the sprawling war zone of the Iran-Iraq War fought between 1980 and 1988, soldiers killed were designated as martyrs. Since the meaning of martyr is l

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multi-dimensional, Akhlaghi performs the battle scene when Iran’s most remembered soldier was martyred. Akhlaghi witnesses the scene from the periphery of this panoramic image dotted with soldiers, fire, explosions and smoke, focusing on the movement of the soldiers and not the martyred Mehdi Bakeri.

This essay on the multifaceted experience of death by the witness would have remained incomplete without the representation of a final journey. Unlike the chaos on the streets when someone is killed, the grieving crowd of the image Colonel Mohammad Taghi-Khan Pesyan 7 October 1921 (2012), marches in silence alongside the gun-carriage carrying the body. The funeral procession of Mohammad Taghi-Khan Pesyan, the political leader who fought for the autonomy of the Khorasan region, was attended by close to six hundred people. He was assassinated on the order of the military commander, Reza Khan, who wanted to control the province. Images of protestors are not included in the series, but Akhlaghi makes an exception here when she adds the photograph of Pesyan at the forefront. Similarly, the photograph of Mahmoud Taleghani is presented in the mourning room of the image, Mahmoud Taleghani, 10 September 1979 (2012). Flowers decorate the portrait photographs of both Pesyan and Taleghani with the colour red, and white in the former, immediate visual referents to the garden of paradise.

To give an impression of the variety of people—from literary figures and university students to politicians and leftist guerrilla members—who stood up against the autocratic policies of Mohammad Reza Shah, Akhlaghi adds the mourning site of Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleghani.

A staunch supporter of Mosaddegh, Taleghani made invaluable efforts to spearhead the Iranian Revolution of 1979 through his writings and oratory skills, which led to him being imprisoned for nearly fifteen years between the years 1964 and 1978. An exception in the series, Akhlaghi’s image re-enacts the response to the supposed natural death of the religious leader. Opposed to the rising chaos at the moment of death in the other images, in this a sombre mood is implied as a crowd of mourners strive to pay their last respects. To recreate a state of despair and shock at the death of 132 | 133

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Taleghani, Akhlaghi stages a dual scene, with an inside and outside view of his house. The outside mourners, fixed to the windows to get a glimpse of Taleghani’s coffin, are set as a backdrop to the grieving relatives around the dead cleric. Since historical images of Taleghani’s funeral are publicly available, Akhlaghi underscores this record with his framed portrait being held by two people to the right of the image. Akhlaghi can be seen to the left of this portrait, kneeling amongst the crowd outside, looking through the window directly into the camera. In parallel, a boy inside the house, seated to the left, gazes straight into the camera lens. It is not a frequent sight in the series to see the actors acknowledging the camera, apart from the artist. *** The photograph is out there, an object in the world and anyone, always (at least in principle), can pull at one of its threads and trace it in such a way as to reopen the image and renegotiate what it shows, possibly even completely overturning what was seen in it before.

Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography22 Ariella Azoulay’s promise of the possibilities the photograph can offer when a ‘thread is pulled’ and Foucault’s reference to the skein of networks as points to facilitate connections, undercut the ontological authority of the norm, a search for homogeneous aggregation. Being in medias res, Akhlaghi does not present a denouement with her orchestrated photographs. She opens a possibility for public analysis as a mode of knowledge production, rather than setting herself up as the single authority. This essay is an attempt to encourage a novel perspective of witness in these artworks, one that analyses the conditions in which the people and history have been erased from public memory. Beyond legal boundaries, the visual citizenship of the witness as a concept is attentive to the democratic relations between the political subjects—photographer, subject and viewer—devoid of a hierarchical vocabulary. Overcoming the historically contingent canvas of political life, these re-enactments call for conversation, dialogue and engagement, to look beyond the question of what constitutes a victim and different manifestations of victimhood.

By An Eyewitness, within the framework of the complementary world of heterotopias, unravels the matrix of power and knowledge. The subjects of the heterotopic worlds of these photographs are produced both by and within power dynamics, and their experiences are shaped by the social relationships of which they are products. Through this image-making exercise (a form of power), photographer and subject are pushed to tell the truth (produce knowledge).

These enactments spearhead an alternative history (another form of knowledge), one that counters what is given and accepted without contestation. For Akhlaghi, to visually narrate a part of history that, for a long time, has been ignored or denied by political authority is a way to reclaim agency from the makers of history. If the construction of these photographs lends a visual language to silence, then the practice of recreation turns into a moment of self-revelation, to initiate a dialogue on the policy of censorship. This introspection, even if fraught with the pain of loss, offers scope to envision a creative space of solidarity and justice by remembering. The uniqueness of these artworks rests with the desire of the artist to revisit the events and represent them in a visual taxonomy that brings about the journey of articulating struggle. The particularity of the events represented in the series, with a renewed interest in the troubled history of a nation, lies in the realization of a parallel between the many pasts and presents of loss and pain. This is not to align the series to a unique 134 | 135

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discourse on a nation’s turbulent political history—that would perpetuate a recurring error to hierarchize suffering. Rather, this analysis attempts to open the possibility of an avenue removed from the logic of tautology, to encourage a shared voice shaped by historical agency to draw a comparison with and contrast to the past (in)actions and a contemporary struggle of ‘us against them’.

Akhlaghi elicits a peripheral history from the dominant political discourse, an interpolator who traces the patterns of similarities in the (dis)appearance of the dissenter. The triad of witnesses, as mentioned prior, of the heterotopic world captured by Akhlaghi, initiates an understanding of the events determined by the eyes of the witness. It resuscitates the necessity to gauge the political struggles of today, entrenched in the power interest of capitalism, empire and trade, as performative events to exercise resistance and reform, not a tabula rasa, but on a politically dynamic field.

The witness acts as a centripetal force in the visual arrangement of the restaged domains of Akhlaghi, who is an active agent for the photograph’s disenfranchized subject to reclaim the right to (re)live, denied by institutionalized politics. The witness is not external to the “margin of excess”23 but takes cognizance of the choice of possibilities, instead of determining a single meaning. At the locus of the images, the witness oversees the permeable tensions incised into the home, streets, and the picturesque landscape, to engage the audience with collective memory in the present new world.

A photograph, as an act of witnessing and as a site of memory, slips into a tangible repository of a shared sense of belonging. The performative photograph, when approached through the lens of collective memory, disseminates the need to preserve loss in the face of the certainty of political tyranny. The collective memory of the past, as the centrifugal force directed towards the making of these series, is a means by which to articulate new forms of solidarity. The inherent nature of memory to borrow and negotiate opens a discursive site to reconcile with histories of injustice.24 To override the mistake of an easy possibility of amnesia, these inroads of collective memory revisit and reconstruct the past to acknowledge loss and arrange for reconciliation. If the art of creating an image is to work towards immortalizing a slice of time, then the practice of remembering undertaken by the dissenter’s family and friends mobilizes meaning from death against the particularities of the erasure of these historical events.

In 2020, Hundred+Heroines, the UK-based organization that promotes the work of female photographers, featured Akhlaghi as one of the hundred female photographers selected from across the world who have extended the boundaries of their art. In addition, Contemporary Art from Iran, as part of the 2020 exhibition Epic Iran at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, had Akhlaghi, as participating artist, speaking about her conceptually staged photography and how it opens a window into the fraught history of Iran. This re-visitation of By An Eyewitness, of the witness entwined with remembrance-led collective memory, makes reconciliation not a private affair but carries the potential to draw interactions beyond borders and boundaries. The reconstruction of these incidents unsettles the exclusionary version of history to reawaken the heterogeneity of remembrance that cuts across a specific temporal-social axis. With By An Eyewitness, Akhlaghi offers a discursive field of renegotiation with the past, punctuated with bereavement and struggle that remains never far from the reach of an epistemological search for the critical alternative to the terrain of repressive politics.

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Notes 1 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias. Des Espaces Autres’, Jay Miskowiec trans., Diacritics 16, 1986, p. 23 2

Ibid., pp. 22–27

3

Farshad Malek-Ahmadi, Democracy and Constitutional Politics in Iran: A Weberian Analysis, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, p. 8

4 Thomas Friedman, ‘Iran’s Third Wave’, The New York Times, 16 June 2002; https://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/16/opinion/iran-s-third-wave. html; accessed 26 August 2020 5

Azadeh Akhlaghi, email correspondence with the author, 15 September 2020

6 Khurana Chanpreet, ‘Anatomy of a murder: A photographer stages deaths to put focus on Iran’s bloody history’; https://scroll.in/ magazine/819669/anatomy-of-a-murder-a-photographer-stages-deaths-to-put-focus-on-irans-bloody-history; accessed 20 October 2020 7 Scheherezade Faramarzi, ‘Beyond realism: Iran’s photographers recreate images of nation’, Middle East Eye, 27 November 2019; https://www.middleeasteye.net/fr/node/149341; accessed 7 June 20210 8

Susan Sontag, On Photography, London: Penguin, 1979, p. 4

9

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Richard Howard trans., NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010, p. 81

10

Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, Cambridge: Zone Books, 2008

11

John Peters, ‘Witnessing’, Media, Culture & Society 23, no. 6, 2001, pp. 711–712

12

Carrie Rentschler, ‘Witnessing: US Citizenship and the Vicarious Experience of Suffering’, Media, Culture & Society 26, no. 2, 2004, p. 297

13

Azoulay, p. 14

14

Ibid.

15 Hamid Dabashi, ‘Remembrance of Things Past: On Azadeh Akhlaghi’s Photographic Memory’, Azadeh Akhlaghi, By an Eye Witness (exhibition catalogue), Mohsen Gallery, Tehran, 2013, pp. 50–51 16

Azadeh Akhlaghi, By An Eyewitness (exhibition catalogue), Mohsen Gallery, Tehran, 2013, pp. 52

17

SAVAK, Sāzemān-e Ettelā’āt va Amniyat-e Keshvar, Iran’s secret police and intelligence service established by Mohammad Reza Shah with the help of the US Central Intelligence Agency in 1957

18

Hamid Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 4: The Globalizing Era, 1984–2010, London, Duke University Press, 2011, p. 503

19

Ibid.

20

Maziar Behrooz, Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2000

21

James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier, My Brother Sam Is Dead, New York: Scholastic, 2005, p. 167

22

Azoulay, p. 13

23

Christopher Pinney, The Coming of Photography in India, London: British Library, 2008, p. 4

24 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Palo Alto CA: Stanford University Press, 2009

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IMAGE NOTATIONS

Middle: Emily Jacir fires at 1,000 blank books at a shooting range in Sydney, using a .22 calibre pistol, the same gun used by the Mossad Bottom: 2006 Biennale of Sydney installation detail; https://electronicintifada.net/content/materialfilm-performance-part-2/7053

Cover Guo Jian, Do You Feel Anything?, 2021 Photo courtesy the artist and Arc One Gallery, Melbourne The inspiration for Do You Feel Anything? comes from Western religious paintings in which Christ’s wounds are seen and examined (the Five Holy Wounds). Since I was a little kid, Monkey King is my favourite character, in the book Journey to the West. Monkey King is a rebellious dissident or troublemaking character who challenges or makes fun of powerful and conservative societies, and has always been punished but never gives a shit about it. People choose a mask to wear to become the character they want to be. Wearing a mask in public can be considered a threat to the existing order, culturally and politically. As a participant and witness both in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and 2015 in Hong Kong I saw the fall of them before my eyes, and the incompetent reaction of the West that made me feel so wounded.

Guo Jian, 16 September 2021.

Guo Jian 郭健 and his art, are products of the last fifty years of violence and tumultuousness in China, from the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, to the Sino-Vietnam war at the beginning of the 1980s, and through to the horrors of the Tiananmen Square incident. At the end of the 1970s at age seventeen, he enlisted in the People’s Liberation Army during a recruitment drive to support the Sino-Vietnamese war, initiated by the country’s then leader Deng Xiaoping.

The grim reality of his military experiences permanently transformed him from the idealistic young promoter of the ideology of the army and communist party as he served as a propaganda poster painter. As with many of his peers, his military experiences left him both cynical and with a new found critical perspective. After leaving the army he returned to his hometown and was the propaganda officer in a transport company.

His time in the army would later serve as fertile source material for his artwork. After leaving the army, Guo Jian enrolled in the National Minorities “Minzu” University and studied art in Beijing during China’s “85 New Wave” art movement period.

His perspective turned a full 180 degrees as a result of the horrors that he and his classmates witnessed on the streets of Beijing in June 1989.

Guojian’s art is not about preaching or converting others but rather a reflection of his observations from both sides of propaganda and art. As a result of his first hand perspective both from within the propaganda function, as well as from the outside looking in, he also sees abundant commonalities in the Chinese and Western approaches to persuasion… His subjects wrestle with the inherent contradictions: high ideals verses blighted reality, heroism verses villainy, patriotism and valour verses betrayal and loathing. He speaks of the lines easily blurred between terror, euphoria, aggression and lust. He also nods to the commonality and empathy of soldiers across borders. Soldiers don’t start wars, governments do; but it is the soldiers who serve and suffer the horrors; https://guojianart.com/about-english/

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Page 15 Front cover of the 2006 Biennale of Sydney: Contact Zones catalogue

Page 18 Antony Gormley, Asian Fields, 2003 installation views 2006 Biennale of Sydney: Zones of Contact Photos courtesy the artist and White Cube, London

Page 17 Emily Jacir, Material for a Film, 2006 Photos courtesy the artist Top: One of the 13 bullets fired at Wael Zuaiter hit volume two of One Thousand and One Nights which he carried on him when he was assassinated by the Israeli Mossad in Rome, 16 October 1972

unconventional, even rebellious woman living in a traditional Middle Eastern society. Through installation, performance and photography she focuses on her own body, like a Cindy Sherman of the Middle East, to address her concerns and frustrations and bring them to a wider audience; http://www.contemporarypractices.net/essays/ volume6/profile/Raeda%20Saadeh_37-39.pdf

Page 21 Chen Chieh-jen, Bade Area (video stills), 2005 Photos courtesy the artist

Page 26 Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev, A New Silk Road: ‘Algorithm of Survival and Hope’ (video stills), 2006 Photos courtesy the artists

Page 22 Top: Raedah Saadeh, Untitled, 2006 installation 2006 Biennale of Sydney: Zones of Contact Bottom: Raedah Saadeh, Voyage to Jerusalem, 2006 performance Biennale of Sydney: Zones of Contact Photos courtesy the artist Saadeh was born in Umm Al-Fahem, Palestine, and educated at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, where she now teaches.

Her life in Jerusalem is one of several states of occupation and contradiction: a concrete wall, fences, checkpoints, curfews, stone barriers and also a home, a language and cultural and social expectations. She is a Palestinian with an Israeli passport, and also an artist and therefore an

Page 25 Zhao Zhao, Officer, 2011 Photo courtesy the artist Zhao’s paintings, sculptures and videos address realities in his country, as well as documenting his life and those of his friends. One of those friends happens to be Ai Weiwei, the world famous artist who was imprisoned for two and a half months (2011). Zhao worked as his assistant for seven years. Ai is of a different generation of artists than Zhao, yet the two have much in common.

Both grew up far from Beijing, because earlier generations of their families had been exiled to the deserts of northwestern China… Zhao was supposed to have a major solo exhibition in New York, at a gallery owned by Christophe Mao, an art dealer active in both Beijing and New York.

For Zhao the exhibition would have been an important step toward making a name for himself internationally. He packed up a large number of his works to be shipped by sea, but the shipment never left the northern port of Tianjin. China’s powerful customs police confiscated the cargo.

One of the items seized was a sculpture of Zhao’s that consists of the shattered pieces of a concrete statue, a figure of an enormous police officer.

The number on the officer’s uniform is the date on which Ai Weiwei was arrested in 2011.

Zhao made the sculpture during Ai’s imprisonment, and constructed it from the start as a ruin.

Zhao showed the work publicly for the first time in October 2011, at Mao’s Beijing gallery.

At the time, the authorities didn’t yet seem interested in Zhao. It wasn’t until a later exhibition that police showed up at Mao’s gallery a few days before the opening and ordered Zhao’s sculpture removed from the group show. Their rationale: it wasn’t art. Zhao relates that after his art shipment was confiscated, he was informed he had to pay a fine of 300,000 yuan, the equivalent of €38,000.

It was a penalty imposed for no crime, when in fact the authorities had simply refused to export his works… Zhao says that he was further informed that even after paying the fine, he would not get his work back but he would be allowed to view it one last time before it is destroyed; Von Ulrike Knöfel, Spiegel International, 28 August 2012; https://www.spiegel.de/ international/world/in-china-artists-like-zhaozhao-face-political-oppression-a-851403.html

Page 28 Asia Pacific Triennial catalogue cover 1993

Page 31 Peter Tyndall, detail A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/ someone looks at something... QLD: 1979 (PUPPET CULTURE FRAMING SYSTEM),1979 Photo courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne

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IMAGE NOTATIONS Page 35 Top: Doug Hall, screen grab from the video talk; https://acca.melbourne/program/defining-momentsfirst-asia-pacific-triennial-of-contemporary-art/ Bottom: Anish Kapoor, Untitled, 2006-07 Photo courtesy the artist Doug Hall with Direcor Tony Ellwood, 2007.

This commissioned sculpture is dedicated to former Queensland Art Gallery Director Doug Hall, AM, in recognition of his 20-year contribution to the Gallery and to Queensland.

Page 42 Xu Bing, A book from the sky, 1987–91 Photo courtesy the artist Page 36 Zhang Xiaogang, Three comrades from Bloodline: The big family series, 1994 Photo courtesy the artist

Page 32 Top: Lachlan Hurse, Rock Against Petersen, 1983 Photo courtesy the artist Middle: Car bumper sticker from the 1987 Joh for PM campaign Bottom: Queensland Art Gallery exterior 1982

Page 39 Dadang Christanto, For those:Who are poor, Who are suffer(ing),Who are oppressed,Who are voiceless,Who are powerless,Who are burdened, Who are victims of violence,Who are victims of a dupe,Who are victims of injustice, 1993 Photo courtesy the artist

Page 41 Montien Boonma, Lotus sound, 1992 Photo courtesy Montien Boonma Estate

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Pages 44, 47 Ahmad Fuad Osman, Enrique de Malacca Memorial Project, 2016–ongoing Photos courtesy the the artist and A+ Works of Art, Kuala Lumpur Ahmad Fuad Osman’s work often explores abuse of power and historical amnesia in order to challenge canonical narratives. Enrique de Malacca Memorial Project is a fictional memorial based on historical evidence, scholarly interviews and oral religious records. In this expansive installation of video, painting and sculpture, which also represents 16th-century documents, coins, weaponry and clothing, the artist reconstructs a lost character and a vanished archive to negotiate the identity of a man celebrated in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines… the artist questions not only how history is written but also who determines the value of what it holds; http://sharjahart.org/sharjahart-foundation/projects/enrique-de-malaccamemorial-project-2016ongoing

Page 53 Tuan Andrew Nguyen, The Specter of Ancestors, 2019 Photo courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York The Specter of Ancestors Becoming is a four-channel video installation that continues on from the echoes of French colonial subjects. Senegalese soldiers, or tirailleurs, were among the forces deployed to Indochina to combat the Vietnamese uprising against French rule. During the war and after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu hundreds of Vietnamese women and their children migrated to West Africa with Senegalese husbands who had been stationed in Indochina. Many other soldiers left their wives and took only their children, while still others took mixed or Vietnamese children not their own and raised them in Senegal without connection to their origins… However, instead of stories of solidarity, he was confronted with the legacies of colonial prejudice, in which power plays across colour, class and faith complicated relations between native colonial subjects and their offspring. Nguyen’s work is a collaboration with Vietnamese-Senegalese descendants who imagine scenes based on their desire to activate and reexamine their relationship to the past.

Three writers in particular create imagined conversations with and between their parents or grandparents that highlight nuances in strategies of remembering. As narrators and actors, the voices of these descendants embody a historical conscience that challenges understandings of decolonizing societies; https://www.tuanandrewnguyen.com/ thespecterofancestorsbecoming

Page 48 Jompet Kuswidananto, Keroncong Concordia, 2019 Photo courtesy the artist Exploring Indonesia’s colonial history, Jompet Kuswidananto’s Keroncong Concordia examines greed and desire for social control through fragmented memory and residual folk tunes…

The project features a large glass chandelier in the shape of a bird that has crashed to the ground and partially shattered. This scene symbolizes the fragmented memories of the Keroncong Concordia community, which are also reflected in the moving images and carpets of this installation, conveying their experiences and opinions as citizens, subjects and Dutch Royal Army soldiers; http://sharjahart.org/sharjah-art-foundation/ projects/keroncong-concordia-2019

Page 51 Tintin Wulia, Terra Incognita, Et Cetera, 2009 Photo courtesy the artist and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong

Page 54 Ampannee Satoh, TUGU 1370 : 1425, 2018–19 Photo courtesy the artist Shaped like an oversized golden bullet, this monument is rumoured to house the remains of Thai soldiers involved in bloody confrontations with villagers and insurgents at Dusun Nyor in 1948… the work’s final incantation from the Quran merges with the ambient sound of nature to offer a prayer of respect and protection. The artist’s images make visible the militarized Buddhist ideology in Thailand and their ‘truth’ management; http://sharjahart.org/sharjah-art-foundation/ projects/ampannee-satoh-various-works-20182019

Page 56 Luke Roberts, Mars Rusting, 2019 Photo courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

Page 58 Rushi Anwar, Irhal (Expel), Hope and the Sorrow of Displacement, 2013–ongoing Photo courtesy the artist

Page 61 Phaptawan Suwannakudt, RE al-re-g(l)ory, 2021 installation detail, The National, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney Photo courtesy the artist Photo AGNSW Felicity Jenkins RE al-Re-g(l)ory (2021) are paintings of Thai government propaganda posters, the likes of which surrounded Suwannakudt when she was growing up in Thailand in the 1960s and 1970s.

They were part of an anti-communist campaign that the Thai government promoted, which was most likely funded by the United States Information Service, who had a presence in Thailand at the time. The posters are often a comparison between a perceived good versus evil. One side, called Communist, depicts what life could be like under communist rule; the other, Free State, shows life under ‘democracy’, in other words–Thai monarchical military rule; https:// www.the-national.com.au/artists/phaptawansuwannakudt/RE%20al-re-g(l)ory/

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IMAGE NOTATIONS

Page 65 Lorraine Connelly-Northey, Narrbong Galang, 2021 Photo courtesy the artist Photo Zan Wimberley

Pages 66–73 Guo Jian, March to the Execution, 2021 Guo Jian,The Arrow Punishment, 2021 Guo Jian, In the Face of the Gunmen, 2021 Guo Jian, Inspection, 2021 Guo Jian, All You Have is the Guns, 2021 Guo Jian, The Scream after Edvard Munch, 2021 Guo Jian, The Bloody Great Wall, 2021 Guo Jian, Bloody Warning, 2021 Photos courtesy the artist and Arc One Gallery, Melbourne

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Pages 74–79 Khadim Ali, Invisible Border 1, 2020 Khadim Ali, Invisible Border 4, 2020 Khadim Ali, Sermon on the Mount, 2020 Khadim Ali in collaboration with Sher Ali, Urbicide 2, 2020 Photos by Marc Pricop Khadim Ali in collaboration with Sher Ali, Urbicide, 2019 From Flowers of Evil, installation view Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber 2019, commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation.

Photos courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane Text https://artdesign.unsw.edu.au/unsw-galleries/ khadim-ali-invisible-border Invisible Border: an Institute of Modern Art touring exhibition at the UNSW Galleries, Sydney, 2021 Curator Liz Nowell

Page 91 Top: James Tylor, We Call This Place (Kauwiyarlungga), 2020 Bottom: James Tylor, We Call This Place (Karildilla), 2020 Photos courtesy the artist and GAG Projects, Adelaide

Pages 80, 84 Archie Moore, Kamilaroi Neytion, from the series United Neytions, 2014–17 Archie Moore, United Neytions, 2014–17 Installation våiew, The National, 2017 Photos courtesy the artist and The Commercial, Sydney Photos Sofia Freeman

Page 86 Alex Gawronski, Threshold #1, 2017 Installation view, The National, 2017 Photo courtesy the artist

Pages 94, 97, 99, 100, 103, 104 Archie Moore from top: Blood Fraction (detail), 2015; Graph of Perennial Disadvantage (detail), 2021; Blood Fraction, 2015; Graph of Perennial Disadvantage (installation detail), 2021; Family Tree, 2021; Family Tree (both details), 2021 Installation views UNSW Galleries, Sydney All photos Zan Wimberley Photos courtesy the artist and The Commercial, Sydney The Colour Line brings together a presentation of new and recent works by Kamilaroi/Brisbane artist Archie Moore in dialogue with drawings by African American scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963). Archie Moore’s ongoing interests include key signifiers of identity—skin, language, smell, home, flags—as well as the borders of intercultural understanding and misunderstanding, including the broader concerns of racism…

Blood Fraction deals with the politics of skin and the words used to classify, quantify and assign meaning based on race. It is in response to various public commentators who question a person’s Aboriginality, authenticity and legitimacy. One drop of Aboriginal blood is all it takes for most Aboriginal people to accept you but if you’re not ‘Full Blood’, then you’re not a ‘real Aborigine’ to others. Displayed as a colour chart or a sliding scale of skin tones it highlights the absurdity of breaking down a human being’s self into words with mathematical prefixes like ‘Octoroon’.

Archie Moore, 2017. UNSW Galleries exhibition overview

Page 106 The deserted Jerusalem Airport; https://www. haaretz.com/israel-news/MAGAZINE-jerusalem-sposh-airport-now-home-to-weeds-here-s-what-itlooks-like-1.9728340 Photo Ohad Zwigenberg

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IMAGE NOTATIONS

timesofisrael.com/deadly-duel-photos-capturebattle-between-iron-dome-and-hamas-rockets/ Bottom: Mona Hatoum, Waiting is Forbidden, 2006–08 Photo courtesy the artist and Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin | Paris

Page 107 Lydda Airport building showing a Misr and Palestine Airways plane, 1936; https://picryl.com/ media/lydda-airport-airport-building-showing-amisr-plane-and-palestine-airways-plane Page 113 Taysir Batniji, Suspended Time, 2006 Photo courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg/Beirut

Page 115 Raedah Saadeh, Penelope, 2010 Photo courtesy the artist Saadeh personifies the absurdity of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict… By drawing attention to the artifice of the image, she is more concerned with highlighting disjuncture, discord and displacement and so structures her images accordingly; https://aestheticamagazine.com/raeda-saadehtrue-tales-fairy-tales-rose-issa-projects-london/

Page 109 Khalil Rabah, The United States of Palestine Airlines, (detail and ongoing installation), 2007 Photos courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg/Beirut

Pages 100, 111 Emily Jacir, Lydda Airport (video stills), 2009 Photos courtesy the artist and Alexander and Bonin, New York

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Page 116 Top: Rockets from Gaza, on right, fired towards Israel from Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip on 14 May, 2021, while Iron Dome interceptor missiles, on left, rise to meet them.

This photograph, captured by Anas Baba of the French news agency AFP, has become synonymous with the 2021 Israel-Palestine crisis; sourced multiple Twitter accounts and https://www.

Pages 118, 122–123, 126–127, 130–131, 133, 134 Azadeh Akhlaghi from the top: Forough Farrokhzad, 13 February 1967 Azar Shariat Razavi, Ahmad Ghandchi, Mostafa Bozorgnia, 07 December 1953 Mirzadeh Eshghi, 03 July 1924 Marzieh Ahmadi Oskuie, 26 April 1974 Sohrab Shahid Sales, 01 July 1998 Mahmoud Taleghani, 10 September 1979 Mohammad Farrokhi Yazdi, 17 October 1939 From the series By An Eyewitness, 2012 Photos courtesy the artist and Mohsen Gallery, Tehran

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2016–2021 ARTISTS | WRITERS Basel Abbas Ruanne Abou-Rahme Majd Abdelhamid Noor Abed Nancy Adajania Babak Afrassiabi Hoda Afshar Shumon Ahmed Ai Weiwei Makato Aida Jananne Al-Ani Latif Al Ani Sophie Al-Maria Monira Al Qadiri Azadeh Akhlaghi John Akomfrah Khadim Ali Kamal Aljafari Navjot Altaf Halil Altindere Heba Y Amin Rana Anani Brook Andrew Joël Andrianomearisoa Rushdi Anwar Vartan Avakian Stephanie Bailey Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck Mirna Bamieh Matthew Barney Taysir Batniji Richard Bell Gordon Bennett Diana Campbell Betancourt Joseph Beuys Rustom Bharucha Dilpreet Bhullar Birdhead (Song Tao & Ji Weiyu) Montien Boonma Benji Boyadgian Behzad Khosravi-Noori Daniel Boyd Eric Bridgeman Cao Fei Rifat Chadirji Ariana Chaivaranon David Chan Hera Chan Kenneth Chan Chen Chieh-chen Tianzhuo Chen Ali Cherri Chim↑Pom Colin Siyuan Chinnery Dadang Christanto Tiffany Chung Lorraine Connelly-Northey Bridget Crone Alan Cruickshank Cui Jie Zoe De Luca Gökcan Demirkazik Heri Dono Anthony Downey Jacob Dreyer Petros Efstathiadis Işil Eğrikavuk Tarek El-Ariss Rory Emmett Köken Ergun Marzia Farhana Media Farzin Patrick Flores Blair French Hikaru Fujii Simon Fujiwara Aslan Gaisumov Nicholas Galanin Alex Gawronski Adam Geczy Shaun Gladwell Paul Gladston Kaveh Golestan

Antony Gormley Gu Dexin Guo Jian Sudodh Gupta Joana Hadjithomas Khalil Joreige Rokni Haerizadeh Doug Hall Agan Harahap FX Harsono Salima Hashmi Mona Hatoum Ho Rui An Ho Tzu Nyen Lynne Howarth Megumi Igarashi Ryan Inouye Emily Jacir Arthur Jafa Jao Chia-En Jia Zhangke Nutdanai Jitbunjong Ranbir Kaleka Ranjit Kandalgaonkar Tony Kanwa Gulnara Kasmalieva Muratbek Djumaliev Reuben Keehan Elly Kent Mazen Kerbaj Raja Khalid Bharti Kher Yuki Kihara Kim Seo-kyung & Kim Eun-sung Prakit Kobkijwattana Meiro Koizumi Zai Kuning Jompet Kuswidananto ByungJun Kwon Ray Langenbach Chari Larsson Lee Weng Choy Leung Chi Wo Joey Leung Ka-yin Li Jingxiong Liew King Yu Charles Lim Susie Lingham Lana Lopesi Ian McLean Andrew Maerkle Vali Mahlouji Zulkifle Mahmod Taus Makhacheva Guy Mannes-Abbott Kelly Sinnapah Mary Feng Mengbo Charles Merewether Marta Minujin Naeem Mohaiemen Morad Montazami Robert Montgomery Archie Moore Nat Muller Djon Mundine Hira Nabi Judith Naeff Elicura Chihuailaf Nahuelpán Katsuhisa Nakagaki Showkat Nanda Shirin Neshat Tuan Andrew Nguyen Tom Nicholson Eko Nugroho Nodoka Odawara Ahmet Öğüt Kenjiro Okazaki Ahmad Fuad Osman Otolith Group İz Öztat Robin Peckham Mary Pelletier Jack Persekian Melanie Pocock Nathan Pohio

Pala Pothupitiye Eko Prawoto Kusuma Putera Qiu Zhijie Jim Quilty Imran Qureshi Khalil Rabah Mahbubur Rahman Michael Rakowitz Ramingining artists Cheng Ran & Item Idem Shubigi Rao Raqs Media Collective Marwan Rechmaoui Lisa Reihana Todd Reisz Andrew Renton Una Rey Luke Roberts Anca Rujoiu Raedah Saadeh Khaled Sabsabi Walid Sadek Kiyoko Sakata Tita Salina Khvay Samnang Tisna Sanjaya Larissa Sansour Svay Sareth Sarkis Ampanee Satoh Reetu Sattar Yhonnie Scarce Gigi Scaria Kuroda Seiki Canan Şenol Basak Senova Wael Shawky Hassan Sharif Shen Xin Skawennati Leroy Sofyan Shooshie Sulaiman Elia Suleiman Martin Suryajaya Phaptawan Suwannakudt James Tylor Vahit Tuna Pilvi Takala Hale Tenger Peter Tyndall Tadasu Takamine Tang Da Wu Genevieve Trail teamLab Nobuaki Takekawa David Teh Nasrin Tabatabai Rashid Talukder Hank Willis Thomas Titarubi Sophia Tabatadze Rayyane Tabet Meraj Ud Din & Sumit Dayal Youichi Umetsu Erman Ata Uncu Murtaza Vali Vanghoua Anthony Vue Frank Vigneron Ryan Villamael Hajra Waheed Emily Wakeling Tim Riley Walsh Bo Wang & Pan Lu Made Wianta Entang Wiharso Stephen Willats Sue Williamson Johnson Witehira Wong Hoy Cheong Andrew Wood Tintin Wulia Yan Pei-Ming Souchou Yao Yee I-Lann

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