Di'van | A Journal of Accounts | Issue 12

Editor Alan Cruickshank

Contributing Editor Paul Gladston

Publisher DIVAN ART JOURNAL | University of New South Wales Arts Design & Architecture, Sydney Design Alan Cruickshank

ISSN 2207-1563

d ɪˈ v a n | A Journal of Accounts is published biannually by DIVAN ART JOURNAL and UNSW Arts Design & Architecture

© Copyright 2022 Alan Cruickshank in conjunction with the UNSW Arts Design & Architecture, the authors and artists

No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission

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AUSTRALIA

The views and/or opinions expressed in d ɪˈ v 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 Arts Design & Architecture

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 ɪˈ v 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

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

STEPHANIE BAILEY Hong Kong/United Kingdom

Writer and editor, Hong Kong/London

UTE META BAUER Singapore

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

THOMAS BERGHUIS The Netherlands

Independent Curator and Art Historian, Leiden

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

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

SHUBIGI RAO Singapore

Artistic Director 2020 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, artist

ZARA STANHOPE New Zealand

Director, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre, New Plymouth

PHIL TINARI China

Director, Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing

MURTAZA VALI USA/UAE

Writer, art historian and curator, New York

ALA YOUNIS Jordan

Curator and artist, Amman

Accounts has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory

Stephanie Bailey is editor-in-chief of Ocula Magazine, contributing editor to ART PAPERS, managing editor of Podium, the online journal for M+ in Hong Kong, editorial advisory board member of d’ivan, A Journal of Accounts, and part of the Naked Punch editorial collective. Formerly senior editor of Ibraaz, she also writes for ArtMonthly, Canvas and Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, and since 2015 has curated the Conversations program for Art Basel Hong Kong; essays have appeared in Navigating the Planetary: A guide to the planetary art world–its past, present, and potentials (eds. Hildegund Amanshauser and Kimberly Bradley, VfmK, 2020); Germaine Kruip: Works 1999–2017 (ed. Krist Gruijthuijsen, Koenig Books, 2018); Future Imperfect: Contemporary Art Practices and Cultural Institutions in the Middle East (ed. Anthony Downey, Sternberg Press, 2016); The future is already here–it’s just not evenly distributed, 20th Biennale of Sydney catalogue (ed. Stephanie Rosenthal, 2016); Armenity, the catalogue for the Armenian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale (ed. Adelina von Furstenburg, Skira, 2015); Hybridize or Disappear (ed. Joao Laia, Mousse Publishing, 2015); Happy Hypocrite #8: FRESH HELL (ed. Sophia Al-Maria, Book Works, 2015); and You Are Here: Art After the Internet (ed. Omar Kholeif, Space/Cornerhouse, 2014).

Alex Burchmore is an art historian and Lecturer in Museum & Heritage Studies, University of Sydney, specialising in the study of Chinese art, past and present, with a broader focus on travel and mobility, trade and exchange, communities and collectivism, and interactions of the personal and material. He has written for a wide range of publications, including the Oxford Art Journal, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Index Journal, Art Monthly Australasia, Espace Art Actuel, 4A Papers, and TAASA Review. His first book, New Export China: Translations Across Time and Place in Contemporary Chinese Porcelain Art (University of California Press, 2023), reveals how Chinese artists have used ceramics from the 1990s to the 2010s to highlight China’s role in global trade and to explore the function of this medium as a vessel for the transmission of Chinese art, culture, and ideas.

Nadine Khalil is an independent arts writer, editor, researcher and curator; currently researching the female body as an expanded site of performance, labour and resistance in the Gulf region within a framework of the politics of exclusion and technologies of surveillance; former editor of Dubai-based contemporary art magazine, Canvas (2017–20) and the Beirut-based magazines A mag and Bespoke (2010–16). Her writing can be

found in Art Agenda, Art Forum, The Art Newspaper, Artnet, Art Review Asia, Artsy, Broadcast, Brooklyn Rail, FT Arts, Frieze, Ocula and the Women’s Review of Books. She has authored a series of artist monographs (Paroles d’Artistes) on Lebanese artists Samir Sayegh, Hanibal Srouji and the late filmmaker Jocelyne Saab, and curated for European film festivals such as MidEast Cut and the Arab Independent Film Festival.

Kit Messham-Muir is a theorist of art and visual culture and Professor in Art at Curtin University, Perth. His research focuses on contemporary art and culture in relation to war and violent conflict, including culture war, terrorism and political violence; co-author of Images of War in Contemporary Art: Terror and Conflict in the Mass Media (Bloomsbury 2021) and The Trump Effect in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture: Populism, Politics, and Paranoia (Bloomsbury 2023) with Uroš Čvoro (UNSW), and is co-editor of Art in Conflict, an edited volume whose international authors include leading war artists, curators and theorists, contracted to Bloomsbury for publication in late 2023. He is author of Double War: Shaun Gladwell, visual culture and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (Thames & Hudson 2015), the first published sustained critical investigation into the artwork of Shaun Gladwell, one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists. He is the Lead Chief Investigator on Art of Peace: New perspectives in visual art on peacekeeping from the 1990s, in partnership with the Art Gallery of Western Australia and National Trust (NSW), in collaboration with UNSW, University of Melbourne, University of the Arts London, Cal State LA and Oberlin College, which is a three-year Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage project (2022–25). He was Lead CI previously on Art in conflict: transforming contemporary art at Australian War Memorial (2018–21). He is a founding member of the Curtin Extremism Research Network.

Genevieve Trail is an art historian and PhD scholar, University of Melbourne; research considers the early contemporary period in Hong Kong art (1970-89) and the co-instantaneous emergence of new mediums of global video, installation and performance art; writing has appeared in Art+Australia, Art Monthly Australasia, Currents Journal, and d'ivan | A Journal of Accounts; co-edited a special issue of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art with Dr Claire Roberts and Dr Mark Erdmann, Shifting the Ground: Rethinking Chinese Art (2021); curated an exhibition of Hong Kong video art, All elements speak their own language, University of Melbourne (2022); currently part of the editorial team for the forthcoming book, The History Projects: John Young Zerunge, ed. Olivier Krischer, (Power Publications, 2023).

Erman Ata Uncu is an Istanbul-based art writer, researcher and film critic; graduated from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University’s sociology department; has a Masters Degree Film Studies, University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on contemporary art and cinema in relation to political history and popular culture; arts and culture editor and correspondent for Radikal (Turkish daily) 2004-14. His writing has appeared in publications including Argonotlar, Art Unlimited, Duvar, Istanbul Art News and Altyazı; exhibition editor and researcher including the SALT exhibition How Did We Get Here, focusing on Turkey's 1980s political and cultural climate, and social movements of the post-1980 military coup.

Souchou Yao is a cultural anthropologist and writer based in Sydney and Malaysia. He has taught at universities 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.

Ala Younis is an Amman-based artist and curator; co-founder of the publishing initiative Kayfa ta that researches and publishes through independent projects; solo exhibitions in Amman, Dubai, Sharjah, New York, London, Seville and Prague; projects shown at the Venice, Istanbul, Gwangju, Ural and Orleans Biennials. She curated the first Kuwaiti Pavilion at the Venice Biennale; and the Museum of Manufactured Response to Absence and its interventions in Algeria, Kuwait and Ramallah; holds a B.Sc. in Architecture from University of Jordan, and a MRes from Goldsmiths College; edited an extensive monograph on the work of Abdul Hay Mosallam (Sharjah Art Foundation, 2020), and co-edited On the Book of Sceneries (2022), How to maneuver: Shapeshifting texts and other publishing tactics (2021), and The Time is Out Of Joint (2016); co-Artistic Director, Singapore Biennale 2022; research scholar at al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art, New York University Abu Dhabi.

Parergon

In the conceptualising of this journal in 2016, I invited acclaimed Turkish curator Fulya Erdemci, to contribute to its inaugural issue, as a follow-on text to our previous exchange in 2014,1 of issues related to her 2013 Istanbul Biennial: ‘Mom am I barbarian?’ and the Gezi Park protests earlier that year, and the Biennial’s (if not Turkish contemporary art’s) subsequent challenges and conflicts; the former, of the curatorial hypothesis of ‘what it means to be a good citizen’ in engaging concepts of the public domain as a political forum, contemporary forms of democracy, perceptions of civilisation and barbarity, and contemporary art as agent to the making/unmaking of the consideration of ‘public’; and the latter, of issues related to corporate sponsorship of the arts, in this particular instance, of Istanbul Biennial’s long-term sponsorship from Turkey’s largest industrial conglomerate, Koç Holding (owner of a diverse range of companies, from weapons manufacturing, oil refineries, mining and shipbuilding, to supermarket chains, real estate, banking and hotels).

On 13 July 2016, Fulya Erdemci wrote: Dearest Alan, so sorry keeping you in the dark! Many things have happened (… at the very same time of the airport attacks…) and I sincerely came to the verge of thinking the near Future seriously. Though we are strongly attached to Istanbul and don’t want to move out, at the same time, we began to think... Though it has been such a turmoil in the last couple of weeks, I also started to think subliminally on the periodical… it is good [for my contribution] to have a title that refers to my geographic and cultural coordinates and proposes an oblique perspective layering current concerns and urgent issues in relation to art and culture. My proposal is “Bar bar bar bar” as it refers to the sound of the unknown languages that the Ancient Greek people didn’t understand and thus called the people who spoke these languages, barbarians. I think, it is open and inspiring, giving a historical reference to the iconic relationship between the East and West. It also points to the unorthodox languages, in its largest sense, appearing on the horizon but not yet legible.

I am thinking around the issues of art and activism again, the urgency to think around the issues of art, reinstating itself, against the background of urgent political issues and protests. Taking for instance two examples from Ai Weiwei (his photograph as the drowned Syrian refuge laying on the coast) and Ahmet Öğüt’s last sculptures (bronze casts of the people who were attacked by the police dogs during the Gezi demonstrations), we can examine these two current responses, but at the same time, through these examples, we can think around the very issues of Art such as the ambiguity and the uncertainty factor… something like that, stating the crisis of art in midst of the whirling social struggles and international politics... These are the initial thoughts…

On 25 July 2016, Fulya Erdemci wrote: Dear Alan, since I received your last mail, every morning I woke up, thinking to write to you. So sorry, but, I shut down, closed down the shutters to survive… I am not certain if I can put my elements together, if I can concentrate on anything specific rather than the post-coup attempt pressure…

Te Au:

Liquid Constituencies

3 Dec 2022 – 20 Mar 2023

Bonita Bigham, Megan Cope, Erub Arts, Ruha Fifita, Taloi Havini, INTERPRT, María Francisca Montes

Zúñiga, Angela Tiatia, Te Waituhi ā Nuku: Drawing Ecologies, Arielle Walker

Kuku Biochar Project & Waikōkopu stream restoration, Te Waituhi ā

Nuku: Drawing Ecologies group, working alongside the Deep South National Science Challenge

Photo credit: Maija Stephens Courtesy of the artists

Len Lye Newborn Child, 1947 Len Lye Foundation Collection

Earlier this year in July, Fulya Erdemci sadly died at the age of sixty, not having succeeded in our aspirations to engage these issues—firstly, in consequence to the 2016 post-coup attempt in Turkey, followed by her then relocation to Denmark as curator at KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces, and subsequently the 2020 global pandemic. In the first issue of this journal Turkish writer and researcher Erman Ata Uncu, in his text ‘The Grey Zone: Censorship Disguised’ analysed the direct links of post-Gezi protests/coup attempt state and governmental methods of censorship (including artist self-censorship) and the constant crises of concepts of national identity and public space, in response to Erdemci’s Biennial and its consequent developments. In this issue, as a bookend perhaps, Erman Ata Uncu returns with a further appraisal of those events and Erdemci’s legacy, of her radical vision of art’s role in the conflict between multiple publics, narratives and histories; as she wrote in her statement for the 13th Istanbul Biennial, that the poetic power of art might “imagine another world and to envision what is to come, [that] we need to invent new languages and learn the languages of the most invisible, repressed and excluded.” As a preface to his text, the following is an edited version of the aforementioned exchange, ‘Art Does Not Come from a Clean White Room’, the one duologue we did manage to put down in ink on paper, that might perhaps might operate as a modest in memoriam ***

Fulya Erdemci visited Sydney in the aftermath of the 2014 Transfield-Biennale of Sydney corporate sponsorship drama, that saw a small group of artists withdraw in protest at the commercial links between that company (sponsor of the Biennale as Founding Partner since 1973), and the then Australian government’s policy of mandatory offshore detention of refugees, the Biennale initially standing its ground in its association with Transfield, then capitulating after the dramatic resignation of the Biennale Board Chair (also director of that company). Extensive and polemic views were expressed in the media and arts sector about the outcome of these events, the opportunistic mixing of minority group politics for political gain with the vexations of government and corporate funding of the arts, the impulsiveness of the protesters and their apparent mimicry of similar events (the recent 2013 Istanbul Biennial), a coercive if not threatening government response, the sponsorship cessation seen as an own goal-Pyrrhic victory and the uncertain impact upon the corporate realm’s desire for future funding of the arts without being caught up in similar political complications. Many pages of Broadsheet magazine focused on a spectrum of issues, of a dilemma of amplifying proportions for not only the Biennale of Sydney and any other Australian arts institution with or seeking major corporate sponsorship, but for the future relationship between art, corporate goodwill and government scrutiny. The Biennale of Sydney was not alone in finding itself in the middle of an unasked sponsorship and credibility dilemma. The Istanbul Biennial, of which Fulya Erdemci was artistic director in 2013, in the lead up to its presentation experienced its preliminary programming and performances interrupted by activists protesting against Koç Holding, and the influential main sponsor of the Biennial and the İKSV (Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts). In responding to my interrogatory regarding the relationship between corporate sponsorship of art and “dirty money”, Erdemci responded categorically that, “art does not come a clean white room.”

FULYA ERDEMCI: Actually, art’s relation with power is a historical one. Just to take a look at the Italian High Renaissance—art’s interconnectedness with the Church, Medicis or the Monarchs —indicates this long-term relationship. What I am trying to articulate is that the production relations and representational regimes of art cannot be abstracted from the systems that it realises itself. It takes form in the middle of the systems/economies/societies that it responds to. However, unlike many other fields, art has the capacity to unfold critically the systems—from within—that it takes part in. Since 1970s, artists such as Hans Haacke, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Martha Rosler, Andrea Fraser or more recently Hito Steyerl have been working around the issues in connection with art, capital and institutional critique. Along with neo-liberal funding policies, art institutions have become more dependent on private funding and commercial support globally, and have thus been criticised, protested and boycotted for serving to whitewash ‘dirty’ money, as well as for being the epicentres of the distribution of neoliberal culture and mechanisms. Because of its funding sources, a group of activists protested against the 13th Istanbul Biennial starting from the first press conference in January 2013 onwards, while the 19th Biennale of Sydney was boycotted by the participating artists just before its opening date for the same reason and the Biennial responded to the protests with the resignation of its Chair. In a way, biennials have become more politicised international platforms and the target of protests to bring crucial issues to the attention of larger publics, while through the art projects examining the art system(s) critically; they have also become the prime sites for institutional critique. For instance, Hito Steyerl’s Is a museum a battlefield? (2013) a lecture-performance and videowork produced for the 13th Istanbul Biennial is exactly unfolding the relationship between art institutions and power. Unfolding the historical alliances of art spaces and museums with power, she alludes to the nature of art institutions as war zones. With the same token Steyerl asks what potential connection exists between the funders of Istanbul Biennial and the military industry.

EDITOR: In an online interview with Creative Time Reports in April 2014, artist Ahmet Öğüt, one of the protesting Biennale of Sydney artists who, having initially withdrawn in protest then returned to exhibit, in response to the question how artists might have the most impact on a political situation, either through their participatory artwork or by their withdrawal, responded; Since I make no distinctions between art and life, I don’t see a need to choose one of these two options. I rather see it as fusion of both. For me, the argument [is] that ‘all money is dirty’ should not be used as an excuse to deliberately compromise social responsibility. Simply providing space for criticism is an attempt to place all the responsibility on the shoulders of the artists. Institutions and curators should share this collective responsibility by being critical, in a creative way, of their own administrative structures and bureaucratic agendas. Artists have a right to act, when necessary, beyond the body of their works—if the institutions and their funders undermine their social values and basic human rights.2

Publicly voicing one’s opinion is not in dispute, but it would seem inconclusive in this context that a minority influence might presume a validity if not defendability to materially disrupt and/or economically subvert a significantly larger cultural entity that professionally represents more than their composition? As a sporting example (perhaps somewhat anathema to The Arts in Australia), it is commonly held that ‘the game is bigger than the individual’ who professionally plays it (and receives significant remuneration), with contractual agreements and codes of behaviour. Even sports people, no different from other citizens, though seemingly removed from the perceived intellectual

Parergon

The Collective School

3 Oct 2022–1 APR 2023

Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong

An exhibition that explores artist-driven and collective models of learning. Developed in collaboration with Gudskul.

Supported by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, Wendy Lee & Stephen Li, and Virginia & Wellington Yee.

Asia Art Archive

11/F Hollywood Centre

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

Image: Installation view of The Collective School, AAA Library, 2022. Photo: South Ho.

Taman Indonesia:

Unchartered Waters

Chang Fee Ming

Curated by Aminah Ibrahim

6 January – 25 March 2023

A+ at Atelier Sekuchi

d7-5-3A, d7 Trade Centre

800 Jalan Sentul

51000 Kuala Lumpur

Malaysia

Storage

Curated by Anonymous

6 January – 25 March 2023

A+ Works of Art

d6-G-8, d6 Trade Centre

801 Jalan Sentul

51000 Kuala Lumpur

Malaysia

No Man Land

Solo exhibition by Mary Pakinee

Curated by Kittima Chareeprasit

S.E.A. FOCUS

6 – 15 January 2023

1pm – 8pm

Tanjong Pagar Distripark

39 Keppel Rd

Singapore 089065

Threshold of Memoirs

Solo exhibition by Yim Yen Sum

Curated by Alia Swastika

Art Jakarta Gardens

7 – 12 February 2023

HUTAN KOTA by PLATARAN

A+ WORKS of ART

d6-G-8, d6 Trade Centre, 801 Jalan Sentul, 51000 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

www.aplusart.asia

certainty of The Left and The Artworld, equally have the right to a moral determination and expression, as did one team of professional basketballers in the USA (at the time of the original text in 2014) against their owner for his racist remarks, but their public group action did not economically sabotage (even by default) the event-platform that professionally supported them. That biennales are becoming more politicised rostrums, over an extended period your Biennale, though hindered by protests and rupture, nonetheless provided an extended citywide platform for conflicting dialogue—Hito Steyerl’s Is a museum a battlefield? video and performance was a specific example of an artist exercising a ‘right to act’ by occupying a resonant place within that discourse, rather than not at all. Perhaps more intriguingly, and one might wonder how the following might stand up in Turkey and other countries experiencing similar issues, was a comment made on a local news website at the time of the Biennale of Sydney-Transfield issue, that the actions of the artists were predominantly about distancing themselves from being “magically contaminated” by their exposure to “dirty money”, that it was an instance of either believing that purity is art’s natural state or in striving to cleanse itself from the perceived filth of [the sponsor], art just wants nothing to do with the “dirty world.”

FULYA ERDEMCI: Today many artists experiment with art and activism to question the limits between these two—perhaps related but different—forms of resistance. Here we can see different shades and grades of experiments and attempts in the practices of mostly socially engaged artists. Artists have creative potentialities unlike many other fields of activity that are disadvantaged by their absence. Being detached from such potential I see as a missed opportunity, as through their creative acts, artists can create a deeper, long-term impact upon society and its issues, as in the case of Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971), that remains one of the most resonant examples in relation to urban usurpation and gentrification, as well as institutional critique. The project presented documentation and photographs of 142 properties in the lower East side and Harlem in New York in relation to the ownership and control of urban space and was originally conceived for Haacke’s exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The project was cancelled by the director of the museum. This example also points out that even simply providing space for criticism is not an easy task for art and cultural institutions that are functioning in the midst of the dominating economic, social, and political coordinates of their time.

This particular work of Haacke not only established a reference point for gentrification and control of urban public spaces, but it also inspired a new generation of artists and activists today. For instance, Networks of Dispossession, an online collective data compiling and mapping the capital and power relations in Turkey initiated by the artist Burak Arikan as a part of his practice, but developed further by activists, journalists and lawyers during the Gezi resistance. Having been triggered by similar concerns about the unjust transfer of land through urban transformation, Networks of Dispossession compiled data on the protagonists of urban transformation in Istanbul and Turkey—being mainly the developers, government and media, to create maps that highlighted the relationship between them. As one of the projects in the 13th Istanbul Biennial it included three maps, of mega projects such as the third bridge across the Bosphorus, airports and dams in Turkey, another of the protagonists and processes that deprive minorities of their properties, and the third on urban transformation protects in Istanbul that included one of the sponsors of the Biennial.

Certainly, I can understand the impulse of artists to divorce themselves from ‘dirty money’. However, this search for purity—a church of art—has also a dangerous essence in itself and refuses to take the challenge that life poses for us.

In my talk ‘Impotence of Action and the Search for the Poetic Act’ in Sydney March 2014, I mentioned that I learned of the connection between the main sponsor of the Istanbul Biennial and the military industry through the protests, starting from the very first press conference of the Biennial in January 2013. Some people asked afterwards that if I knew about this information before accepting the position of artistic director would I have become involved with the Biennial? I said at that time, yes definitely, because either we have an extensive international platform to make such situations visible and debatable, or not. I contended that this was an opportunity, through the power of art, to convey such critical issues to public scrutiny and consideration. I believe that it is an urgent task for the art world to open up discourse on such burning issues and start institutional critique from within the system for change.

In my Sydney talk I stated that in wanting to discuss with the artists, activists and others the course of action after the Gezi Park protests—being the withdrawal of the Biennial from urban public spaces—we made two public announcements to meet in the Cihangir neighbourhood park, where we were expecting those protesters to join us, or to react against us. However, they didn’t attend these forums. Similarly, we opened the 13th Istanbul Biennial on the 14th of September to the public without any official ceremonies or cocktail parties that by nature necessitate inclusion and exclusion. Again, we were expecting protests from the same group, or others; however, there were none. Nor were there during the whole period of the Biennial exhibition. There may be three major reasons for this. In the Biennial exhibition, there were two activist groups/collectives from Istanbul —Sulukule Platform and the Networks of Dispossession—and this may be one of the reasons.

The Koç Group—the main sponsor of the Istanbul Biennial, that is involved with the military industry—curiously came out of the Gezi Park protest as one of its supporters by opening up the Divan Hotel (located next to Gezi Park) to the protesters seeking refuge from the police attacks. However, even more importantly, I believe that the Gezi resistance presented the phenomenon of unexpected coalitions and collective actions of multiple publics, even contrasting ones—the anticapitalists Muslims, Revolutionary Muslims, nationalists, leftists, anarchists, revolutionaries, women’s rights movement, environmentalists, syndicates, chambers of lawyers, architects and medical workers, and even inimical football fans of competing clubs. Instead of an antagonistic, polarised public debate, there were attempts to create an agonistic public sphere. So, I believe that such a radical, almost utopian experience, even though only for a very short time, may have mutated the psyche of the Biennial protesters as well. The political agenda in Turkey has reached such extremes that they may have chosen between other diverse urgencies and avoid the Biennial in the meantime. So, this was a rather more complicated issue than it looks in retrospect.

I believe that art can be political per se—by proposing subjective transformative experiences, thus opening up those utopian moments in our daily rhythms—without being thematically political.

Notes

1 Contemporary Visual Art+Culture Broadsheet, vol. 43 no. 2, 2014. Published by the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Adelaide, I was editor from 2000 to 2015

2 https://creativetimereports.org/2014/04/01/editors-letter-april-2014-ahmet-ogut-biennale-of-sydney/

Parergon

How to tell...

Was it a coincidence that the 13th Istanbul Biennial (September–October 2013), referring to public spaces as “battlegrounds”, coincided with the last phases of the anti-government Gezi Park protests encompassing a battle over public space? “We were asking whether it was possible to imagine a new social contract in which citizens assume responsibility of each other, even for the weakest, most excluded ones,” the Biennial curator Fulya Erdemci wrote in the event’s catalogue.1 Around the same time, neighbourhood forums, i.e., the extension of the “Gezi process throughout daily life,” were teeming with activities and debates that sought ways to assume responsibility for each other. These short-term “semi-structured” and “issue-specific” organisations had drawn on the Gezi events collective nature and brought heterogeneous groups together, centred on a wide range of issues, extending from “gentrification” to “white-collared workers’ rights.”2

This concurrence makes it almost impossible to resist the temptation to regard the Gezi Park events as the realisation of Erdemci’s remarks. However, this proximity proved to be a source of crisis for the Biennial on an institutional level, rather than a smooth transition from theory into practice, as well as bringing forth questions on the political aspects of the realm of aesthetics that still resonate in art production today. “What we have experienced in Istanbul and throughout other cities in Turkey is of a scale that cannot be compared to any exhibition or art event… I could not fathom that we would experience a transformation process as intense and radical as the Gezi Park events,” Erdemci continued in her ‘Curator’s Text’.3 She had announced the conceptual framework of the Biennial as “public space” at the beginning of the year on 8 January 2013. The civil disobedience in Istanbul’s Gezi Park began approximately five months later on 27 May 2013. Developments in-between had witnessed an upheaval of the core notions of institutional relations and public space, following which came Erdemci’s highly criticised decision to withdraw from the previous plan of using public spaces—Gezi Park included—as exhibition venues. She said that this was a bid to prevent the ruling Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) governing municipality of the time from utilising the Biennial against the events. “I thank the ones treating me as a revolution’s curator. However, I am an exhibition curator,” she said in response to objections of the decision to realise the Biennial in “secure and comfy” spaces.4

CREATIVITY CUTS IN

Focusing solely on the ostensible line drawn between art and politics in Erdemci’s remarks would not do them justice, as they also offer the means to dwell on how radicality in art and politics might converge, the alleged lack of which had caused the Biennial to receive significant criticism. The belief of a missed opportunity had informed most of the commentaries of the period, suggesting a failure on the Biennial’s part in embracing the grassroot structure of the Gezi events. This was of course not far removed from the preceding and long-standing debate over the Biennial’s dependency on private capital, especially its main sponsor, Koç Holding, one of Turkey’s major corporations. This perception reached its peak in the protest staged in the panel discussion ‘Public Address’, held as part of the Biennial’s public program. The protesters, using the phrase “I am human”—in reference to the Biennial theme, ‘Mom, am I barbarian?’5—accused the event of being an extension of the sponsors’ gentrification projects.6

Having emphasised her assessment of “Istanbul’s vicious urban transformation” as one of the key Biennial topics with related artworks, Erdemci criticised this protest as being “equivalent to a puritanistic critic.” However, she found the Gezi Park protests to be anything but puritanistic: “Gezi raised the bar for the ethics of protest. What determined the Gezi spirit was the extremely peaceful, discussion-oriented, humour-packed and creative acts.”7 These “creative acts” were among the major reasons for a comparison of the Biennial with the Gezi events. The protests entailed new possibilities in the formation of public spaces as well as offering distinct ways to perceive them. For example, Erdem Gündüz, aka The Standing Man, who initiated an unexpected gesture to the debate. As a trained dancer with a background in performance art, Gunduz stood still for eight hours in Taksim Square facing the Atatürk Cultural Center—both focal points of the protests—the latter displaying countless posters manifesting the protesters’ demands.8 Joined by hundreds of followers in subsequent days in Istanbul and other cities, Gündüz staged his silent protest against the police’s brutal response to demonstrators. Another example of aesthetic possibilities infusing the uprising was painting a bulldozer pink in Gezi Park. This reclamation of a symbol of urban transformation

—the major trigger of the protests—as an ironic stance produced a makeshift monument inside Gezi Park. This was a celebration of the contingent nature of the Gezi movement, as well as an ironic manifestation of the protesters’ demands for change.

WHAT IS POSSIBLE ANYMORE?

With its never-before-seen scope and search of new ways of visibility within the aesthetic realm, it was almost inevitable for the Gezi Park debate to extend towards the notion of radicalism in contemporary art. “Is it possible for one to realise more real and effective performances, compared to those dancing before a panzer, hit with gas while wearing a red dress, learning what a water cannon is and then using its wireless to chant football slogans at a police officer?,” art critic Elif Dastarlı wrote in the second month of the events;9 that is, the adoption of a playful approach as a method of resistance in the face of urgency—be it the government’s aggressive urban transformation policies or police intervention. Before a conclusion might be drawn, it is worth noting how the Gezi Park events brought forth radical possibilities stemming from the aesthetic realm. “The Gezi movement is a creative force that leaves us behind as well. We did not write those graffiti… it is not as if these people had repeated what they had seen from us. That creativity was lying inside [them] all along and it erupted at some point,” an anonymous protester from a leftist organisation said at the time.10

Interestingly, this dormant creativity erupted in numerous countries around the same period. Preceding the Gezi Protest by two years, the anti-government protests in the Arab world had inspired a series of uprisings that extended from Mediterranean countries to the United States, of a wide range of regimes, from totalitarian states to Western democracies. This ‘inspiration’ refers to an intricate web of links and similarities between these countries—rather than a dispersion from a sole point—with regards to the distinct features of governance systems in which these uprisings took place. Stemming from the drive towards an enhancement in democracy, these movements were also local expressions of the search for ‘horizontal’ methods of policy-making.11 Having noted the locally intrinsic logic behind the political formation of each of these movements, Susan Buck-Morss lists the precipitating causes that are not country-specific: degradation in the social state, gentrification-related mobilisation in urban spaces, and the precedence of profiteering over environmental urgency.12 All these elements were discernible as local tensions in the event that triggered the Gezi protests, the government’s highly symbolic act of seeking to build an Ottoman army barrack-shaped shopping mall in Taksim Square, as if in an effort to enforce its neoliberalist and neo-Ottoman agenda on a location that has been subjected to symbolic wars since its formation in the nineteenth century.

A long-standing site for tensions in Turkey’s Westernisation history as well as for political demonstrations, Taksim Square and the connecting İstiklal Cadessi (Independence Avenue) had constituted one of the major lines in Istanbul’s cultural production and also provided an interaction and socialisation space for repressed groups. This variety and history have doubtlessly resonated in the heterogeneous nature of the Gezi Park protests. People without any previous mutual association, pro-Kurdish and pro-Turkish groups, leftists, LGBTQI rights activists, feminists, anti-capitalist Muslims and football fans were among those participating in the protests. Fuelled by their common lack of “trust in political and economic institutions,” these groups sought a flexible conceptualisation of citizenship based on “trust bonds” and the ability to accommodate different identities.13 The Gezi Park encampment that expanded following the initial police crackdown embodied this idea of a new collective identity, rendering visible mutual recognition, extending even to those previously in dispute; the urban space of the square reconfigured through their collective identity.

REPRESENTING GEZİ

In shifting the definition of politics from the “exercise of, or struggle for, power” to “the configuration of space” and “the framing of a particular experience,” Jacques Ranciere draws on Aristotle to link political competency with the right to speech. “Politics occurs when those who ‘have no’ time take the time necessary to front up as inhabitants of a common space and demonstrate that their mouths really do emit speech capable of making pronouncements on the common,” he writes.14 As much a framework enabling to see the political possibilities of the aesthetics in the Gezi events, Ranciere’s conceptualisation can also be considered as informing the 13th Istanbul Biennial’s view of public space. “From a linguistic perspective, ‘barbarian’ is a definition that marks… those who are not citizens,” Erdemci had written in her curatorial text, in reference to the Greek origin of the keyword in the Biennial’s title, and added that it also stood for the language of those “marginalised, illegal, and aspire to debunk or change the system: the recluse, outcast, bandit, anarchist, revolutionary, or artist,” the Biennial reportedly intending to search for the possibility of “new subjectivities” devoid of binary oppositions informing these status and to create “novel languages.”15

Such an distinct continuity between the theoretical framework offered by ‘Mom, am I barbarian?’ and the occurrences at demonstration sites inevitably brought forward the question of whether the Biennial could rightfully respond to the Gezi protests. Any attempt at covering such a contiguous event brought about the risk of lapsing into the artifice of mere representation. Moreover, treating the uprising as a completely different realm to be covered, hinted at the ignorance of the link between contemporary art practices and forms of protest. “The contemporary art and Istanbul Biennial’s avoidance of the representative art trap and breakaway from the thought of trauma seem to be a significant solution,” art historian Burcu Pelvanoglu wrote, referencing Ranciere’s suggestion that art attained the quality of being political by shaping time and space, instead of representing it.16 A separation from mere representation was therefore evident in the few Biennial works directly referencing the Gezi events. Christoph Schäfer’s series of drawings titled Park Fiction is Now Gezi Park Hamburg (2013) was a bid to reimagine urban planning by way of collective desires, which were deduced from interviews and readings. Fiona Connor and Michala Paludan’s Newspaper Reading Club (2013) focused on the awareness of events by documenting random people’s reading trajectories, and outlining how public consciousness was affected by the censored coverage of Gezi in the Turkish media. Tadashi Kawamata’s sketches for his unrealised intervention in public space, Plan for ‘Gecekondu’ (2013) served essentially as a reminder of the irrepresentability of social movements.

Due to the increasing pressure on social movements following the Gezi events, as well as the failed military coup attempt on 15 July 2016, to bridge the distance between the public space and exhibition venues has proved to be a major consideration in art production and its circulation. However, it is worth noting that the majority of the sites considered as public spaces in Turkey were already of a contested nature before these events. Deliberating on the inconsistency between the definition of the word “public” and its suggested Turkish equivalent of Arabic origin, “kamu,” eminent curator and director Vasıf Kortun says, “kamu is such a thing I suppose: it belongs to the state and does not indulge groups.”17 To a greater extent, local contemporary art production’s inclination towards issues of gender, militarism, nationalism and republican history had automatically brought forward tensions revolving around the concept of public space.18 As such, the questions and considerations that culminated during the Gezi events were also intrinsic to art production and exhibition. “We had already covered many issues featured in Gezi. There were programs regarding

the Emek Movie Theatre or the pedestrianisation of Taksim,” said Kortun in response to a question on the project Disobedience Archive (The Park) that presented source materials from uprisings around the world, including the Gezi Park events and was hosted by his former contemporary art institution SALT in 2014—“as these remain within the walls of an institution and are not adequately publicised, they cannot produce a reality despite generating a memory. One has to embark on the road with an awareness of these institutions’ desperation and inadequacy,” he added.19

This desperation was further entrenched in Gezi Park’s aftermath, as there emerged an inclination towards self-censorship in the mostly private-funded art infrastructure. Encased in gallery spaces or alternative venues—following a short period of an increasingly frequent use of public spaces—the fragilities within that framework came further under scrutiny. There were some discernible instances—the cancellation of the 2016 Sinop Biennial following its censoring of Angela Melitopoulos’s film Passing Drama (1999), and Beral Madra’s withdrawal from the cocuratorship of Çanakkale Biennial, also in 2016—that fragility shaped the institutions from within. In other words, the Gezi events became a determinant factor in art’s dissemination, whether by hindering or informing its aesthetic framework. Its concurrence with the Gezi protests and befitting theme of ‘public space’ rendered the 13th Istanbul Biennial as the initial and accordingly the ultimate example where these fragilities became apparent. Apart from the inevitable cases of self-censorship —due to art infrastructure’s reliance on private capital—the institutional framework offered the artists an urgent field to explore. With the experiences of insurgence fresh on minds, the aftermath of Gezi gave way to an urgent need to reconsider how institutions factored in art production.

Ahmet Öğüt’s Bakunin’s Barricade (2015–20) is a notable example of the latter as it both touches upon the politics of space regarding art institutions and takes the matter of representation towards a precarious terrain. As part of a series that Öğüt modified for different cities and institutions, the work was featured in Istanbul as part of the artist’s solo-exhibition Round-the-clock at Alt Art Space in the year of the failed coup attempt. The inspiration for the work came from Russian revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin’s unrealised proposal to place the paintings from Dresden’s National Museum in front of the barricades to defend the city’s socialist insurgency of 1894 against advancing Prussian soldiers. This provocation of the soldiers’ “bourgeois fine art sentiments” would have deterred the attack against the insurgents, Bakunin suggested.20 Öğüt has been resurrecting this idea within the art institutions, using works from local collections. The first version presented in Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven in 2015, placed works from the museum collection in front of his built ‘barricade’. The Istanbul version resorted to the private Zeyno-Muhsin Bilgin Collection which focuses on Turkish art’s modern and contemporary periods. Attributing the works a new value of application, these installations unlocked their content to unexpected possibilities. The first version of the work also included a loan agreement stating that the installation might be requested and deployed by the public during a movement for social change. As for the version presented in Istanbul, the history of the exhibition venue provided another layer for the work’s ironic take on institutions. The subterranean art space Alt (‘below’ in Turkish) Art Space opened in 2016 as part of the privately-funded arts and entertainment complex Bomontiada, which was built on the premises of a historic beer factory in the district of Şişli from the Ottoman period. A late example of the transformation of the city’s unused industrial structures into cultural sites, Bomontiada is also a manifestation of the cultural scene’s retraction from Taksim to other parts of the city. Columnist Cem Erciyes linked the “success” of the complex to its offering of “entertainment and drinks” as opposed to “Turkey’s increasing conservatism.”21

Such attributions of the venue and its positioning within Istanbul’s cultural climate triggered new concerns for engagement for Öğüt’s intervention in the institutional process. Is this work a parodic reminder that the gap between the arts sphere and social movements might never cease? Or is it an attempt at bringing life and art together? “Aesthetic metapolitics cannot fulfil the promise of living truth that it finds in aesthetic suspension, that is of transforming the form into a form of life,” Ranciere wrote.22 By encasing a utopian idea as a singular work of art and exhibiting in museums/art institutions in various countries, Öğüt seems to be opting for the former. However, the work’s additional loan agreement stipulating the installation’s deployment by the public in times of social disobedience allows for a theoretical possibility to intrude into the institutional structure. Thus, Gezi and other movements’ attempts at reordering public space takes form within the institutional framework via Öğüt’s intervention. More importantly, this means of representation called the functions of institutions and the viability of the authorship into question.

The call for participation took on a more urgent role in Serkan Taycan’s long-term project Between Two Seas (2013–). Citing Gezi Park events as a direct influence, the project consisted of documenting group walks on the route of one of the government’s most aggressive attempts at urban transformation: an artificial waterway connecting the Black Sea and Sea of Marmara as an alternative to the Bosporus Strait. Dubbed Kanal Istanbul, the project was first announced by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2011. Despite warnings regarding its possible risks of irreparable damage to the ecosystems of both seas and adjacent land, Kanal Istanbul is frequently featured as part of the government’s future projects and has been a topic of public debate and a longgoing dispute with the current opposition-run Istanbul mayorship.

Having started with an assumed path—as the canal’s probable trajectory was not revealed initially—Taycan’s project proposed a walking project for people to experience the land threatened as a means of reclaiming the city. The artist initially drew on his experience as a civil engineer to designate a possible route connecting the seas and walked the sixty-nine kilometre path, documenting each kilometre, to be shared at the 13th Istanbul Biennial. The subsequent participatory act of grouping walks along the route was a forum-like response to the ‘top-down’ implementation of major urban transformation projects. Rather than a result-oriented approach, Taycan’s years-long project extended further with each walk, accumulating the experiences of participants via their photographic documentation of Istanbul’s rarely seen periphery that is under the threat of obliteration.

In addition to the possibilities of creating new experiences within the aesthetic realm—as informed by the spontaneity and contingency of the Gezi movement—there was also an artistic inquiry regarding the documentation of the protests. Known for her videos bringing together found footage to challenge the power dynamics informing gender and social relations, the artist Zeyno Pekünlü relied on accounts of people’s experiences of the resistance, rather than the gigantic flow of information, including misinformation as well, in her lecture/performance At the edge of all Possibles (2014). This line of thought was also the departure point for a group project Pekünlü had attended in the aftermath of the Gezi events. Stay With Me, organised by the art initiative Apartment Project, consisted of notebooks created by eighty-four artists at new media and video artist Selda Asal’s request. Ranging from notes of events in doodle forms to the manipulation of documentary images, the selection of artist notebooks were essentially located in a transitory position between the events and its representation. Their account of this contingent and spontaneous uprising in demand of a reordering of things, additionally opened new possibilities within the aesthetic realm.

As these examples demonstrate, the connections between social movements and aesthetic responses proved to be requiring much more than a mere representation or direct connotation despite the immediate desire for art infrastructure’s response to the Gezi events. This intricate connection was to be demonstrated further through unpreventable shocks and setbacks to artistic pursuits, through various restrictions and controls, especially self-censorship, due to the increasing tensions in cultural fault-lines and the atmosphere prolonging the state of emergency. Following the coup attempt in 2016, the government decided to withdraw from the European Union’s Creative Europe Program in 2017. This was an overwhelming course of events as the program was the major source for exhibition funds.23 Furthermore, philanthropist Osman Kavala, the founder of the non-profit cultural institution Anadolu Kültür and a major figure in Turkey’s art production, was handed a life sentence in 2021, charged with financing the Gezi events. Seven other activists were also sentenced to prison in the same court. “[T]he detention and arrest of Osman Kavala is a very important part of the political and cultural decimation carried out by the government over the recent years in Turkey. Using the July 15 coup attempt as an excuse, the government has been trying to suppress politics, the press, academia, human rights, civil society and culture and arts, and silence the oppositional voices therein,” Anadolu Kültür Program Coordinator Asena Günal wrote on the Red Thread social and cultural theory online platform.24

Despite the increasing instances of autocratic intervention as seen in the Gezi trial of Kavala and others, this stifling atmosphere continues to take on seemingly relieved forms as well.

A recent instance was the Beyoğlu Culture Road Festival and the affiliated exhibition organised by the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism. The controversial event was held in a bid to celebrate the reopening of the Ataturk Cultural Centre after thirteen years of a reconstruction process that witnessed long battles between professional chambers and the AKP government, in addition to the Centre being a major topic of debate during the Gezi events, due to the government’s initially announced plan to demolish it. The Culture Road Festival also took place in the recently gentrified axis from Karaköy to Beyoğlu, the historic hub for arts production. Ironically, the shortage of state resources in funding the visual arts helped the government to utilise this precinct for tourism’s benefit, as it presented a ‘public space’ idea relying on the clichés of “carrying the past to the future” and “contributing to cultural accumulation.” Inclusion of some eminent contemporary artists in the accompanying exhibition stirred controversy, as manifested in writer Nazım Dikbaş’s much discussed article. Calling the event a “path that will make the cashier work faster,” Dikbaş refers to the government’s efforts to turn Beyoğlu into a “shopping destination” and promote it in the “global scene.”25

Interestingly, the latest edition of the Istanbul Biennial (2022) curated by Ute Met Bauer, Amar Kanwar and David Teh served as a reminder of the post-pandemic political relevance of the art and public space. Having offered an open-ended process as a way to reconsider the socially and ecologically-related urgencies of the 17th Istanbul Biennial’s extension towards the archival process took on a history of social movements, in particular. This was most evident in the latest display of the Disobedience Archives at the former Central Greek High School for Girls in Beyoğlu. Barın Han, the former studio of a renowned calligrapher, also hosted a display that brought together archival works concerning various social movements throughout history from a wide range of locations. Indicating how archival processes have always left something missing to cover the scope of social movements, these displays demonstrated the possibilities of radical interventions in the aesthetic realm.

How to tell...

Notes

1 Fulya Erdemci, ‘Curator’s Text’, The Guide to the 13th Istanbul Biennial, IKSV and Yapı Kredi Publications 5, no. 4, 2013, p. 29

2 Baran Alp Uncu, ‘Embedding the prefigurations of the Gezi protests,’ Public Space Democracy–Performative, Visual and Normative Dimensions of Politics in a Global Age, (ed.) Nilüfer Göle, London: Routledge, 2022, p. 61

3 Ibid., p. 24

4 Özgür Duygu Durgun, ‘Fulya Erdemci: Bienal’i Gezi’yle karşılaştırmak Gezi’ye haksızlık’; https://t24.com.tr/haber/fulya-erdemci-bienaligeziyle-karsilastirmak-geziye-haksizlik,241750; accessed 21 December 2022

5 Taken from a poem by Turkish poet Lale Müldür. Ibid., p. 27

6 ‘Anne ben insan mıyım?’; https://m.bianet.org/bianet/toplum/145335-anne-ben-insan-miyim; accessed 21 December 2022

7 Elif Tuğba Gürkan Yılmaz, ‘Fulya Erdemci: Bienal’in yapısı yüzeysel tartışıldı…’; https://www.arkitera.com/haber/fulya-erdemci-bienalinfinansal-yapisi-yuzeysel-tartisildi-bienal-dusmanligina-tekabul-etti/

8 See Richard Seymour, ‘Turkey’s standing man shows how passive resistance can shake a state’; https://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2013/jun/18/turkey-standing-man; accessed 21 December 2022

9 Elif Dastarlı, ‘Sokakta Sanat Var…’; http://www.sanatatak.com/view/sokakta-sanat-var-direngezi-eylem; accessed 21 December 2022

10 Ayşen Uysal, Sokakta Siyaset: Türkiye’de Protesto Eylemleri, Protestocular ve Polis, Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2017, p. 191

11 Yahya Madra, ‘Sunuş: Yerelötesi Müşterekler Siyaseti’, Türkiye’de İktidar Yeni Direniş, Yahya Madra (ed.), İstanbul: Metis, 2015, p. 9

12 Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Yerelötesi Müşterekler ve Küresel Kalabalık Üzerine’, Türkiye’de İktidar Yeni Direniş, p. 30

13 Baran Alp Uncu, ‘Embedding the prefigurations of the Gezi protests’, pp. 53–57

14 Jacques Ranciere, Aesthetics and its Discontents, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009, p. 24

15 Ibid., p. 28

16 Burcu Pelvanoğlu, ‘Gezi, güncel sanatta temsil "bağzı" şeyler’ (Gezi, representation in contemporary art, “some” things’), Art Unlimited no. 23, October 2013, p. 76

17 Vasıf Kortun, Can Altay, ‘Hatırlama 1’ (Remembering 1), Park: Bir İhtimal–Hatırlama, Can Altay (ed.), Vasıf Kortun, Merve Elveren, İstanbul: SALT/Garanti Kültür AŞ, 2017, p. 12

18 Erden Kosova, ‘Dışarı Çıkma Cesareti’, Olasılıklar, Duruşlar, Müzakere: güncel sanatta kamusal alan tartışmaları, Pelin Tan (ed.), Sezgin Boynik, İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2007, p. 79

19 Quoted by Tuğba Esen, ‘Devrim bu kez televizyonlardan yayınlanıyor’; https://www.agos.com.tr/tr/yazi/7158/devrim-bu-kez-televizyonlardanyayinlaniyor; accessed 21 December 2022

20 Christian Scholl, ‘Bakunin’s poor cousins? Engaging art for tactical interventions’, Theorizing Cultural Activism: Practices, Dilemmas and Potentialities. Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex, Race, Begum Firat & Aylin Kuryel eds, Amsterdam/ New York: Rodopi, 2011, p. 157

21 Cem Erciyes, ‘Kültür savaşının Bomonti cephesi’; https://www.gazeteduvar.com.tr/amp/kultur-savasinin-bomonti-cephesi-makale-973261; accessed 21 December 2022

22 Ibid., p. 39

23 See Anna Zizlsperger, Dutch Culture: Contemporary Visual Arts in Turkey Version 2019, p. 4; https://dutchculture.nl/sites/default/files/atoms/ files/Mapping%20Turkey%20Contemporary%20Visual%20Arts%202019%20DutchCulture.pdf

24 Asena Günal, ‘“Cultural Hegemony” by Means of the Police’; https://red-thread.org/cultural-hegemony-by-means-of-the-police/; accessed 21 December 2022

25 Nâzım Dikbaş, ‘There's a curse on the street’ (English version); https://birartibir.org/sokakta-kahir-var/; accessed 21 December 2022

Archival and bodily art in decolonial practices

The concept of decoloniality, which has featured prominently on the biennial circuit this year, is not new in contemporary art discourse and curatorial practice. The question of whether decolonial practices in a contemporary art context have become more fashionable or relevant in the Global North was addressed by Indian writer and activist Meena Kandasamy in a panel entitled ‘New Social Movements, Black Lives Matter and its Global Reverberations’ at the 2022 March Meeting held by the Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF): “Sometimes in a sinister manner, decolonisation functions as a smoke bomb, there’s drama and distraction, it’s entertaining and is even the current trend as far as circus routines go.”1 This can be seen in the thinking behind this year’s documenta, as well as the Berlin Biennale, while the Sharjah Biennial often opts for a regional approach that although critical, is in line with the Emirate’s general avoidance of a radical politik in relation to its own geography. Curator and researcher Ivan Muñiz-Reed posits that a decolonial critique on postcolonial theory is that it is situated within a European framework. It’s akin to formulating a “Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism.”2 “Decolonial thought, on the other hand” he writes, “is not constructed from or in opposition to European grand narratives, but rather from the philosophical, artistic and theoretical contributions that originate from the Global South.”3 While a distinct awareness of the confines of Eurocentric perspectives in the non-Western world, both geopolitical and epistemic, was evident in the 2022 March Meeting, ‘The Afterlives of the Postcolonial’, much of the debate by scholars, artists and art practitioners focused on language and terminology, the constant redefinition of such felt like a glossary that needed regular updating. Theorist and feminist critic Gayatri Spivak’s reimagined postcolonialism and anticolonialism, Walter Mignolo’s extrapolation of decolonialty by the late sociologist Anibal Quijano in relation to Western modernity, and Premesh Lalu’s definition of “petty apartheid” of the everyday and internal colonialism in South Africa were cases in point. South African academic and historian Premesh Lalu, in the panel ‘Persistent Structural Inequalities: Settler Colonialism, Segregation and Apartheid’ talked about a need for tightening the concept of decoloniality on the one hand and broadening it on the other so that a “capaciousness could account for the present.” Gayatri Spivak stated in her keynote ‘Imperatives to Reimagine the Postcolonial’ that the real fight is now against a globalised neoliberalism, rather than colonialism, which has become “a cultural excuse” that diverts attention from precolonial structures of oppression that are still operative in today’s postcolonial world, such as India’s theocracy. Most of the March Meeting panelists would agree that the project of decolonisation is not over and has become the pretext for regressive politics, which especially

has seen an inheritance of neo-colonial systems post-independence in Asia and Africa. “Where it remains an academic project, decolonisation panders to white guilt, to the white savior complex of seeking absolution or the ‘forgive me father for I have sinned’ performance,” proclaimed Menna Kandasamy, in the panel discussion ‘New Social Movements, Black Lives Matter and its Global Reverberations’. For all the debate on terminology, there surprisingly wasn’t a serious attempt to distinguish between postcolonial and decolonial discourse, the latter having a lineage from the 1955 Bandung Conference and the transnational Afro-Asian solidarities of the Non-Aligned Movement. This moment has been described by academics Anthony Gardner and Charles Green as “the birth of the Third World not as a racialised category of poverty or under-development, as it would become in the First World’s hierarchical imagination, but as a critical geopolitical entity, one based less on explicit ties of solidarity than on shared experiences of decolonisation and an insistence on independence from the Russian-American binary of the Cold War.”4

As an institution, the Sharjah Art Foundation has become a locus in decentering the cultural geographies of power, pushing the emergence of South-South art discourse in the broader region, and pointing to the situated aspect of knowledge production in that it always emerges from a particular context. Postcolonial theory was driven by the triumvirate of theorists Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak who contextualised the Middle Eastern and South Asian diasporas, and according to Gurminder Bhambra, “refers back to those locations and their imperial interlocutors (Europe and the West)”5 in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while decoloniality arose from South American scholarship and covers a much longer time frame, starting from the fifteenth century colonial invasions of the Americas. Accordingly, it makes sense that Sharjah, which focuses on the Global South or the SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa) region, locates itself within the postcolonial.

However, homogenising non-Euro-American worlds into strict binaries of ‘West and the rest’ dilutes the critical positioning of post-Western thought. Kandasamy’s particular examples of right-wing appropriations of decoloniality via Hindu nationalism, the targeting of Muslims and a fascist caste system, highlight the problems in bifurcating non-Western decolonisation from Western colonial structures Pointing fingers at the oppressor from without often leads to a lack of recognition of the oppressor within, where seemingly progressive rhetoric can be co-opted for state-sanctioned violence. In other words, can we speak of a collective decolonial subject? As David Teh, co-curator of the 2022 Istanbul Biennial, which was firmly entrenched in South and Southeast Asian art practices, has remarked, “What is the geography of decolonial politics? That’s more than the majority of the world and this is not just in terms of the former colonised countries, it’s also speaking to the imperial centres where decolonisation is arguably most necessary.”6

The implication of “afterlives” in the March Meeting is that rather than claiming to undo hegemonic historiographies, the ways in which they persist in the present is more significant. Feminist theorist Tina Campt noted in the panel, ‘New Concepts and Theoretical Imperatives: Intersectionality, Feminism and Gendered Identities,’ it is important to consider the grammars implied in “afterlife.” Said differently, it is necessary to distinguish between the ‘aftermath’ and present continuities. This pays tribute to Okwui Enzewor’s vision for the 2023 Sharjah Biennial 15, ‘Thinking Historically in the Present’, curated by SAF Director, Hoor Al Qasimi of which the March Meeting can be seen as a theoretical prelude, deriving from the late Nigerian curator’s idea of the “postcolonial constellation ”7

Al Qasimi has often referred to how her curatorial concepts have been greatly influenced by Enzewor’s documenta 11 in 2002, which challenged the centrality of an exclusionary art canon by incorporating non-Western art histories in a global context. It is interesting that we have reached a moment in 2022, where the authorial gesture of curating documenta 15 by the Indonesian collective ruangrupa was in a sense withdrawn. By inviting additional groups to curate themselves into documenta, they enabled a broader segment of cultural actors and geographies. Sadly, their provocation of the quinquennial’s hierarchy witnessed an extreme backlash under the guise of anti-Semitism that began with the vandalism of the exhibition space of Question of Funding, a Palestinian collective. Although restrictions on artistic expression are also prevalent outside the West, the issue here was one of orientation and terms of address. That is to say, what art publics were being gauged? How are North-South differences being instrumentalised? Are these delineations/ divisions still effective in the contemporary art world? For example, the removal of Indonesian collective Taring Padi’s mural People’s Justice (2002) by documenta because of imagery critics claimed to be anti-Semitic had a completely different impact from the withdrawal of artworks by Iraqi artists at the Berlin Biennale protesting against Jean-Jacques Lebel’s explicit imagery of torture at Abu Ghraib Prison, in terms of the demonisation of an othered body. The first instance demonstrates the limitations in a German environment that bears the historical burden of the Holocaust tragedy; the second fetishises the violence against—and disregard for—Iraqi bodies in the West, a more recent history of assault that is perpetuated through Lebel’s images.

The question remains what can be expected from biennials in the SWANA region that respond to non-Western epistemologies in relation to those biennials developed in the Western world that gesture towards them, to consider the value of knowledge systems that emerge from specific contexts while acknowledging how the geopolitics of representation (or underrepresentation) can undermine that. When thinking of Sharjah’s position on the biennial circuit for the past three decades as an institutional model outside the West and its take on contemporary art discourse, it is important to note the shift in the SAF’s own trajectory with the 2018 establishment of the Africa Institute, which has expanded conversations to incorporate African perspectives. But it also does so at the safe distance that comes with academic research.

In the past, lecture-performances by artists at the March Meeting mediated overly theoretical talks and standalone art practice, but this year the latter were few. A parallel seems to be occurring currently in the art world if one considers that the recent Berlin and Istanbul Biennials were seen as pedagogical, text-heavy spaces for art. This kind of intervention also harks back to Kandasamy’s “white guilt”, or the need to correct past wrongs from the position of privilege.

“As a person who has been rightly or wrongly described as one of the founders of postcolonialism, I would say that the real imperative today as we move toward acknowledging planetary disaster and saving a future for our children and their children, is to conduct the postcolonial with general social justice,” Spivak observed in her keynote. These sociopolitical urgencies of the present, when seen through the lens of twentieth-century humanitarianism and ‘transitional’ justice, lend a sense of resolution that is misguided, according to political theorist Robert Meister 8 By deferring responsibility from the time before justice, during the Holocaust, slavery or apartheid for example, there is a preconception that ‘evil’ ends after justice. But it is merely a means of alleviating collective guilt he argues, while still enabling the systemic conditions that gave rise to these humanitarian crises. Meister’s critique of human rights discourse can be linked to postcolonial discourse and those who have benefited indirectly from systems of oppression.

Archival and bodily art in decolonial practices

One could even suggest that the human rights discourse of the Global South has translated into a strained attempt at eliciting a kind of collective care in contemporary art. Therefore, in Berlin, Istanbul and Kassel, we saw archive-driven work that risked reifying the problems they sought to address as an overload of information, instead of the kind of art that confronts you in a bodily manner in public space. As Homi Bhabha puts it, “We must not merely change the narratives of our histories, but transform our sense of what it means to live.”9

For the March Meeting panel, ‘Migrations to the North, Forced Repatriation and the New Middle Passage’, critical theorist Zahid Chaudhary stated, “Art that reinvents documentary practices, drawing on histories of forced migration, radicalised violence and archives of repatriation and migrant stories… becomes a mode of recovery, reinvention and recording.” A compelling example of this was presented by feminist researcher Anjali Arondekar in the panel, ‘New Concepts and Theoretical Imperatives: Intersectionality, Feminism and Gendered Identities’, in which she examined the under-theorisation of archival forms in the Global South as sites of surplus or abundance, rather than centres of “marginality and loss, paucity and disenfranchisement.” These “narrative economies of loss,” she noted, are “an excruciating double bind that indentures us to the very historical holdings we seek to release. In face of the casual brutality of dispersed global suffering, there is nothing spectacular to report about loss anymore. Histories of caste and sexuality have always been pandemic histories, accessed solely through material and phantasmatic imaginary of contagion, precarity and destruction.” Through the case study of a specific collectivity in India, the (Hindu reform movement) Arya Samaj, Arondekar demonstrated how archival practices were less concerned with record-keeping and absence rather than with amplifying a relationship to the past, which moved beyond stories of caste to the minutiae of everyday life.

Shaina Anand from the artist collective CAMP, in ‘New Forms of Extraction and Surveillance,’ similarly addressed the idea of the overflow of the archive as a way of resisting obsolescence through the publicly accessible digital media project Pad.ma. Together Anand and Arondekar developed a language of accumulation that is deployed to create new archival practices. “The story of this archive can be the story of any archive if you think of archives as nonevidentiary,” Arondekar noted. “We have to be more robust about South-South conversations, we presume shared vocabularies of oppression which we do not have. The origin stories of slavery are radically different between the Middle East and the Atlantic, for example.” It is significant to note that only one scholar, Ahmad Sikainga from the Africa Institute focused on the prevalence of slavery in the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf. He revealed that the practice began before the rise of Islam, but then became part of Islamic law, reflecting changes in the global economy that the pearling industry brought about during the nineteenth century.

Tina Campt’s analysis, in her panel presentation of the work of American artist Carrie Mae Weems, showed how the artist visually archives an afterlife of slavery through the movement—or lack thereof—of African-Americans being shot by US police. Holding a delicate balance between academic discourse and artistic practice that was felt lacking in this year’s March Meeting, Campt suggested that Weem’s photographic or moving image depictions of “fatally arrested movement” by anonymous black bodies are a means to move beyond the archive, which “is so fraught in its capacity to allow witnessing.” A sharp counterpoint to the invisibility of the black body was made by scholar Naminata Diabate, who saw the naked female body in public as a site of excess and creative resistance in her presentation for ‘New Concepts and Theoretical Imperatives: Intersectionality, Feminism and Gendered Identities’. Using the prevalence of female protesters who have mobilised

in different parts of Africa since the 1920s through “civil nakedness as the most universal yet most context-specific mode of dissent,” Diabate shifted the framework of interpretation. Instead of looking at this kind of protest as a pre-colonial form of contestation relying on spiritual logic and ritual, she saw it as an anti-colonial strategy, as “naked agency,” a neat trope that was nevertheless effective. Diabate stated, naked agency is—peace activist Leymah Gbowee helping end the Liberian civil war by threatening to strip naked (seen as a powerful curse in West Africa) at peace talks in Accra in 2003; of hundreds of female protestors taking over ChevronTexaco’s export terminals in Nigeria in July 2022, holding 700 Americans, British, Canadians and Nigerians hostage, the same threat to strip naked enabling them to negotiate their demands for employment and basic infrastructure. Diabate’s argument resonated with Indian artist Mayuri Chari’s I Was Not Created For Pleasure (2022) at this year’s Berlin Biennale. A derisive wall installation of rows of cow dung shaped in the form of vaginas, it evoked a feminist vocabulary of dissent through its linkage of the Indian patriarchal system’s traditional perception of menstruating women as impure, with the use of cow dung as fuel and religious purification rituals.

These instances of a body politic and performative archive illuminated embodied forms of knowledge that seemed lacking in depictions of indigeneity. Colombian artist Caroline Cayedo for instance, in the panel ‘The Environment, Climate and Global Warming, and the Anthropocene’ talked about the effects of extractivism on the human body in her analysis of a political ecology of dams, with the perspective that infrastructures do not exist just outside the body. “These projects extract knowledge from our bodies, from the everyday, choreographic gestures inherited over time that are accumulated by our grandmothers intrinsic to these geo-choreographies,” she stated. “Our memory muscle disappears and the transmission stops with the extractivist infrastructure. There is no longer the possibility to embody knowledge anymore because the river isn’t there anymore.”

When looking at environmental degradation, art can be an expansive field of engagement in regard to climate change, conservation and control, often employed as excuses by Western museums to retain looted artifacts. In the March Meeting panel, ‘Restitution and Repatriation of Looted Artworks and artefacts’, Nigerian artist and historian Chika Okeke-Agulu saw this hoarding of global cultural heritage by museums as “the primary valence of colonisation in the technologies of knowledge production and dissemination.” Sri Lankan Deneth Piumakshi Veda Arachchige turned this institutional hierarchy on its head in Self-Portrait as Restitution–from a feminist point of view (2020) at the Berlin Biennale. The hyperreal, half-naked 3D scanned reproduction of her body carries a skull, referencing the collection of ancestral remains by Swiss naturalists during an 1884 scientific expedition to Ceylon that are now held in European museums, such as the Natural History Museum in Basel, the Berlin Society of Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory and the Museum of Mankind in Paris. The plaintive offering of a replica of a male skull from the Indigenous Adivasi group in Sri Lanka to which she belongs, is a tribute but also a reclamation; utilising her own body a means of taking ownership of nineteenth century anthropometric photographs taken of her ancestors. Arachchige studied these archives to achieve a similar expression of fear and alienation, which is remarkable to apprehend in person. Her body, which is tattooed with texts about the colour of her nipples, irises and complexion chillingly conforms with historical categorisations.

As Kader Attia explained to me his curatorial intent for the Berlin Biennale, “The real issue is how we can reinvent the debate on restitution by producing other forms of rituals from the locus of where they were repatriated, and to reappropriate them.” This act resonates with French filmmaker Jihan el-Tahri’s video, Complexifying Restitution (2022) also at the Berlin Biennale, which, stemming

from a 1934 decree that prohibited Africans in the French colonies from filming themselves (until the 1960s), invites researchers and filmmakers to find other possibilities of self-representation.

An important concern was raised by Chika Okeke-Agulu in the March Meeting restitution panel about the possibilities of the postcolonial museum undertaking reparation as professional practice, removed from the damage of the “one-line history” propagated by Western museums that “told all the stories” of retained African and Asian objects in order “to teach the world.” The question raised by panelists was what kind of stories would global museums connecting Africa, Asia and Latin America tell? If the dominant order was reversed, how would they display Renaissance objects, for example? Such alliances in the non-Western world were engaged in the panel, ‘New Social Movements, Black Lives Matter and its Global Reverberations’, where Meena Kandasamy talked about solidarities between the Liberation Panther’s Party, a Dalit mass movement in Tamil Nadu, South India, that sees convergences between white supremacy and the nationalist, neoliberal Hindutva, of which she says is “nothing but East India Company 2.” This argument was countered by historian Suraj Yengde who cautioned against a kind of “peekaboo activism” or commodified “identities of convenience” in stating, “The new liberal order has reduced the relevance of your movement by having a certain hashtag that rhymes with someone else’s experience, which doesn’t give access to other communities who don’t know what hashtags mean or have access to technological innovations.” Both however, agreed on the necessity of a decolonial critique that speaks to a hereditary system of caste discrimination and local oppression. “How do you name an oppressor who shares your passport and skin colour, practices the horrors of colonialism but speaks the language of diversity and decolonialism? It doesn’t augur well for a society to lay all the blame for its disintegration on the doorstep of colonialism,” Kandasamy said. “To blame the British without acknowledging the horrors of caste and class patriarchy, which existed hundreds of years before their arrival is convenient whitewashing, as in using the white oppressor/coloniser to cover up what is deeply rotten and wounded in our society.”

In ‘New Concepts and Theoretical Imperatives: Coloniality, Decoloniality and their Aftermath,’ semiotician Walter Mignolo added to the position on cultural specificity by questioning the “North Atlantic universal.” He claimed that, “The way we think decoloniality cannot be the same in the Maghreb as in sub-Saharan Africa or the Americas; the grammar of decoloniality is no longer universal, it is pluriversal,” echoing the decolonial scholar Rolando Vázquez, who has argued that a colonial modern discourse constructs an invisible, modern colonial, white West in relation to a hypervisible inferiority of others, reducing them “to a single and universal concept of humanity … there is no claim to universality without erasure.”10 This contends with Yengde’s question about whether the underrepresented can be seen as a global caste and what would it take for a Dalit subject to become a global subject.

The political and aesthetic imaginaries of Dalit histories were particularly poignant in art events during 2022. At the Berlin Biennale, evocations of landless brick workers, groups displaced by British colonisers, stood out in Birender Yadav’s installation Walking on the Roof of Hell (2016), which included sculptures of wooden khadau sandals used to protect the bonded labourers from the extreme heat of brick kilns, while Prabhakar Kamble’s sculpture series Utarand (2022), casts of the feet of agricultural workers, were symbolic of the violence of caste structures. In documenta, Amol Patil’s Black Masks on Roller Skates (2022) comprised surreal sculptures and paintings of appendages: an unnaturally extended hand, an eye-like aperture through an old radio, the cracked sole of a foot, a set of teeth. His performance, Sweep Walkers (2022) was a tribute to Anil Tuebhekar

Archival and bodily art in decolonial practices

Archival and bodily art in decolonial practices

(a Dalit who played the radio while he swept the streets on roller skates) with songs written by his grandfather, anchored in a seventeenth-century protest tradition (powada) that criticises the caste system. Such elegiac works, located between thought and practice, were transformative. They felt both mournful and hopeful. They expressed a long singular encounter with the protracted present that prompts a questioning of not only of Enwezor’s ‘Thinking Historically in the Present,’ but also how the present can be re-envisioned through artistic material and medium. This leads me to the role of dreams in reconstituting and refashioning the present. Can dreams be an anti-colonial force? As Enzewor writes, “decolonisation is more than just the forlorn daydream of the postcolonial artist or intellectual.”11 A Dream on Lucids (2016–22), an immersive multi-channel video and sound work by Randomroutines (Tamás Kaszás and Krisztián Kristóf) at documenta told a dystopic tale of collective dreamers and subcultures roaming in the desert who can consciously manipulate the conditions of their reality in a world that bears no traces of historical trauma. Like with Enzewor’s postcolonial constellation, it is a world that is subject to constant redefinition. In it, some individuals hijack their own dreams, but essentially there’s a powerlessness and violence as the community falls apart. The narrator states in A Dream on Lucids, “This memory came back to me several times, always with that disconcerting feeling that in the end, everyone winds up choosing their own kind, everything that’s similar becomes one. It’s like a magnet bringing together all the little drops of mercury that have wandered off here and there, picking them out from the masses they ended up in, forming a single, indivisible puddle, which then becomes impermeable to any foreign matter.” Notes

1 All quotes that follow are by the named speakers, in the titled panel or talk, at the 2022 March Meeting, Sharjah

2 Ivan Muñiz-Reed, ‘Thoughts on Curatorial Practices in the Decolonial Turn’, Decolonizing Art Institutions, December 2017, p. 99

3 Ibid.

4 Anthony Gardner and Charles Green, ‘Biennials of the South on the Edges of the Global’, Third Text, 27:4 2013, p. 446

5 Gurminder Bhambra, ‘Postcolonial and Decolonial Dialogues’, Postcolonial Studies, vol. 17, no. 2, 2014, p.115

6 Interview with David Teh, Singapore 27 September 2022

7 “Contemporary art today is refracted, not just from the specific site of culture and history but also—and in a more critical sense—from the standpoint of a complex geopolitical configuration that defines all systems or production and relations of exchange as a consequence of globalisation after imperialism. It is this geopolitical configuration, its post-imperial transformations, that situates what I call here “the postcolonial constellation.” See Okwui Enwezor, ‘The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition’, Research in African Literatures, vol. 34, no. 4, 2003, pp. 57–82

8 Robert Meister, After Evil; A Politics of Human Rights, New York NY: Columbia University Press, 2012

9 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994

10 Rolando Vázquez, Vistas of Modernity: Decolonial Aesthesis and the End of the Contemporary, 2020, Prinsenbeek: Japsam Books, p. 8

11 Okwui Enwezor, ‘The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition’; http://www.oddweb.org/wp-content/ uploads/2018/05/Enwezor-The-Postcolonial-Constellation.pdf

Severe Clear, Part 1: On the phenomenology of a systemic crisis, from the Athens Biennale to documenta

There’s a phrase used in aviation to describe conditions of perfect visibility, like on a cloudless sunny day: severe clear. It was used the morning the world was shocked into a twenty-first century axis, as two passenger planes, one after the other, flew into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City in autumn 2001, prompting the War on Terror that pit the world, per the words of George W. Bush, with or against America. Shockwaves first reverberated through the North tower, the first impacted building—they immediately resonated through the structure and across its immediate surroundings, as people on the ground turned their heads and cameras up to a cloudless blue sky. Then, as when a stone is thrown into water, images transmitting the event in real time rippled across screens and pages around the world, as the second plane was filmed flying into the South Tower live on air.

Anyone old enough to remember can recall where they were when it happened. I was in Hong Kong, researching Athens, the Greek capital, on the internet, where I landed a few days after 9/11 to live for one year after graduating from high school. The mood among the people I met there, as the world reeled, was a complex blend of shocked and empathetic indifference; a human tragedy no matter which way you saw it, that also appeared like an ouroboros to those who had experienced American violence, here, returning to its heart by hitting one of its core instruments of historical domination, international finance and trade, and destroying lives in the process.

It was a harsh lesson, where a global event reflected not so much a neat distinction between good and evil, as George W. Bush Jr’s administration would have it, but opened up a complicated landscape of intersecting threads that continues to unravel to this day, as demonstrated, from the perspective of the global art world, in the debates surrounding documenta fifteen in 2022 and the installation of a monumental mural by Indonesian collective Taring Padi that contained two images (or one, depending on the commentator) containing antisemitic tropes; a flash point that saw some people perform mental somersaults to dismiss the real concerns raised by people affected by at least

one depiction in the mural, as if the need to choose a side over-rode the opportunity to collectively confront the murky, enmeshed realities that so often exist beyond the neat distinctions that have shaped the world today, one of the most basic of which being the form and function of the nationstate, as modelled at the World Cup this year when Morocco, having beaten Spain to reach the quarter finals, launched a range of reactions from international public.

Some proclaimed Morocco at once African, Arab, and Muslim, and highlighted the fact that the player who scored the winning penalty goal in the team’s match against Spain, the Spanishborn Achraf Hakimi, chose to play for his country of origin rather than birth, because he didn’t feel at home in Spain as an immigrant. Others described Morocco’s win a colonial revenge fantasy, making jokes about the Moors re-taking Al Andalus and praising the Moroccan football team for raising the Palestinian flag. Then there were those who pointed out the Kingdom of Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara in the 1970s, making the nation-state a colonial power in itself—a fact that recalls accusations against ruangrupa (artistic directors of documenta 15) by some critics, who pointed out the hypocrisy of organising a decolonial exhibition that made no mention of the West Papuan struggle for independence from Indonesia, highlighting the complexity of any given context as soon as you zoom in, as was the case with Greece in 2001.

Greece, I soon learned back in 2001, had a complicated political relationship with the United States. Every year, on November 17, a protest snakes through Athens towards the US Consulate in recognition of the US government’s support of a far-right military dictatorship that lasted from 1967 to 1974, which President Bill Clinton publicly acknowledged in 1999.1 That chapter in modern Greek history was punctuated by a student uprising against the dictatorship on 17 November 1973, which culminated with an army tank crashing through the main gate of the Athens Polytechnic as students still clung to its rails. (Those gates remain crumpled in situ today, while a law passed in 1982 mandating that police could not enter universities, in response to the events of 1973, has undergone rounds of repeal and re-instatement since.) As Dr. Julia Tatiana Bailey writes, the US considered the junta in Greece “an expedient anti-communist ally for the West,” which “led to growing antiAmericanism during the dictatorship”—sentiments that “only increased when the US failed to support Greece in halting the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974,” the year the dictatorship fell.2

One year later, in 1975, a militant group formed to claim 17 November as its name, swiftly assassinating a CIA station chief in Athens. That same year, as Greece transitioned to democracy under the leadership of Prime Minister Konstantinos Karamanlis, the country applied to join the European Economic Community, in part to secure Greece’s protection in light of the Cypriot invasion. In response, the European Commission issued an opinion that the Greek economy did not meet the requirements to enter the monetary zone, citing the country’s “weak industrial base” as limiting to its ability to successfully “combine homogeneously” with other EEC member states.3 German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, meanwhile, voiced concerns about “Greece’s problematic public administration, and its inability to collect taxes from its wealthiest citizens.”4

But despite these reservations, Greece’s EEC application was approved in 1976, pointing to the EEC’s “attempts to establish a European political identity” that emphasised “the importance of democracy to gaining membership.”5 Europe, after all, is a Greek word, emphasised Karamanlis; a tactic that scholars Emma de Angelis and Eirini Karamouzi have described, per professor Frank Schimmelfennig, as “rhetorical entrapment,”6 whereby Greece played on its identity as the cradle of Western civilisation and democracy, as it had been projected on the country in the nineteenth century by the same European powers now composing the core of the EEC.

The EEC’s unconditional acceptance of Greece, then, was made on political and ideological grounds that emphasised liberal democracy within the context of a common trade and economic zone, as Europe’s structuring order—a position that was intimately entangled with the Cold War politics of the time. After the fall of the dictatorship, “Greece’s withdrawal from the integrated military command of NATO in the midst of intense anti-Americanism in 1974 and the rise of the left in domestic politics,” writes Karamouzi, raised “concerns about the country’s future orientation,” making it “of major strategic importance to promote a quick Greek membership as a means of assuring the country’s continued adherence to the West.”7 This was particularly important given the socialist risings occurring in post-dictatorship Portugal, Spain, and Italy, making “the Greek case … part of the Southern European puzzle”, and Greece’s entry into the EEC “a solution to a genuine Cold War problem.”8

It’s a complicated history, one this essay, as part of a much larger interrogation, seeks to untangle in order to reach a place where the conditions that fed into documenta fifteen in 2022 might be contextualised within a milieu of intersecting and enmeshed histories that have shaped the world as a shared space, often by reducing it into reductive Manichean dichotomies, whereby the nuances of time give way to the violence of amnesia. But in order to get to documenta 15 in 2022, which will form part two of this study, this essay will focus on Athens first, looking at how the Athens Biennale, which would become the inspiration behind documenta 14’s decision to split the show between Kassel and the Greek capital in 2017, 9 explored the conditions that shaped the Greek state, particularly in the nineteenth century, when the capitalist world economy that has come to define the international world order was formalised into a community of nation-states and territories defined by degrees of sovereignty.

Greece played a central role in European politics of the nineteenth century, exemplifying how histories often framed as conspiracy or dismissed as irrelevant, actually reflect complex, systemic, and ongoing material trajectories that reveal how crucial it is to retain the past in our sights, if only to resist systemic collapses into oversimplification and open up a severe clarity whereby good and bad, us versus them, are complicated to the point that everyone, whether perpetrator or victim, becomes implicated. Such were the sentiments of the 3rd Athens Biennale in 2011, titled Monodrome and curated by Biennale co-founders Poka Yio and Xenia Kalpatsoglu with curator Nicholas Bourriaud, to contextualise the Greek economic crisis at a time when Greece had effectively been placed under a bell jar by international news media and European politicians, and projected upon with every stereotype possible, the worst of which was the accusation that the Greeks had brought the crisis upon themselves—a view that simply absolved the world from recognising the structural conditions of the crisis itself, which has not stopped there nor elsewhere, even if official announcements would have you believe otherwise.

One of the works on display at the old Diplareios design school, where a bulk of the Biennale was staged, hammered this point—that the Greek crisis was by no means an isolated event —with particular insistence. Pinned to a decrepit wall in the building was a striking poster promoting the opening of a branch of Citi Bank in Greece in 1964, then known as the First National City Bank of New York and the first major American bank to open a foreign branch in 1914 in Buenos Aires. The design shows the Statue of Liberty standing amid a line-up of Caryatids, the female sculptures that double as columns on the Acropolis Hill, with the words: “The American Banking System in Greece!” printed in Greek. The archival document pointed an angry finger at the dynamics at play in Greece’s financial collapse, which Greek artist Stefanos Tsivopoulos’ 2009 film Lost Monument

aligns with Professor Michael Herzfeld’s definition of crypto-colonialism: “the curious alchemy whereby certain countries, buffer zones between the colonised lands and those as yet untamed, were compelled to acquire their political independence at the expense of massive economic dependence,” in a “relationship… articulated in the iconic guise of an aggressively national culture fashioned to suit foreign models.”10

Lost Monument tracks a journey taken by a statue of former US President Harry Truman as it passes through different communities in and around Greece, from farmers and fishermen, to migrants and the bourgeoisie. The statue in question was erected in 1963 near the US Embassy in Athens by the conservative American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association based in the US. It has since been repeatedly targeted, among the most recent incidents being an attack by the Greek Communist Party in 2018 in protest against air strikes on Syria by the United States, Britain and France.11 The reason for such enduring ire, as suggested both by the attacks against the statue and Tsivopoulos’ treatment of it, is Truman’s authorship of the 1947 Truman Doctrine, which was designed to bail out Greece and Turkey after World War II.

At the time, Greece was in the midst of a bitter civil war between British and US-backed monarchists and Yugoslav- and Bulgarian-supported communists, which erupted towards the end of the Nazi occupation in October 1944 and unfolded in two parts through to 1949—what has been since been described as the Cold War’s first proxy war.12 Truman articulated the US position on that war in an address to a joint session of congress in March 1947 that introduced the Truman Doctrine. Describing a rising threat of totalitarian regimes against the free peoples of the world, he advocated for the instrumentalisation of America’s political, economic and military power to prevent the domino effect of Greece and Turkey falling under the influence of the USSR.13 What followed in 1948—the year Citi Bank funded the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis’ first supertanker14 —was the Marshall Plan, which expanded the Truman Doctrine: an international credit and aid program rolled out in Western Europe that helped consolidate the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation alliance, and paved the way for the establishment of the European Union.

As written in The Economist, “The EU is an American creation, as much as a European one,”15 and the Marshall Plan—”a torrent of post-war funding for the crippled continent, [which] came on the condition that European countries meld themselves together”16—was among the tools to promote it. “We hoped to force the Europeans to think like Europeans, and not like nationalists,” said American diplomat George Kennan at the time—a hope that spoke to the Cold War tendency to create blocs of allegiance in the face of the capitalist or communist threat.17 The Truman Doctrine, along with the Marshall Plan, thus “indicated the beginning of a long and enduring bipartisan Cold War foreign policy,” with “similar reasoning” later used “to justify actions in Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam, among others.”18 What followed in 1949 was the Point Four Program, which was designed to aid developing countries in meeting “universal development needs around the globe, especially in underdeveloped areas and countries,” and thus bring them into the fold of liberal capitalism.19

“Universal development” is the operative phrase here, because it encapsulates the post-war economic world order and the globalisation of industrial capitalism which would seek to not only preserve the centre-periphery dynamics that were established in the nineteenth century between emerging post-colonies in the twentieth century and their former colonial occupiers, but also extend those dynamics through the politics of under/development in the post-World War II order—as defined in part by the notorious loans offered by the IMF and the World Bank, both established in the same time period as the United Nations amid and after the Second World War. What these

Severe Clear, Part 1: On the phenomenology of a systemic crisis, from the Athens Biennale to documenta

institutions heralded, not least from their development out of the Bretton Woods Conference hosted in the United States in 1944, was an era defined by what Ghanaian politician Kwame Nkrumah termed “neo-colonialism”, one that aligns with imperialism as a form of economic capture and taps into Herzfeld’s concept of crypto-colonialism, in that former empires shifted from land-holding and occupation to financialisation as a way to retain influence in territories ostensibly declared independent.

Such were the sentiments of the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS), named after the Swiss village where the first MPS meeting in 1947 was organised by economist Friedrich von Hayek, bringing together economists, historians and philosophers to respond to a perceived threat against liberalism from Marxist and Keynesian economic state politics emerging at the time across the world. In the 1950s, the MPS meetings increasingly turned to the issue of development in the formerly colonised world just as it was establishing newly independent states and staging international meetings of its own, including the pivotal Afro-Asian Conference at Bandung in 1955 and the Non-Aligned Movement meetings that followed, resulting in a parallel track whereby ideas of a neoliberal counter-revolution were fomented in tandem with anti-colonial movements.20

This was the age of Third World non-alignment, after all, as a wave of newly independent states began to enter the United Nations General Assembly, turning that space into an active site of decolonial praxis, thus explaining the urgency with which the MPS meetings tackled a rising threat to an existing order—that is, a capitalist world economy, as it had been developed, per Immanuel Wallerstein, from within Europe in the seventeenth century and subsequently exported through colonisation to the rest of the world. Amid this momentum, these newly independent territories experimented with state planning, exploring the models, methods, and means to establish a sovereign nation-state capable of standing its ground in the capitalist world economy—already grossly imbalanced due to the forced underdevelopment and utter exploitation of colonisation and industrial capitalism—amid the increasingly bipartisan and indeed financialised geopolitics of the Cold War.

Enacting non-alignment, these states would often “model their industrial system on the Soviet pattern, though without subscribing to Bolshevism.”21 In the case of India, writes Professor Mark Berger, “Nehru’s views by the 1950s had much more in common with social democracy in post-1945 Western Europe than they did with state-socialism in the Soviet Union, despite the much publicised Soviet support for national development in India,” though Nehru’s government also drew on China’s post-1949 approach to national development, especially its approach to agriculture.22

In Indonesia, President Sukarno’s anti-Western, Third World vision manifested in what was termed “Guided Democracy”, and by the late 1950s had embraced an approach to economic development that involved centralised state intervention, not to mention “full presidential powers and rule by decree,” to restructure and nationalise the economy.23 Sukarno’s approach was mirrored in places like Egypt and later the United Arab Republic under Gamal Abdel Nasser, and in Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah, which, like Indonesia, would eventually lead to accusations or enactments of dictatorship and corruption, prompting uprisings, coups, and power grabs, like the one led by General Suharto in Indonesia in 1965, which resulted in the mass-killings of Indonesian leftists, and Suharto’s ascension with US support to (dictatorial and genocidal) power.24

With these developments in mind, scholar Dieter Plehwe provides a fascinating look into the mindset of mostly American and European thinkers grappling with that changing world order in the post-war era in his tracking of the Mont Pèlerin Society meetings: a back-end view of a few

precious decades that were undoubtedly decolonial in their decisive rupture from the age of old empire. Tracking the evolution of development discourse in MPS meetings during the 1950s—a foreshadowing of the division of the globe into First (Developed), Second (Developing) and Third (Underdeveloped) Worlds—Plehwe uncovers mentalities that remained intimately linked with “an understanding of development economics that still uncomfortably resembled traditional colonial economics underpinned by Victorian anthropology.”25 That meant a tiered structuring of a world system according to a tripartite criteria: whether core, semi-periphery and periphery—a typology that was formalised, per Wallerstein, in seventeenth century Europe—or sovereign, semisovereign, and non-sovereign, which was adopted in nineteenth century international legal discourse to effectively justify the domination of the globe by a handful of Western powers (plus the Japanese) by creating a measurable global hierarchy.

Of particular note was the 1957 MPS meeting in St. Moritz, which took place two years after the Bandung Conference. By then, “the topic of development moved up on the MPS’s agenda,” writes Plehwe, “owing to the rising challenge of Third Worldism in general and to a specific ‘German’ discussion within the neoliberal camp in particular.”26 That discussion was anchored to the writings of Alexander Rüstow, the German MPS member who coined the term “neoliberalism” in 1938, and whose critical assessment of colonialism and imperialism sought out a new liberalism that, as summarised in 1955 by German-American political theorist Carl Friedrich, took “into account the criticism levelled at its forebear by socialism and communism, as well as by conservatism and reactionary types of thinking.”27

Plehwe, in his reading of Rüstow’s contribution to that 1957 MPS meeting, describes a contradictory figure. On the one hand, Rüstow blamed “the absolutist state’s thirst for power for the earliest and most brutal application of colonial imperialism in an apparent effort to separate the term imperialism from capitalism,” conflating “the Spanish and Portuguese conquistador” with “nineteenth-century Western imperialism and twentieth-century Soviet efforts to expand communism” in his analysis of imperialism as “a universal category of state power indicated by foreign policy ‘behaviour’.”28 Rüstow even acknowledged “the feelings of hatred and revenge that have accumulated and built up in four continents,” which, “though not ready to explode everywhere right away… are only waiting to be exploded by Bolshevism against ‘us’.”29 He then chastised the Western world for lacking consciousness, guilt, and penitence toward its “victims of centuries-old colonial superimposition.”30

But then Rüstow flipped the script. As Plehwe summarises, he “went on to reject ‘typical’ accusations against colonial powers as allegedly preventing colonial people from attaining a cultural development similar to ‘ours’,” effectively pointing out the progress that colonisation catalysed, which is something Black American writer Richard Wright grappled with in his writings on the Ghana Independence movement and the Bandung Conference. The libertarian American lawyer Arthur Shenfield, president of the MPS from 1972 to 1974 (which coincided with the Non-Aligned Movement’s call for a New International Economic Order) and 1957 MPS meeting attendee, upped the ante, defining anticolonialism as the “aggressive” party “weaken[ing] the West from within.”31 Such views no doubt infused the actions that sought to destabilise the decolonial movement at a state level, including the Belgium-backed assassination in 1961 of Patrice Lumumba, the first president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in order to maintain the balance of power established by the economic system that the world’s colonial powers imposed on everyone else in the nineteenth century: global industrial capitalism.

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All of which circles back to the Truman Doctrine, and the red thread connecting the Greek Civil War in the 1940s and its military dictatorship in the 1960s, with events beyond the country’s borders that defined the Cold War. Not limited to the military coup of 1973 that would oust Chile’s first democratically elected socialist president with a US-backed far-right dictator, who ushered in the neoliberal policies of the so-called Chicago Boys, Chilean economists educated at the University of Chicago under the likes of Milton Friedman, another MPS member—what some call the sounding shot of the neoliberal counter-assault on world politics, whereby economics would become a weapon of choice, though others, including The Otolith Group’s Kodwo Eshun, have identified the coup against Nkrumah in Ghana as the point when the neoliberal counter-revolution arrived on the African continent.

With this backdrop in mind, Plehwe’s most telling observation when it comes to Rüstow’s contributions to the 1957 MPS meeting, was Rüstow’s dismissal of “Anglo-Saxon parliamentarian democracy as an option” when considering adequate developmental models to engage newly independent states, with Rüstow inviting “political scientists to assist the intelligentsia of former colonies to develop a model that would help to combine the indispensable elements of dictatorship with a minimum of democratic freedom”—a model, while anathema to the tenets of a liberal democracy, Rüstow believed would “help us,”32 which then feeds back to the dictatorships that arose in places like Greece and Chile, not to mention later examples, such as the strongmen we see today, with some observing in President Donald Trump nothing more than the neoliberal counterrevolution of yesteryear finally coming home to roost. Because what is dictatorship (or pyramidal models to that effect) if not monarchy modernised?

That proximity between then and now within the context of Cold War history opens up a crucial historical frame through which to locate Greece’s sovereign debt crisis that erupted at the end of 2009, triggering a full-blown Eurozone meltdown in 2010—a frame that the 3rd Athens Biennale sought to highlight in its emphasis on the economic history of the Greek state. Beyond the 1960s poster describing the American banking system in Greece, the exhibition included a series of archival images created in nineteenth century when the country’s cycle of debt truly began, in order to open up a broader historical context through which to read the present crisis as one invoking Lenin’s famous observation that capitalism is imperialism’s highest form. Pinned to the wall in one room of the Diplareios building was a line of photographed pages from the nineteenth century satirical periodical, Neos Aristophanes, each one depicting a caricature focused on the many international loans that fed into the foundation of the Greek state, including those that fuelled its war for independence from the Ottoman Empire. In one image, a city positioned within a vast landscape is overlooked by two figures—two of Greece’s main creditors—perched on peaks overlooking the scene. On the left is England, represented by a cow who is releasing a steady stream of watery shit into a sack, on which the words “SINKHOLE OF LOANS” is emblazoned in Greek, held up by a large hand in the foreground, as a man on the right representing France pours in a flurry of insects and dirt from a wheelbarrow.

“Nationhood and sovereignty were interwoven with external borrowing in Greece from the time of the first loans contracted in London in 1824 and 1825,” writes scholar Maria Christina Chatziioannou, who calls “The history of the Greek independence… a textbook case of the intertwining of economic expectations with a cultural component”33—something that emerged in the fashioning of Greece into a European state after experiencing a completely different developmental trajectory under four hundred years of Ottoman rule, which excluded the country from the

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Industrial Revolution. Thus, from the outset, Greece’s state infrastructures had to be reformed if not created outright—one of the conditions of the 60,000,000 francs loan guaranteed in 1832, with the House of Rothschild appointed as financial executor, to support the foundation of the Greek state and build its economy, as defined by two treaties signed that year by Britain, France, and Russia (the so-called Protecting Powers) to form the independent Kingdom of Greece, establish the state’s independent borders, and appoint an imported Bavarian monarch.34

It is said that the Greeks welcomed their foreign prince: “Not only did he embody the hope for domestic peace and progress, but as a king he was also conferring Greece equal international status with the rest of the European states,” writes professor George Tridimas.35 In reality, though, there were aspirations to establish a democratic republic both before and after the revolution—a testament to the French Revolution and its influence on the Greek independence struggle, a consequence of which, writes professor Aristides Hatzis, was a “surge in Greek nationalism and liberalism that occurred at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century,” which was subsequently “energised by Napoleon’s declarations for a Europe as a ‘federation of free peoples’.”36 But since the war of independence was won thanks to “the military and diplomatic support of the Protective Powers,” the Greeks “were not in a position to enforce their preferred constitution,” Tridimas continues,37 leading one contemporaneous British account to describe King Otto as a schoolboy “building a kind of Regent’s Park row of houses from Athens to the Piraeus” while “the men who fought and bled for their country, and who achieved its liberty, are pining in dungeons.”38

So, in 1832, as part of the terms of its establishment and despite the publication of two constitutions in 1821 and 1827 that favoured French republican legislation, the new Greek state, with its new foreign king, “ended up an absolute hereditary monarchy,” which was “the prevailing European norm” at the time39—a proto-European Union of sorts, which frames Henry VIII’s divorce from the Catholic Church as the original Brexit in a region defined by its royal houses. Greek civil law “would be based on the Byzantine Code and supplemented by customary law norms that had developed during the Ottoman times,” summarises Tridimas. “A criminal law code was published based on the Bavarian code, while for commercial issues the Napoleonic code, which was already in use in the eastern Mediterranean basin, was adopted,” until, per Hatzis, the modern Greek Civil Code, adopted as late as 1940, took effect in 1946.40

The honeymoon period didn’t last. By the time crowds gathered outside Otto’s Athenian palace demanding a constitution in 1843, tensions between the absolute rule of an imported monarchy and its subjects were at boiling point, with local elites—many inspired by the French Revolution—excluded from high office.41 While the economy did recover in the years preceding the 1843 default through the expansion of its role in handling sea trade between Russia, the Ottoman Empire and Western Europe, the state of Greece’s public finances was precarious. “Debt repayments and spending on administration and the military had claimed the loans guaranteed on Otto’s appointment, while tax revenues remained meagre,” writes Tridimas. “In the meantime, Britain was using every opportunity available to press the government to fulfil the schedule of its debt servicing obligations.”42

Thus, while a new constitution amalgamating the French and Belgian versions was granted in 1844, which “provided for the protection of individual rights and established constitutional monarchy,”43 Otto, who still retained overwhelming power, was deposed in 1862, after his attempt to join the Crimean War on the side of Russia was blocked by Britain and France, who were fighting

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on the side of the Ottomans—a PR disaster that not only showed the Greeks just how little power the state enjoyed thanks to the terms and conditions of its conditional European sovereignty—in 1841, one British Minister to Greece apparently described the idea of a truly independent Greece as an absurdity44—but also how fickle power and allegiances could be. All of which created palpable schisms in society, heightened by the presence of Russian, British and French agents on the ground. “In the diplomatic realities of the post Napoleonic Europe,” Tridimas explains, “the representatives of the three Protecting Powers held considerable influence on the political life and diplomatic relations of the new kingdom, so much so that each domestic political faction allied itself with either the French, English or Russian foreign ministers.”45

As Richard Clogg writes, tensions naturally “arose” in Greece amid “the grafting of Western parliamentary institutions and… forms of European constitutional government onto a deeply traditional society during the establishment of the Greek state, whose political culture had developed in wholly different circumstances.”46 As Greece joined the European community with its new European king, it began to acculturate to new structural conditions after four hundred years of Ottoman rule, revealing a dichotomy within wider Greek society that would be exploited by those within and without the territory.

Clogg finds this dichotomy neatly expressed in an 1836 watercolour by the Bavarian Hans Hanke, made after an original by L. Kollnberger, depicting the café ‘Oraia Hellas’ (‘Beautiful Greece’) situated in central Athens. The scene presents a binary view of Greek society within the frame of the Greek kafeneion. The foustaneloforoi are on the right. These are traditionalists, guerrilla fighters in the Greek War of Independence, many of whom were affiliated with Greece’s clans. Among them was the Mavromichali, who, after the arrest of one of the clan’s revolutionary leaders, assassinated the first prime minister of the first independent Greek state, the Padua-educated Ioannis Kapodistrias, in 1831. Kapodistrias, who called the traditionalists “Christian Turks”—that is, elites who sought nothing more than to replace Turkish oligarchical rule with their own—was aligned with the alafrangas, who in the café image were gathered on the left. These were the suit-wearing modernisers who espoused a romantic nationalism infused with the Grand Tour fetishisation of Greek antiquity, which sought a direct link to Greece’s classical past and aimed at importing Western institutions wholesale to build the new state.47

The division that Kollnberger’s microcosm depicts, overseen towards the top of the picture by a group of Bavarian soldiers, recalls the issues surrounding the development of a constitution in Greece post-revolution, not to mention the concept in trialectics that a third force is often at play in situations that appear dialectical or divided. “The more conservative forces,” Hatzis writes, “saw the new Greek state as the continuation of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire,” and thus opted for a law based on the old Byzantine (i.e. Roman) law. “On the other hand, liberal and democratic forces influenced by the European Enlightenment and liberal nationalism”—who viewed Byzantine law “as the relic of an authoritarian era, a distorted offspring of Roman law, that was illsuited for the needs of a liberal and democratic nation”—“envisioned a Greek state whose ideological roots lay in the Ancient Greek conception of democracy and the intellectual movements that swept across Western Europe at the time.”48

These dynamics put Greece in a strange position—one that was articulated in the 1851 Great Exhibition of Works and Industry of All Nations in London, where American artist Hiram Powers’ neoclassical sculpture Greek Slave (1844) was a centre piece of the American display: a white marble depiction of a naked woman with hands bound by Ottoman chains, which apparently

had Punch Magazine asking why the Americans had not sent the real thing—living American slaves —instead.49 While Greek Slave paid tribute to the struggle for Greek independence—a war that the British, French, and Russian empires were particularly invested in—its placement in the 1851 Great Exhibition in relation to Greece’s sector, positioned not within Europe but next to Turkey and Egypt, only highlighted Greece’s precarity within the European community. While Powers’ sculpture positioned Greece “as the origin of European neoclassicism,” albeit from within the frame of the United States, writes professor Jeffrey Auerbach, Greece’s location in the exhibition only marginalised its claims to be European, with the state positioned somewhere between ‘Other’ and ‘Oriental’, iconic and side-lined, in one exhibition.50

Artist Andreas Angelidakis, whose installation Crash Pad, created for the 8th Berlin Biennale in 2014, references Kollnberger’s image in the creation of a discursive space that blended of the aesthetics of Ottoman salons in Northern Greece with Greek kafenio and the occasional white column, finds resonance in how Greece was positioned in the nineteenth century compared to the early twenty-first. The issue, he said, is ultimately about reality versus concepts—that is, “the reality of Greece as an Ottoman prefecture versus the idea that modern Western civilisation was born here, and therefore could not stay Ottoman.”51 It is a condition that endures, Angelidakis says; the kind that brings to mind the cryptocolonialism that Stefanos Tsivopoulos explored in his artistic study of Truman’s legacy on the fabric of Greek society.

Herzfeld has described Greece, along with Cyprus, as classic historical examples of “how nineteenth century European discourse situated both societies ‘in the margins of Europe’.”52

Indeed, writes Vassos Argyrou, not only did the Great Powers of the nineteenth century deny Greeks and Cypriots their European identity, “but also refus[ed] to classify them as unequivocally oriental.”53 This placed Greece in a liminal position, Argyrou continues, performing a number of roles in relation to what Europe was (uncivilised), could have been (Ottoman, thus Oriental), and was becoming (classical, modern). This was part of the diacritical power structure imposed by the Great Powers, Argyrou explains, “by means of divisions and boundaries that produce and maintain distinct and separate identities”54—distinctions that echoed the tripartite hierarchies of sovereignty and civilisation that defined the nineteenth century world order, which was organised by colonising European imperialists along the lines of, among other typologies, “civilised”, “barbarian (semicivilised)”, and “savage (un-civilised).”55

Historically situated in a liminal space between idealised projection of civilisation and ‘other’ while materially bound to the economic power structures of an imperialist world order, the complex dynamics that shaped the establishment of the modern Greek state felt all too present in the coverage of Greece’s well-documented crisis in the twenty-first century, when the country was reduced to an acronym as one of the PIIGS along with Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain—the Eurozone nations hardest hit by the economic crisis. All of which explains why the Athens Biennale in 2011 sought to contextualise the Greek sovereign debt crisis within the broader history of both Europe and more broadly historic capitalism for its third edition, from the Truman Doctrine and its implications on the geopolitics of the post-World War II era, to the intricate relationship between debt and sovereignty that defined the establishment of the Greek state in the nineteenth century.

As much as the Greek Civil War is seen as the Cold War’s first proxy war, so the Greek Revolution of the nineteenth century was a similarly decisive moment in global politics: what Professor Roderick Beaton describes as “the pivotal point on which the whole geopolitical map of Europe tilted away from the eighteenth-century model of multi-ethnic, autocratically ruled empires

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and towards the twentieth-century model of the self-determination of nation-states. After that,” Beaton continues, “the list of new European states created on the same model is a long one: Belgium in 1831, Germany and Italy in 1871, Serbia, Romania and Montenegro in 1878, Bulgaria in 1908, Ireland in 1922, Turkey in 1923, to say nothing of the broader redrawing of the map of the continent in the wake of the two world wars and the Cold War of the twentieth century.”56

This systemic replication—and standardisation—was extended to the economic system that would bind these nation-states together, resulting in a historic capitalism that continues to play its hand in the present. Maryam Jafri’s photographic installation and book project Independence Days 1934–1975 (2009–ongoing) succinctly articulates this condition of transmissible replicability in a collection of some two hundred and thirty-four photographs sourced over ten years from forty archives across Asia, Africa and the Middle East, each depicting the first independence day ceremony of newly independent nations in the twentieth century. Presenting these historical images side by side, Jafri points out, highlights the codification of the nation-state through the ritual of its establishment, from the swearing-in of the new leadership after an official handover of power, to the celebratory military parade. “The photographic material is strikingly similar despite disparate geographical and temporal origins, as it reveals a political model exported from Europe and in the process of being cloned throughout the world.”57

Those striking similarities observed across Jafri’s Independence Days photographs would manifest in the events that took place around the project’s presentation in the 2010 Bucharest Biennale, which opened around the time thousands of people took to the streets of the Romanian capital to protest a proposed twenty-five percent wage cut and fifteen percent pension decrease in order to meet the requirements for Romania’s IMF loan. Protests like these had by then become commonplace in Greece, which had been subjected to the politics of austerity since its first bailout was agreed in 2010. The 3rd Athens Biennale in 2011, for example, opened on the heels of a twoday general strike and violent protests ahead of a parliamentary vote that would pass further tax increases and spending cuts as part of Greece’s international bailout.

Within this climate, the Athens Biennale, itself a format whose own transmissive replicability is intimately tied to the historic capitalism that has shaped Greek politics, did not sugarcoat its claim: the Greek economic crisis was not a freak event. Rather, it was the latest rupture in a trajectory of historic capitalism to which Greece has long been subjected, and its crisis was coming for everyone. Soon enough, the so-called Arab Spring erupted in December 2010, sparked by Tunisian fruit and vegetable vendor Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself alight in the Tunisian capital after police seized the scales he needed to sell his produce; followed by the Indignant movements of Spain and Greece in 2011, galvanised by the Arab risings, in particular the occupation of Tahrir Square in Egypt, and the increasing marginalisation of Southern Europe amid the Eurozone crisis. Then came Occupy, which would inform the occupations of Gezi Park in 2013 and central Hong Kong in 2014, in a fabric of connected resistances defying the same force: capital, and the imperialist world system that has been shaped according to its laws of accumulation. These dynamics fed into the satirical images published by Neos Aristophanes that were selected to go on view at the 2011 Athens Biennale. In one striking print, three men in an abattoir dressed in ceremonial uniform—a Prussian (German), a Brit, and a Frenchman—are seen sharpening their knives, as a naked woman representing Greece, hangs from the wall already sliced open. Another series of caricatures focus on the figure of Harilaou Trikoupis, Prime Minster of Greece from 1875 to 1895. In one image, he vomits letters for the word “loan” in Greek, with a subtitle below

Severe Clear, Part 1: On the phenomenology of a systemic crisis, from the Athens Biennale to documenta reading, “THE BORROWER”, while in another he is seen requesting another loan from the Great Powers with a low bow, with subtitles below reading, “THE COMPROMISE”—an image that recalls the moment Prime Minister George Papandreou Jr., after defying Europe to call an unexpected referendum surrounding Greece’s acceptance of the EU’s bailout terms in 2011, was forced to scrap the vote after being summoned to a meeting ahead of the G20 summit in Cannes that year.58

According to one version of the story, Trikoupis cut to the chase when informing the Greek Parliament in 1893 of the country’s third bankruptcy since independence, simply stating: “There is no money.” That 1893 bankruptcy was tied to overspending on infrastructure, including the construction of the Corinth Canal, a massive project that Trikoupis oversaw, whose intentions —to create a faster trade-route—brings to mind the politics of development that would likewise grip the world in the twentieth century in a decolonial wave as a flurry of new states were established; the Aswan High Dam, overseen by pan-Arab leader Gamal Abdel Nasser with the financial and technical support of the Soviet Union, being one example. What these instances of development have in common, is the impetus to build a state infrastructure capable of competing in a world economy whose terms were defined centuries ago.

Two works at the first Athens Biennale in 2007 articulated this historic claim by opening up another temporal axis between past and present. Stelios Faitakis’ epic narrative painting rendered in the style of Byzantine iconography, Socrates Drinks the Conium (2007), covered the walls of a single room like the naos of a Byzantine church. The work’s title references the narrative that unfolded: the death of Socrates, who was forced to drink hemlock by the Athenian authorities on the charge of corrupting the people, in particular the youth, with his transgressive ideas; namely, questioning everything—including absolute power—to open up space for dialogue. Yet in Faitakis’ telling, this ancient reference collapses into an expansive, trans-temporal allegory: while Socrates is robed at the dock, he faces not an ancient archon and jury, but two orthodox priests, as an army of contemporary riot police square off in the city below with a furious crowd of rioting workers, behind whom a suited man hangs from the gallows.

The exit to this striking room was blocked by a single standing wall framing a small drawing on paper at its centre. The drawing was created by Pablo Picasso in 1959 to raise both awareness and funds to support the jailed communist activist and life-long anti-fascist Manolis Glezos, who is legendary for climbing the Acropolis hill at the age of eighteen alongside schoolmate Apostolos Santas, to tear down the swastika flag raised by Nazi forces during World War II. (“The first act of defiance under German occupation,” writes The Guardian’s long-time Athens correspondent Helena Smith, it “was credited with boosting morale and spurring the country’s resistance movement.”59) Picasso’s simple work commemorates Glezos’s story, by depicting a small blue figure standing on the roof of the Parthenon holding a flag with the Dove of Peace as its emblem. But, in an echo of the way fighters in the War of Independence were jailed afterwards —Theodoros Kolokotronis being one of the most famous cases—Glezos, a national hero and by then secretary of the United Democratic Left party, was arrested in 1958 for espionage, a common accusation against leftists after the Civil War, which left members of the defeated Communist Party of Greece, since outlawed, open to persecution.60 Glezos was sentenced in 1959 to five years in prison. (Apparently, the Soviet Union responded by putting his face on a stamp.61) He was imprisoned again under the far-right dictatorship—a regime that, ironically, recalled the warnings against a communist dictatorship made by the Greek right before, during, and after the Civil War—and then exiled, returning to Greece in 1974 after the junta fell. He would remain committed to political life

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—it was his way of honouring his fallen comrades for whom he’d promised to live every day —sitting in parliament as a member of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement in the 1980s. In 2012, he famously returned to politics shy of his ninetieth birthday to represent the leftist Syriza party, becoming the oldest member elected to European Parliament in 2014 at the age of ninety-one, where he pushed an anti-austerity, pro-people agenda.

Recalling the illustrations from Neos Aristophanes, Glezos, a regular presence at the demonstrations against austerity in Athens, often talked about the colonisation of Greece by the Germans, who had in fact become Greece’s largest creditors by the late-nineteenth century—a common talking point, in fact, during the crisis, which in turn invoked the legacy of the nation’s Bavarian kings, ousted once and for all at the foundation of the Third Republic, not to mention the brutal occupation by the Nazis, who emptied the Greek state’s coffers and destroyed the country’s infrastructure as they left (a common tactic of the Nazis as defeat closed in around them). “Greece is the guinea pig of policies exacted by governments whose only God is money,” Glezos once said, in a description that could have informed an image from Neos Aristophanes over a century ago.62 In turn, Glezos said, he would never stop fighting for what he and his comrades had set out to do decades ago, which tapped into the very heart of the Greek struggle for independence centuries beyond that: to establish the people’s rule.

All of which puts the First Athens Biennale into perspective, particularly given its title, Destroy Athens, and the first work that opened the exhibition, curated by the Biennale co-founders Xenia Kalpatsoglou, Poka Yio and Augustinos Zenakos. Julian Rosefeldt and Piero Steinle’s sevenchannel video installation Detonation Deutschland, produced in 1996, features footage of building demolitions filmed in post-war Germany, including a tower on the former Nazi Party rally grounds in Nuremberg: visuals whose connection to 9/11 could not go un-noted, given the relentless, collapse of architectural blocks, one after the other. “The detonations show themselves to be part of a historical process,” the artists have stated of the work. “Metaphorically, they stand for the transitory nature of systems, ideologies, power structures and their status symbols.”63

In the case of Athens, one of those has been the Acropolis hill and the Parthenon that crowns it—a citadel whose symbolism has long weighed heavily on the modern Greek state, not to mention its population, as much as both entities have capitalised on its enduring appeal, whether for twenty-first century tourists, twentieth century politicians justifying Greece’s place in the European community, or nineteenth century European imperialists rallying investors to support the Greek War of Independence. With that symbolism in mind, “Destroy Athens presented the city as a symbolic space, associated with stereotypical images of democracy and ancient civilisation, which ‘belongs to everybody’, as a site of potential demolition,” observed critic and curator Diana Baldon.64 Staged at the Technopolis cultural complex, a former gasworks site built in 1857, the Biennale was curated into seven chapters according to the seven days of creation, as if to invite viewers to imagine an origin myth for the present that starts with a breakdown. The intention, as the curators have noted, was to break the stupor perceived in the state of Greece at the time, some three years after the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens—the climax in a period of triumphalism, when the Greek state officially entered the European Monetary Union (it ascended in 1981, and converted to the Euro in 2001). There was a sense, writes scholar Panos Kompatsiaris, that “Greek identity was modernised, and in a way empowered, by becoming more European,” with the large-scale infrastructural projects created ahead of the Olympic Games, including the Athens Metro, “contribut[ing] to the construction of the narrative of [a] strong European nation with a booming economy.”65

Destroy Athens was a prophetic proposal in the end. One year later in December 2008, a policeman shot and killed a fifteen-year-old boy, sparking weeks of furious protests that saw central Athens go up in flames, and public discourse return to the traumas of recent history, so much of them inflicted by the state’s security forces—whether the junta’s fearsome police, or the right-wing’s targeting of leftists. Then came the economic crisis, when the metaphorical breakdown envisioned by Destroy Athens shifted into a real and unstoppable decline, prompting the Biennale, particularly after its bombastic, sponsor-heavy 2009 edition Heaven, to “call upon the tools of art in order to ask questions that no other cultural institution seems to be asking in Athens, without ignoring that noise from the streets,” as observed by curators Zoe Charaktinou and Alkisti Efthymiou.66

Evolving in tandem with the Greek economic crisis, the 2011 Athens Biennale dissected the historic conditions of capitalism and its structural crises, and sounded the alarm against the rising threat of racism, ultra-nationalism, and fascism as a result. In so doing, Monodrome “strategically articulated a sort of reflective indeterminacy,” writes Kompatsiaris; “that is to say a desire to reflect upon the official narrative of Greek history and its mainstream effects on the perception of Greek identity, without, however, being explicit neither on how this perception relates to the current crisis nor how AB3’s framework intervenes in relation to this perception.”67 Mobilising “ideas related to melancholy, failure, nostalgia and self-reflection,” Kompatsiaris continues, this “rhetorical device … helped the Biennale to critically position itself within the current polarised climate and mainstream debates about the crisis without taking a clear side.”68 It was an important position to take when thinking about the politics of division that shaped the Greek state from its outset, the rise of the far-right, and given the urgent need to create space for generative discourse that transcended such archaic and calcified divides—a position the Biennale has arguably taken since.

Take the 4th Athens Biennale, staged in 2013 in the old Athens Stock Exchange, which built on the previous edition’s exploration of the economic crisis’ origins, by creating the conditions through which, it was hoped, alternative political economies might emerge—alternatives that, as with the demolition of buildings-as-symbols, might exceed the limits of what is presently known in order to break the repetitive, cyclical impasse of intoxicating boom and unbearable bust. With questions of collectivity and assembly pulsating across various international movements, around forty curators were invited to participate in a curatorial assembly, with the resulting exhibition taking place in the spaces that wrapped around the old Stock Exchange’s central trading floor, where events, happenings, lectures, and performances took place under the installation of the site’s actual price board, here set by artist George Harvalias to show closing prices on 26 June 2007—”a typical day,” writes curator Kostas Christopoulos, because nothing in those numbers foreshadowed what was to come.69

As the founders of the Biennale stated in their statement for Destroy Athens, “it is not our aim to draft a navigational map or construct a compass for the bewildered viewers of an exhibition; we would like the exhibition to remain off the edge of the map—where there be monsters.”70

To open up the margins—to take the margin as the horizon from which to depart into the unknown, was likewise Agora’s call, and it has resonated through every edition of the Athens Biennale that has followed, especially in the mid-2010s, as a period of disruption, both for the Biennale and Greece, unfolded.

In 2014, documenta 14’s artistic director Adam Szymczyk announced the decision to split the quinquennial exhibition, taking place in 2017, between Athens and Kassel, in a bid to address the dynamics of the North-South split, whether European or global, which inadvertently destabilised

Severe Clear, Part 1: On the phenomenology of a systemic crisis, from the Athens Biennale to documenta

the Greek scene, not to mention the Athens Biennale (whose fourth edition inspired Szymczyk’s curatorial focus), as the documenta organising team moved their offices to the Greek capital. In June the next year, a referendum was hastily called by the Syriza government to decide whether to accept the bailout terms of the so-called Troika—the European Commission, the IMF, and the European Central Bank—which was ultimately framed as a decision to stay in the EU. Despite sixty-one percent of the vote rejecting the bailout’s terms, the Greek state was forced to accept an even worse package shortly after; a moment that, once again, revealed with severe clarity that Greece’s economy has never really belonged to the people.

That sense of alienation was extended to the situation unfolding with documenta. Taking the decision to organise a series of discursive events rather than a single exhibition for what would have been its 5th edition, the Athens Biennale created situations that reacted to documenta 14’s title, ‘Learning from Athens’, in the lead-up to its opening in 2017, highlighting the lack of connection documenta actually had in the end with the Athenian art scene as a whole—including its private foundations, that have long fulfilled the role of public institution where state institutions have failed —and amplifying the stakes of a German institution and its European artistic director objectifying Athens once again as both exemplary and ‘other’. (When the news first emerged of documenta 14’s thematic focus, I asked Szymczyk what thoughts so far had been percolating for him around Greece, to which he tellingly replied, “the village idiot.”)

Indirectly highlighting that disconnect between documenta’s reading of Athens compared to that of that city’s Biennale, was a catalogue essay for the Athens Biennale’s sixth edition by scholar Athena Skoulariki, which cleverly contextualised its title, ANTI, through the rhetoric of resistance, which in the Greek context “mobilises an emotional response, alluding to the long tradition of resistance struggles.”71 Per historian Nikos Svornos, “resistance” does not so much constitute the Greek character as it defines the story of modern Greece, founded as it was in resistance to Ottoman occupation first, and then to Western creditors, Skoulariki notes.72 Equating the rhetoric of resistance with the equally historical usage of the word ‘No’ in modern Greek history, Skoulariki then unveils how thin the line separating traditions of leftist resistance with ultranationalism in the country really are, such that the 2015 referendum’s ‘No’ vote was supported as much by the far-right as the left: an uncomfortable truth that ANTI both highlighted and challenged by leaning into the techno-dystopian textures of a world where forms of resurgent fascism and socialist totalitarianism have decisively taken root—a stark contrast to documenta 14’s uncritical engagement with ‘Greek Freedom’ through fetishised re-tellings not of ancient Greek history, per the European norm, but of Greece’s modern legacies of resistance.73

All of which explains the about-turn that the Athens Biennale took in 2018. ANTI, wrote co-founder Poka Yio, opted to “turn its back to practices that involve historical commentating and referencing” and “practices that aestheticise history”—”in the way a child turns away from peas”—to focus on “an unhistorical present and an oblivious future.”74 Confronting the extremism being shaped by the algorithmic swamps of twenty-first century online culture, works explored contemporary expressions of historic capitalism’s cultural milieu, including entitled group identities like white-bred incel culture as descendant of utilitarian white patriarchy, and projections of that capitalism’s future by those with an interest in accelerating it. Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman and Daniel Keller’s documentary The Seasteaders (2017), for instance, zoomed in on the Seasteading Institute, founded by libertarian Patri Freidman and supported by Silicon Valley’s Peter Thiel, and its intentions to create a society on a floating island in the Pacific Ocean; while Ed Fornieles’ video The Cel (2019), documents a seventy-two hour session of live-action role-play designed to break through the toxicity of a conditioned, stereotypical white masculinity.

What followed was Eclipse in 2022, the Biennale’s seventh edition, which uncovered the flipside view of ANTI’s dystopian nightmare by unfolding its counter image: a fluid trans-temporal vision of a Black universal to eclipse the imposition of a false white totality on the world. Curated by Larry Osei-Mensah and Omsk Social Club under the artistic direction of Poka Yio, the last of the Biennale’s founders still at the helm, Eclipse was staged in three sites in central Athens. The most dramatic being the old department store Fokas, located a stone’s throw from a bank where, in May

Severe Clear, Part 1: On the phenomenology of a systemic crisis, from the Athens Biennale to documenta

2010, three workers were killed by a fire ignited by a Molotov cocktail thrown into the premises during anti-austerity protests, later resulting in the sentencing of bank officials who forbade staff from leaving work early that day despite the promise of civil unrest; not to mention close to where LGBTQI activist Zak Kostopoulos suffered a fatal civilian and police beating in 2017, which highlighted the entrenchment of populist bigotry in a country veering uncomfortably to the far-right. Abandoned since 2013, Fokas is among the many empty shells on Stadiou Street, a prime avenue linking Omonia Square with Syntagma Square (named for the constitution that was demanded there in 1843), where only the multinationals—H&M, Zara—seem to have survived the cull of Greece’s drawn-out economic downturn. With works spread across six floors, the commercial site was integrated into the curatorial fabric as a conceptual frame. Pasted onto a grey, freestanding wall, Awol Erizku’s violet-tinted digital print of an Ethiopian tribal mask smoking at the edges on earthen ground, Affinity I (2019–20), was perfectly framed in the shadow of its interior setting when viewed from across the spatial void created by criss-cross escalators, their canary yellow Perspex wall-casing crowned by a skylight whose shadows cast dynamic grids over the scene. Standing up close and to its side, though, and Affinity I’s grey mount gave way to the view of a wall emblazoned with the image of a blond fashion model, here rendered archaic, much like the department store and the culture it represents.

Of course, a narrative logic ran through the building. It started in the basement, where Simon Denny’s Caterpillar Biometric worker fatigue monitoring smartband Extractor pop display (2019) included a giant floor-version of the artist’s Extractor boardgame, where businesses compete for world domination by accumulating data. Staged like a subterranean ground of capitalist extraction, Mad Max figures populated the space, like Evi Kalogiropoulou’s marble wall sculptures of female bikers, each with a long Amazonian plait, or Andrew Roberts’ RHYTHM RATTLESNAKE: The world ends with you, baby centipede (2020), a silicone foot seemingly ripped from the ankle tattooed with the Nike logo. Nearby, two monumental images by Erizku, Asiatic Lilies (2017) and Black Fire (2019), were pasted across two entire walls, each depicting a still life reconfiguring temporal relations through an assemblage of artefacts like the bust of Nefertiti, a sphinx, Everlast boxing gloves, x-rite ColorChecker Classic charts, and a copy of Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (1968). In a city like Athens, where the ancient past weighs heavily on politics and identity, Erizku offered a welcome remix; a visualisation of Martin Bernal’s three-volume publication Black Athena (1987), which argued for the Afroasiatic Roots of classical civilisation. This was the point of Eclipse after all, if you take its metaphorical title literally: to open up the future by way of a pluralistic Black futurism that rejects the erasures and reductions imposed by a false universal rendered violently monochromatic by the same European patriarchs who defined and commodified ancient Greece as their birthright. This idea of whiteness as both an artificial and systemic construct—as a false universal that renders history a one-sided mythology—was further distilled in the former Courthouse at Santaroza. Taking up a large room in this stone and dirt architectural shell was Zuzanna Czebatul’s striking installation The Singing Dunes (2021), which staged an excavation of an Egyptian sphinx: a reference to the Pharaonic city created for Cecil B. DeMille’s film The Ten Commandments (1923)—the largest movie set in history—which was secretly buried in the California desert. DeMille’s Hollywood imagination of ancient Egypt is probably not far from the Western fantasy of ancient Greece as a paragon of whiteness, a construct whose reductive violence invokes the model Iraqi and Afghan villages created in US deserts as military training grounds: locales whose objectification signals their destruction, if not marginalisation.

With that, The Singing Dunes was a point of departure, heralding the powerful archaeologies and reclamations that followed. In one room, Doreen Garner’s Known But To God: The Dug Up, Dissected, and Disposed for the Sake of Medicine (2017)—hanging glass jars containing pearls and bodylike silicone sections steeped in yellow fluid—honoured Black women subjected to experiments without anaesthesia by a slaveholder who became known as the father of modern gynaecology. While video documentation of Victoria Santa Cruz’s 1978 performance Me gritaron negra (They Shouted Black at Me), showed Santa Cruz rebuffing the internalised white gaze by fiercely proclaiming the mantra “Soy Negra!”, which was repeated by a chorus of people beside her—a powerful act of repossession that was screened on a television monitor positioned to face a 2020 monotype on canvas with images of limbs arranged like votive offerings, from Zahra Opoku’s ‘The Myths of Eternal Life’ series, whose title reads like a proclamation, starting with: “I have a mouth to speak”. Acts of reclamation continued at Schliemann-Mela Hall, an office block abandoned since 2008 on a parallel avenue to Stadiou, starting with the ground-floor, where a small storefront hosted an installation by (the Baltimore-based curatorial art initiative) as they lay, comprising Abdu Ali and Markele Cullins. Soft & Solid: Fugitive Harmonies in Pursuit of Home (2021) evolved around a video projection on a black sequinned sheet hanging on the wall, among them Close to Home (2021), in which personal and macro histories of the African diaspora and Baltimore are connected through recollections of family by Nigerian-American art historian Temi Odumosu and poetry by Baltimore-based poet Mecca Verdell. On the floor, print-outs of poems by the likes of Lucille Clifton and Vega were strewn across a swirl of dirt, while to the side a series of photos—four hanging on the wall and six poised on a table—each depicted figures from queer Black history, among them Audre Lorde, poet and activist Essex Hemphill, and disco singer Sylvester. One review described Soft & Solid as feeling “strangely cast aside”—a feeling that contradicted the “love and devotion that is integral to artist and organiser Ali’s practice of radical care.”75 But among the spaces used for Eclipse, this was the most hallowed room, as the former premises of Aigaion, a much-loved family-run business specialising in traditional Greek donuts that operated for ninety-one years until its closure in 2017. Memories of Aigaion are so resonant, in fact, that a gallerist immediately recalled a childhood eating Aigaion donuts, just because I mentioned a panel discussion taking place in the courtyard behind the shop. Speakers included the founder’s grandchildren, who were so moved when they learned that the location was being used for an exhibition that they reached out to the Biennale, who in turn flew them to Athens from Paris and Tinos to participate. Ahead of the discussion—an intimate full house—an ex-Aigaion baker made donuts on site: a moment that distilled the Biennale’s hyper-globality into a grounded community event honouring a distinctly local memory, while highlighting the richness of this space as a frame for an installation by artists sharing their own community histories.

That this moving framework was lost on an international reviewer is not entirely unsurprising, given the way Biennales are covered—all too often by international critics, myself included, who have but a few days to soak it all in, not to mention a limited word count (and an increasing demand to simplify content per the tyranny of the SEO). And it highlights the fact that, as much as no two biennales are the same—you can’t judge Athens with the same criteria as Venice—so a single biennale might be perceived in a completely different way depending on who is looking and how. These are important things to consider as biennales evolve in the twenty-first century in tandem with the art field more broadly, not to mention the world itself, particularly when it comes to the conditions by which biennale exhibitions are staged and the ‘worlds’ they purport to represent.

Severe Clear, Part 1: On the phenomenology of a systemic crisis, from the Athens Biennale to documenta

The art initiative as they lay brought these conditions to light, when it initiated a GoFundMe campaign ahead of their arrival in Greece to raise funds to supplement their artist fee, thus highlighting the real issue plaguing arts workers regarding the sustainability of their labour in an industry that chronically undercompensates it. Then, after arriving in Athens, the collective shared an Instagram post outlining issues with their accommodation and the Biennale’s response. It’s a knotty issue. On the point that some artists were given rooms in nice hotels, for instance: these were hotel-sponsored and thus available for a few nights only, as opposed to an extended two weeks, hence the Airbnb (apparently carefully checked by the Biennale team). Then there was the treatment of the collective once a problem with a mattress at their lodgings was made known, which occurred during the opening days when a small, overworked team did not have the capacity to properly deal with the problem—points that raise the issue of the Biennale’s material lack, most notably of funding to pay even a skeleton staff, which has fuelled the Athens Biennale’s reputation as an organisation that relies on goodwill and voluntary labour.

But with 2022 marking the first time that the Athens Biennale, thanks to the sponsorship of the Onassis Foundation, was able to offer fees to its artists, perhaps the most important thing to address with an event like this—considering the historical context from which it emerged and to which it has always responded—is the shift in its identity, which is anchored to its DIY foundations as an experiment initiated by three young cultural workers in 2007, that has gone on to weather a storm of economic and political crises and precarities. The organisation has long denied its identity as an institution, given the lack of consistency with funding sources, even from the city of Athens itself, or the Ministry of Culture.76 But whether it likes it or not, the Athens Biennale has evolved into one, with its material and organisational conditions likewise maturing. What follows is the need to reflect on its organising structure, particularly when thinking about the issues highlighted by as they lay, and how these intersect with the fraught and historical relationship Greece has with the capitalist world economy, and the Athens Biennale’s modus operandi to innovate the biennale form in response to those systemic conditions.

As one local artist crucially pointed out, a mattress is not just a mattress when considering matters of care—that is, supporting artists in precarious conditions who have been invited to participate in a biennale that is likewise working itself out of precarity. That mutuality is what demands a review of how ideas of care and solidarity expressed in so many biennale statements are enacted through the structure of the exhibition itself, which relates to issues of scale highlighted so often in reviews these days, and recalls the curse of development that befell so many nation-states, Greece included, when the loans they took out became bonds of debt they would then be unable to break thanks to ambitious, large-scale developmental projects designed to meet the standards of an impossible civilisational ideal. The larger the exhibition the more distributed the budget, which directly impacts the conditions of the artists and workers expected to participate in the spectacle. It may well be time to reckon with this fact, because it connects to the historical conditions that this Biennale has long tracked which, the Biennale has long rightfully asserted, are by no means limited to Greece.

It is here that the narrative spectrum that unfolded through the former Fokas department store, starting with Simon Denny’s extractor boardgame in the basement, becomes most apparent. Taking over the entire sixth floor was The Living Necrologue (2021), a counterpoint installation by Jonas Schoeneberg in collaboration with Happy New Tears and Omsk. Amid peach-painted walls and floors, the space hosted abstract paintings characterised by undulating surfaces and pastel

pigments, apparently infused with auspicious astrological energy and minerals—the light of the May 2020 Scorpio Supermoon, for example, or opal—and perspex boxes shaped like pinball tables, each containing precious stones and inscribed with tarot grids guiding the use of bespoke decks accompanying each table, with cards like ‘The Orb’ and ‘Avatar’. Thinking back to Denny’s Extractor boardgame, Schoenberg’s installation offered another form of gamified extraction, this time of the existential, like a balm to the earthly destruction that Denny’s work critiques, and recalling the margins that Destroy Athens activated as sites where ‘monsters’—read: the unknown, the sublime, the as-yet uncharted—lurk.

As expressions of hopeful or at least alternative, affective and inquisitive speculation, the tarot as a divination tool placed within the context of a department store transformed into a postconsumerist apocalypse seemed to invite visitors to seek ways out of capital from its very interior —that is, the commoditisation of subjective desire that infuses that department store as a mechanism to extract capital from desiring individuals, which sounds like a metaphor for the commercial and mainstream art world, frankly—via the untapped interior space of earth-bound, anarchic spirituality. As a gesture, the installation seemed to respond to Peter Halley’s description of capital as having “always spoken of itself as a culture of flux” despite its nature as “a universe of stasis, governed by immutable self-perpetuating principles that gradually but incessantly push back all other realities in a process of ever-increasing purification.”77 The result of such reductive stasis, Halley implies, is the incessant replication of a system that produces alienation across scales, from an artwork and an exhibition, to the foundations of a nation-state—a condition that Eclipse attempted to navigate by tapping into the irrational, the unsystematic, and the decentred.

In tandem with the Athens Biennale, perhaps it is at this junction that the world more broadly finds itself, as the promise of change brought on by COVID-19 has settled into an unbearable inertia of the same, if not worse. Such that the three-dimensional cardboard and wooden calendars consisting of red and black felt-tip marker grids created by Zebedee Armstrong in the late 1980s and early 1990s, on view at Santaroza, held particular resonance in a show trying to find a way through the thickness of a present where past and future are collapsing with such severity that it is impossible to ignore. Apparently able to calculate the exact date of the apocalypse, Armstrong’s objects were made in response to a voice he heard in his sixties that told him to stop wasting time because the end of the world was nigh. With Indonesia only just now, at the time of writing, passing legislation banning sex outside of marriage for citizens and foreigners alike, in a move that brings to mind Hong Kong’s National Security Law and its application to locals and non-locals alike, that warning to not waste time resonates ever more, as the polarisations that defined elections and polities across the world in the past decade expand and diversify across scales, further limiting any chance of a people’s push back. Cue documenta.

Notes

1 James Gerstenzang and Richard Boudreux, ‘Clinton Says U.S. Regrets Aid to Junta in Cold War’, Los Angeles Times, 21 November 1999; https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-nov-21-mn-35991-story.html

2 Dr Julia Tatiana Bailey, ‘The Most Hated Statue in Greece’, EspionArt, 17 October 2018; https://espionart.com/2018/10/17/the-most-hatedstatue-in-greece/

3 James Angelos, ‘Why on earth is Greece in the EU?’, Politico, 22 June 2015; https://www.politico.eu/article/why-is-greece-in-the-eu-grexit/

4 Ibid.

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5 Eirini Karamouzi, ‘The argument that Greece was granted EEC accession prematurely ignores the historical context in which the decision was made’, LSE Blog, 25 November 2014; https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2014/11/25/the-argument-that-greece-was-granted-eecaccession-prematurely-ignores-the-historical-context-in-which-the-decision-was-made/

6 See Emma de Angelis and Eirini Karamouzi, ‘Enlargement and the Historical Origins of the European Community’s Democratic Identity, 1961–1978’, Contemporary European History, vol. 25, no. 3, Special Issue: European Integration, 2016, p. 441; and Eirini Karamouzi, ‘The argument that Greece was granted EEC accession prematurely ignores the historical context in which the decision was made’, LSE Blog

7 Karamouzi, ibid.

8 Ibid.

9 See iLiana Fokianaki, ‘Documenting documenta 14 Athens’, MetropolisM, 5 May 2017; https://www.metropolism.com/en/opinion/31387 _documenting_documenta_14_athens

10 “Such countries were and are living paradoxes: they are nominally independent, but that independence comes at the price of a sometimes humiliating form of effective dependence.” Michael Herzfeld, ‘The Absent Presence: Discourses of Crypto-Colonialism’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 2002, 101(4), pp. 900–901

11 Reuters Staff, ‘Greek communists try to fell Truman statue in Syria protest’, Reuters, 16 April 2018; https://www.reuters.com/article/usgreece-unitedstates-statue-idUSKBN1HN1E2

12 Mark Yeisley, ‘Bipolarity, Proxy Wars, and the Rise of China’, Strategic Studies Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 4, 2011, p. 80

13 Milestone Documents, ‘Truman Doctrine (1947)’, National Archives and Records Administration; https://www.archives.gov/milestonedocuments/truman-doctrine, accessed 20 September 2022. See also, ‘Address of the President to Congress, Recommending Assistance to Greece and Turkey, March 12, 1947’, National Archives: Harry S. Truman Library and Museum; https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/researchfiles/address-president-congress-recommending-assistance-greece-and-turkey?documentid=NA&pagenumber=3

14 ‘About Us Greece’, citi; https://www.citigroup.com/citi/about/countries-and-jurisdictions/greece.html

15 ‘The EU: Made in America’, The Economist, 17 June 2021; https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/06/17/the-eu-made-in-america

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 Milestone Documents, ‘Truman Doctrine (1947)’

19 Dieter Plehwe, ‘The Origins of the Neoliberal Economic Development Discourse’, in The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe eds, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2009, p. 245

20 But the impact of these discussions, Plehwe writes, “was not widely noticed until the late 1970s, and not before the 1980s did neoliberal expertise attain the status of authoritative development knowledge.” Plehwe, ‘The Origins of the Neoliberal Economic Development Discourse’, in The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, p. 240

21 Plehwe, p. 239

22 Mark Berger, ‘After the Third World? History, Destiny and the Fate of Third Worldism’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 1, 2004, p. 30

23 Berger, p. 16

24 See Vincent Bevins, ‘What the United States did in Indonesia’, The Atlantic, 20 October 2017; https://www.theatlantic.com/international/ archive/2017/10/the-indonesia-documents-and-the-us-agenda/543534/

25 Plehwe, p. 247

26 Plehwe, p. 254

27 Carl Friedrich, ‘The Political Thought of Neo-Liberalism’, The American Political Science Review, vol. 49, no. 2, 1955, p. 509

28 Plehwe, pp. 254-55

29 Plehwe, p. 255

30 Ibid.

31 Plehwe, p. 257

32 Plehwe, p. 246

33 Maria Christina Chatziioannou, ‘Greek Sovereign Debt and Loans in 19th-Century Public Discourse’, The Journal of Economic History 2, 2019, p. 28

34 https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1836/jul/28/greek-loan-act

35 George Tridimas, ‘When the Greeks Loved the Germans: The Political Economy of King’s Otto Reign’, Tafter Journal, no. 95, 2017; https://www.tafterjournal.it/2017/07/15/when-the-greeks-loved-the-germans-the-political-economy-of-kings-otto-reign/

36 Aristides N. Hatzis, ‘The Short-Lived Influence of the Napoleonic Civil Code in 19th Century Greece’, European Journal of Law & Economics, vol. 14, no. 3, 2002, p. 254

37 Tridimas, op cit.

38 Figaro in London, v. III, 1834, pp. 85. Quoted by Maria Christina Chatziioannou, ‘Greek Sovereign Debt and Loans in 19th-Century Public Discourse’, p. 28

39 Tridimas, op cit.

40 Hatzis, p. 254

41 Tridimas, op cit.

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid. “…made space for local elites to hold positions of power, and granted universal suffrage to men above age 25 in possession of a job or land”

44 Richard Clogg, A Concise History of Greece, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 53

45 Tridimas, op cit.

46 Clogg, p. 53

47 Ibid.

48 Hatzis, pp. 254–255

49 Michael Hatt, ‘Sculpture, Chains, and the Armstrong Gun: John Bell’s American Slave’, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 15, no.2 , 2016; http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/summer16/hatt-on-sculpture-chains-and-the-armstrong-gun-john-bell-american-slave, accessed

1 November 2022

50 Jeffrey Auerbach, ‘Introduction’, in Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge 2008, p. xv

51 As noted in an email exchange in 2014

52 Vassos Argyrou, ‘Is “Closer and Closer” Ever Close Enough? Dereification, Diacritical Power, and the Specter of Evolutionism’, Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 4, 1996, p. 211

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid.

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55 See Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 16 no. 4, 1974, pp. 387–415

56 Roderick Beaton, ‘The significance of the 1821 Revolution for Greece and the world’, Kathimerini, 14 January 2021; https://www. ekathimerini.com/culture/261016/the-significance-of-the-1821-revolution-for-greece-and-the-world/

57 See ‘Independence Days’ website entry; https://www.maryamjafri.net/indepDay.htm

58 Henry Chu and Anthee Carassava, ‘Greek move for bailout referendum returns Europe to crisis mode’, Los Angeles Times, 2 November 2011; https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2011-nov-02-la-fg-greece-debt-fallout-20111102-story.html; and Helena Smith and David Gow, ‘Papandreou scraps Greek referendum as open warfare erupts in his party’, The Guardian, 3 November 2011; https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2011/nov/03/papandreou-scraps-greek-referendum-euro

59 Helena Smith, ‘Former anti-Nazi Greek resistance fighter and MEP Manolis Glezos dies aged 97’, The Guardian, 30 March 2020; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/30/former-greek-nazi-resistance-fighter-and-mep-manolis-glezos-dies-aged-98

60 ‘December 10, 1958, Selection: Michalis Katsigeras’, Kathimerini, 10 December 2008; https://www.ekathimerini.com/opinion/61007/ december-10-1958/

61 Iliana Magra, ‘Manolis Glezos Dies at 97; Tore Down Nazi Flag Over Athens’, The New York Times, 1 April 2020; https://www.nytimes. com/2020/04/01/world/europe/manolis-glezos-dead.html

62 Helena Smith, ‘Greece’s wartime resistance hero denounces EU-backed cuts’, The Guardian, 18 February 2012; https://www.theguardian. com/world/2012/feb/18/greece-wartime-hero-denounces-cuts

63 Here, the dying of the Third and—as it was conceived by cultural critic Arthur Moeller van den Bruck—the final of the German Reichs; then, the dissection of Germany into the liberal democratic West (FRG) and socialist East (GDR); and finally, the absorption of the latter into the former upon reunification in 1990, to create the Federal Republic. See ‘Detonation Deutschland’, Exhibition Announcement, AzW, 2001; https://www.azw.at/en/event/detonation-deutschland-2/

64 Diana Baldon, ‘1st Athens Biennial: Various venues’, Artforum, vol. 86 no. 5, 2008, p. 276

65 Panos Kompatsiaris, The Politics of Contemporary Art Biennials: Spectacles of Critique, Theory and Art, New York NY: Routledge, 2017, p. 137

66 Zoe Charaktinou and Alkisti Efthymiou, ‘The Athens Biennale: A Reflection Towards the Future’, Seismopolite, Issue 6, 28 December 2013; www.seismopolite.com/the-athens-biennale-a-reflection-towards-the-futurehttp://www.seismopolite.com/issue-6/

67 Kompatsiaris, p. 132

68 Ibid.

69 AGORA: The 4th Athens Biennale Guidebook, Athens Biennale, 2013, p. 270

70 Destroy Athens: The 1st Athens Biennale Guidebook, Athens Biennale, 2007, p. 16

71 Athena Skoulariki, ‘The Rhetoric of Resistance’, ANTI: The 5th Athens Biennale Catalogue, Athens Biennial, 2018, p. 61

72 Skoulariki, p. 64

73 For an excellent dissection of documenta 14 in Athens, see Despina Zefkili, ‘Sustained: Learning from Artworking (and Artwashing) in Athens’, Field Journal, 2022; https://field-journal.com/conjunctures/sustained-learning-from-artworking-and-artwashing-in-athens

74 ANTI: The 5th Athens Biennale Catalogue, p. 33

75 Bianca Heuser, ‘Advertising Advocacy: Athens Biennale 7: Eclipse’, Spike, 14 October 2012; https://spikeartmagazine.com/?q=articles/ advertising-advocacy&page=21

76 For more, see: Zefkili, ‘Sustained: Learning from Artworking (and Artwashing) in Athens’

77 Peter Halley, ‘Notes on Abstraction’, Arts Magazine, vol. 61, 1987; https://www.peterhalley.com/notes-on-abstraction

Natasha is...

Mountains are named, and so are rivers, storms, pets, plants, roads, buildings and robots. In some cultures, names are sciences, curses, or omens for blessings. In others, names are markers of disposed leaders. Natasha was the first name of an artist three curators have worked with. Natasha was also a name that existed in the ethnic communities of Singapore. And in a poem from Korea, Natasha said to a man who loved her: “going to a remote mountain doesn’t mean you lose it all.”1

“Natasha” is a name given to the seventh edition of the Singapore Biennale. Naming the Biennale offers singular imaginations of what Natasha can be. The name is chosen not for what it means but for the ability of any name to acquire new associations. Say “Natasha”, and a link to some story, or an absence of one, generates in the mind. This moment of authorship, the un-fogging, or seeking to resolve this ambiguity, is what Natasha wants to prompt; a process of interpretation and relation.

The idea of this name was proposed in one of the early meetings of the four co-artistic directors who curated this edition of the Biennale—Binna Choi, June Yap, Nida Ghouse and myself. During their preparatory meetings, the pandemic was still pressing restrictions on travel and gatherings in and beyond Singapore. We could see exhibitions being installed and opened but then shut down shortly before visitors could see them. As curators we asked, if this condition persists or in the instance where bodies cannot cross borders or be physically present in Singapore, what presence of art forms or types of interventions could interact with audiences? And who would be there for us to operate or activate these interventions?

***

1. a material encounter;

Working with projects from the immediate space the curators had been present in or had access to has been instrumental in identifying the curatorial strategy and characteristics of Natasha. What was lying on the desktops of the physically or virtually visited artists’ studios shaped the topics we engaged with and the language we listened to and carefully re-articulated. We looked into the dayto-day processes in our and the artists’ immediate spaces of living and production—methods that were interrupted, abandoned, revisited, or acquired. Therefore, the curatorial group often stated that this Biennale is about life Natasha grapples with both the articulations of the banal, painful, and tenacious survival tactics and their flattening.

We wanted the visitors to walk into Natasha’s house, befriend the creatures/creations in its gardens, and tell us who or what Natasha is. We thus wanted these initial encounters to be readable in the presentation of the works, that is, to choose pieces that inform the immediacy and intimacy that shaped their creation. So, during its eighteen months of preparation, the Biennale was already happening. In one of the online meetings, I shared the image of Britta Marakatt-Labba’s Flying Shamans (1985).2 In this work, people seem to be flying; some hold or drop other people into the vast sea. Some people are floating or diving in a sea stitched using blue threads.3 If this Biennale is to be understood from its archaeology, then feelings of helplessness, loss, and redemption, experienced in the months that carried us to Natasha are essential segments within this archaeology. The proximity to the environments the projects came from is evident in the exhibition. Visitors are to shape the experience from the openness offered by uncertain answers.

Whether fitted with two or four wheels, pieces of luggage do not roll easily, especially when climbing carpeted ramps. The resistance yields fatigue in the arms that lingers with the damp carpet smell after leaving the carpeted areas. Humidity is the general condition of Singapore’s weather; that’s why big plants spread all over the island. All year it is warm weather, too.4 Humidity and heat are to be tolerated while looking at works on the fifth floor of the exhibition venue in Tanjong Pagar Distripark (TPD). Joo Jae-Hwan’s paintings appear on the right upon entering the TPD exhibition venue. His sets of collaged, themed works are humorous. They incorporate everyday objects that reset the relations to given norms. For instance, one group uses a variety of instant coffee packets to resemble a human body. Next to it is a work that uses the same objects as constellations in a cosmic-like surrounding, with dinosaurs as stars or planets orbiting a cup. In another work, splashes of coffee are presented as conversations between two beings that live in the artwork, one named “co” and the other “fee”. ***

2. an agent;

Natasha may not be a person but can exist as many, i.e. our lookalikes, our possible agents; ones that age or lose their breath when they run or perform. Agents, who are aware of weights they can carry for themselves and others? Natasha is a carrying power that transports several types of matter in the most private carrier; the mind.

There is a possibility of encountering some of the three beings living in a presentation at the exhibition on the TPD’s first floor. It is one of forty-one stone tablets chosen by Shin Beomsun to recall a lost ability to engage with messages inscribed in nature. On the left is a stone tablet fixed on a short, thin black pedestal. Next to it is a pedestal fitted with an optical device created by Lee Sungeun; a camera set in the ceiling emits a delayed capture of the visitors who bend over to look into the optical device. Koon Kwon repainted the lines/beings of the stone enlarged in a painting fixed on the wall. Introductions to the creatures encountered in these stone tablets are presented in A4 sheets of text. Then two vitrines layout drawings from five sketchbooks by Samia Halaby. The first drawing is from 1975, a visual study of autumn leaves that prompted the artist to “make a painting gestate like something living.”5 The nearby batch is Halaby’s experimentation with algorithmic methods that “allowed shape to gestate step by step through a process of dividing, subtracting, adding, and coalescing of parts.”6 Samia Halaby notes “how a point on a paper is nothing until it is given motion and attributes of behaviour.”7 These drawings are shown for the first time with the artist’s computer works. Halaby bought her first computer to teach herself to program the making of paintings, “My intention was an unwavering plan to find out the potential of the media and not the potential of ready-made software programs.”8

As curators, we were interested in the space where art intersects with life and the studio time embedded in the shown works. Elements related to Halaby’s programming are shown in this display, too; a floppy disk that carries a version of the short software she wrote on her Amiga 1000, a photo of the computer station in the studio, some manuals, drawings, and screen captures. In the second vitrine, fifty-four sheets from Sketchbook D46 (1988–89) unwired to bring us through abstraction processes, ones that imitated “the general principles of things we see… and the behaviour of living things.”9

A line drawn after specific instructions; an early software that appeals to a painter to create digitally; a figure associated in the past with a software called Logo; a creature that crosses the road slowly as we come back from a site visit in the South of Jordan; an emoji continuously shared by a co-curator. The vibrant colours of Kinetic Painting with Sound (1986–88) radiate from two large LED screens, colouring the faces of those looking at the vitrines. The kinetic paintings were programmed in Basic and C on an Amiga 1000 between September 1986 and May 1989. Their duration ranges between a few seconds to several minutes. “All images, shapes, colours, apparent movement, and sound in these programs are created by simple commands such as LINE, POINT, PALETTE, SOUND, etc.”10 In loops, the works mediate their appearance in moving lines and colours visible on the screens. Halaby initially shared recordings from her Amiga 1000 screen in the 1980s; their dimensions were 4:3 with a pixel size of 640x400, so their quality was limited. We discussed whether we wanted to show these works with the limitations of the recording realm from which they emerged. Instead, the artist employed an emulator to record higher-resolution video files for this presentation, not of animated videos but how the core of these videos is a code capable of generating kinetic paintings anew every time. The heart of this art work is its code. In the presentation, the core

3. a turtle;

Natasha is...

is invisible, except through its mediator, the technological ability to show us these paintings moving on a screen. In proximity to these works is another constellation, of works by Kanitha Tith. Hut Tep Soda Chan (Hut of an Angel) (2011/2017) is a reproduction of the Cambodian artist’s family house in Phnom Penh, which she used as a living and studio space between 1994 and 2008. The hut is rich with personal objects that reminisce, not only the history of the artist with her parents but also how the artist used it as studio space. On the floor is metal wire bought from Japan, which the artist contorts into sculptures that are not planned ahead of time but matured through intimate coiling time and a sense of completion. Some of these sculptures are shown on the opposite wall as woven webs of wire. They look like undressed attire, like a ghost that had just left a body or like a tree that left its leaves to wander away. Some look like rugs or braids. Between them are watercolour drawings. Some look like these sculptures or like a body or a heap of unidentified things. The artist drew all of them except one illustration of her in the studio. There are two handwritten lists of films that played on the TV the artist watched while she worked in this hut. The TV set sits on a green refrigerator in the house. Kanitha Tith named the work after a 1968 Khmer film about an angel who has given up her divine life for the sake of a man she loved. This film is like this hut, a relic or an effect of sequences of change seen in Cambodia, to which people had to find ways to adapt. Tith placed a bubble-wrapped wire sculpture between the wooden parts of her roof, only recognised by the observer after patient inspection of the hut’s intricately detailed contents. Visitors are welcome to enter the house, sit and contemplate this space. There is a hint that what lies beyond this exhibit is naturally vast; many personal lives in one. Connected times here can only be visible if we decode the space into these ‘time details’ of what we see. ***

4. morphing body;

Natasha is a morphing body, a lost encounter; a transient body; a formula; and a momentary learning process. Natasha reconfigures its temporal bounds. The artist spoke to an ancient tree in Utrecht in 2020. There she stood in front of the tree, admiring its ability to survive by exchanging air with its environment. For one hundred and fifty years, the tree has been taking air but also giving it back to the “things that walk on two legs,” Kanitha told the tree, “I don’t think I am a verbal person. But my gesture can show you gratitude and pay respect to you… No matter what air it is, I think you’ll always find a way to breathe, in and out… I feel that you always find a way to continue to be rooted here.”11 This encounter with the living non-human is to be verbalised by human greeting and identification of names, “I am pleased to meet you in person, and my name is Kanitha,” she salutes the tree.12

When Binna Choi and I visited Kanitha Tith in Phnom Penh, she took us to the National Museum of Cambodia, which neighbours the art school where she studied. She walked us through the rooms, and we learnt about the museum collection’s displays, ethics, and interests. But the artist was keen on visiting the sculpture conservation workshop of the museum, where her friend, Bertrand Porte, works. These encounters gave exciting stories of reassembling, just like the found broken parts of artefacts that fill the museum’s repair shop.13 We asked about a moonstone that we glimpsed near the museum’s exit. Bertrand spoke on how he put together an exhibition of museum objects that gestured or centred an appearance of the moon. The display included this moonstone which Cambodia received as a gift from the US Embassy in 1973.14 We did not see the display but

Natasha is...

were intrigued by the telling of its making. Natasha is seen in the assemblage of words and relations besides the physical objects put on display. In her studio in NYC, Halaby grabbed her notebooks to show her way of observing the surround(ing) nature and how she brings these observations into her works. When I expressed interest in showing the notebooks, the artist insisted she carries her notebook to Singapore. “My heart and life were in these notebooks. When you eyeballed them, I was ready to kill you,” she joked when we sat to look at how to arrange the drawings in their display vitrines.

5. a lost encounter;

In our early online meetings, the co-curators exchanged their interests and areas they wanted to research; the places they wanted to travel to, amid or despite the pandemic, and were remapped based on calculated quarantine days for each stop. What is in people’s meetings in their spaces that appeal to us?

Proposed:

3h 20m Singapore (SIN) > Hanoi (HAN)

2h 15m Hanoi (HAN) > Ho Chi Minh City (SGN)

1h 10m Ho Chi Minh City (SGN) > Phnom Penh (PNH)

1h 15m Phnom Penh (PNH) > Bangkok (BKK)

2h 30m Bangkok (BKK) > Singapore (SIN)

Realised:

1h 40m Singapore (SIN) < > Phnom Penh (PNH)

I think of a collective research visit to Vietnam to catch up on the possible friendships we could have built by physically visiting artists in their living or working places in Southeast Asia. I understood that the art scene in the north of Vietnam (especially Hanoi) has many ‘returnees’ (from the US and elsewhere). In my head, I saw a bus of friends meeting and eating with artists and cultural activists in Hanoi before moving down the coast to Ho Chi Minh City for more encounters. We would see how art and life are in different parts of Vietnam, make friends, come back again, and mix our worlds.

6. an exile;

Returning from a research trip to Singapore’s southern islands of Saint John’s and Lazarus, I landed at the ferry station to the mainland. The line from our ferry’s passengers merged with the line of arrivals from other ferries that brought passengers from Indonesia. A fence separated us; I could see the passengers queuing to have their IDs checked before we all took turns placing our bags on an X-Ray belt. A Malay arrived with a backpack. He picked it off the belt and swiftly headed towards a motorbike. He undid his ponytail, put on a helmet and took off to his life in Singapore. Should I take a year off to roam Southeast Asia via buses and ferries? In my part of the world (being the Middle

East), the word ‘returnees’ describes the exiled Palestinians who managed to move back to Palestine due to the Oslo Accords that saw the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority. Much has changed in the art scene in Palestine after that moment. Many of these ‘returnees’, who became artists, know the difference between crossing one border versus many borders.

The curators wanted visitors to see Kanitha Tith’s hut from a distance. We wanted them to stroll into the exhibition as if walking in a garden. We also liked to greet them with faces of different levels of expression. Two works by Afifa Aleiby embrace the journey through Kanitha’s works. Aleiby’s first painting is Intifada (Uprising), painted in 1989. It shows a woman raising her arms, grabbing a flag. Behind her body is a person on their knees. I was interested in the ambiguity of whether the figure was rising or falling, and the subdued tones that muted this figure. There are

Natasha is...

two possibilities for the protagonist of the painting; one is the female figure representing the artist herself, stuck in exile from Iraq while wars follow each other, distancing her further from her country. The other is the character at the back, that the fore figure is shielding with her body. The attention required to read this pressured figure is another crucial tool in Natasha. How much time or patience is needed from the visitor to engage with this person?

I started painting at a young age. After secondary school, I joined the Fine Art Institute in Baghdad, and at the same time, I worked as an illustrator in a popular newspaper for young readers. In 1974, I received a scholarship from the Surikov Institute and moved to Moscow for six years. Due to the political situation, I could not return to Iraq after completing my studies, and I moved between Italy, the Soviet Union and Yemen for a few years. In Yemen, I taught drawing and painting at the Fine Art Institute and illustrated children’s stories. In Italy, I worked as an assistant to some established Italian artists. Then I worked in an antique shop that produced copies of sixteenth and seventeenth century artworks, or what is known as Flemish painting. I moved to the Netherlands mid-1990s and have dedicated my time to my art practice since then.15

The corporeality of Aleiby’s figures, all representing her, demonstrate an art of survival in the places she has inhabited. In her other work, a beautiful woman in white attire is raising her two arms against a figure of a Mesopotamian relic behind her. They are both punctured with bullet holes, hurt imposed by the aggression of the work’s eponymous Gulf War (1991) that saw destruction of Iraq’s people, heritage, and infrastructure. Afifa Aleiby has not returned to Iraq since the 1970s, but the war’s pain and suffering has reached her wherever she was. New York’s Museum of Modern Art PS1 included this work in its exhibition Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011 in 2019. When the authorities denied the artist entry to the US, the image circulated again in response, partly why this work has been invited into Natasha are these quiet (auto)biographical stories of the work hovering over it.

***

7. erasure;

The entangled lives of humans and the archaeological relics they become are also present in the work of Doa Aly, Semenkh-Ka Re: The Many Forms of Silence (2022), presented adjacent to Afifa’s artwork. Included are delicate pencil drawings, charcoal drawings of photographs of excavation sites, and a set of gold-plated flat sculptures displayed in a museum-like setting, Aly’s attempt to duplicate a display after observed in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum in 2017. Here Aly had discovered the haunting debris of an excavation that showed two blocks of clay with twisted bands of gold and fragments of stone (or perhaps bone) embedded in them. They were part of a jewellery display, surrounded by gold trinkets. Behind them, photographic images of a recent archaeological dig documented the careful disinterring of the objects. A wall label referred to the displayed items as “Jewels of King Semenkh-Ka Re” excavated from a site that archaeologists designated Tomb 55 of the Valley of the Kings, or KV55. Since 2019, these objects have been removed from display and stored. Trying to understand what these objects are, Aly had to research the history of the excavation of KV55 and the identity of King Smenkhkare.16

The mummy found in the tomb was preliminarily stated as that of a female because of its pose. Yet, it has been regarded since as that of a male in his early twenties. In all catalogues and lists of KV55 contents, there is no mention of these strange objects at the Egyptian Museum. And the undated photographs do not look like the excavation images published in 1910 by the excavator. Her ink drawings are based on digital manipulations of the excavation photographs, the gold leaf painting recreates the central figure erased from the shrine. The pencil drawings are based on various reliefs and portraits said to be those of Smenkhkare at one point or another in history.17

The installation traces the trajectory from forms of silence to those of erasure. How much of a biennale’s ‘silence’ is shaping its erasure? What is it that we are attempting to make live longer here, the time we have spent studying or explaining how we brought Natasha together as an exhibition? Like the character in Aly’s project, her drawings so delicate they almost disappeared (or were invisible) when the installation was photographed from a distance. Can such thin and laborious veins of the Biennale also be considered one of its sites? Does an abundance of text overwhelm as much as it overrides the audience’s interest or ability to engage with a biennale? What established systems of engagement can here be defined then revisited? ***

Fear is invisible. Hope is invisible. Speech is a wave or air that is, to the bare eye, invisible. An idea rushing to the mind is hidden. In the form of vapour, water is invisible, but visible in the form of water droplets. Intentions are invisible. Words deleted from final edits are, technically, hidden.

Through several forms and documents, pitched ideas are described, explained, justified, itemised and then produced, installed, lit, and labelled. Little fabrication happens on the Singaporean island, while permits and clearances are integral. Lead-up time and profuse details are thus essential. The text-abundant process became fifty-word wall labels; the works shall generate relations with the minds of Natasha’s visitors.

On the TPD’s fifth floor is Firas Shehadeh’s Signal Feels Collision (2022). Eight large prints reveal how indigenous people radicalise abstraction to produce meanings that bypass algorithmic censorship practised on social media. Shehadeh uses coded characters and signs, and the word “feels” in the title references unexplainable, overwhelming emotions. Firas sees an extension of colonial practice through algorithmic censorship of particular political content when shared on social media, and thus, his world and work are focused on assigning new meanings to and within constructed environments. He takes images and sinks them in water before reworking them as digital images and printing them. Since the treatment is not digital, it is difficult for the algorithms to access their meanings. Only the human mind can process the elements and deliver their purpose. The other side of the hall are the works of Brightworkroom artists.18 On opening day the three artists from Brightworkroom, Yoon Mi Ae, Na Jeong Suk, and Kym Jinhong spoke about their artworks in Natasha. In Korean, Na Jeong Suk explained how obsessively she weaves patterns of stars together into dense constellations, and how they begin to take form in her hands. She begins from one corner of the work, one star after another. With little dots, swashes of colour, bits of fruit or vegetable drawings, and an impression of a nose or an eye, the artwork becomes an illusory skin of statements of her mind. Yoon Mi Ae engages in the same obsessive task, but with collages cut

8. struggle;

from shreds of packages of everyday objects. Webs of glistening sheets of A4 paper with endless constellations of meaning and illusory journeys are Yoon’s neurodiverse communications. Kym Jinhong paints profiles for neurodiversity, so lucidly, as if explained in a children’s story. These endeavours against invisible forces are characteristic of the artworks presented in this gallery of Natasha. Whether fighting against the algorithm, mental challenges, societal norms, or other forms, ‘the enemy’ is intangible, invisible, but forceful. These artists’ works show us their methods of defiance. Similarly, Assem Hendawi collaborates with and against Artificial Intelligence image generation. To speculate upon future imaginaries, Hendawi uses archival images from the social movements and critical historical moments of the modernisation of the Middle East from the 1940s to the 2000s, which he feeds into AI image generators. He then supplants the generic stereotypes provided by the algorithms to speculate a future world. The work emphasises classification bias as it results in an uncanny collapse of the past into the future.

***

9. speculative;

Assem Hendawi painted his projection room red for his video, Simia, Stratagem for Undestining (2022), which begins with continuous questions: What is the space for the communist imagination in the future? What is the possibility of its revision and reinvention? How can we repurpose the thinking about technology towards a positive and emancipative vector while being aware of technology’s history and presence in shaping capitalism and colonialism and even police/military states? What is the possibility and opportunities of addressing the techno-politics of the SWANA region19 from a post-critical position, or in other words, through a propositional and projective imagination that allows for options for the political design of possible political forms and social organisations that might emerge in the future? What is the space for techno-capitalism, that just for being excessively capitalist and exploitative, it can open against the resistance of religious and military fascism? Hendawi attempts to answer by utilising different AI processes to weave a narrative that responds to a history of capitalist and colonialist turbulence in the Middle East that cancels out a possibility of a future outside this cycle of violence.20

Naming Natasha pressed continuous demands to identify who or what it is. Natasha is a concept; a meeting body, a journey of encounters; a report on one of many journeys; a re-examining and experimentation on processes. Processes of making art, putting together exhibitions, deciding to travel (short or long distances) to encounter art. Natasha is an institution in mind and an institution of meaning. Like any biennale, it is a web of relations: advisory, administration, financing, publication, press, production, fabrication, installation and education. Its makers and visitors want it experimental but also want it to be easily accessible. It is exuberant in the knowledge it produces but requires resilience in surpassing the pre-conceptions that typify the scope of its production. It is also buoyant, calculating much of it appearance on works before being built. It required a substantial amount of time spent in meetings that ran estimates, of curatorial relations and costs, dimensions, weights, technologies, space capacities, and text requirements. There was also an abundance of technical lists and renderings in the N-mailbox. In notebooks, on scraps of paper, or post-it stickers, endless types of structures and creatures live in between my notes and to-do lists. Some of the feelings permeated or generated in Natasha’s meetings are present on these pages too.

Natasha is...

10. housed in mind;

The mind is a vehicle; a travel companion, a drifter; a dark space that can also be bright; a location that tolerates continuously changing combinations of presence; a shared ride towards dis/agreement; and a house for a stream of interpretations.

Several exhibition options also exist in similar notebooks, with varying clusters of artists’ names and projects from past and future projects. Some of these works were not shown but remain essential to imagining what Natasha is. Binna Choi brought images of Ruth Asawa’s home with her sculptures and children sharing the same space. She spoke on the artist integration, work, and education efforts. I thought much about Marguerite Nakhla’s Scene Dans Le Parc (c. 1940s) and how women and their families colour a garden. I paired it with a photo for a children’s playground designed as a fountain in a park.21 From a distance, it looked like children were walking on water; the image was overwhelming. At the time, I imagined the Biennale as a garden, where remoteness is as essential as play, nature and gatherings. This idea found its echo in the curatorial meetings, the possibility of building a children’s playground in Singapore and imagining one at Yan Kit Playfield. Eventually, we created a garden with the Malaeb collective in a remote village south of Jordan. Neither Nakhla’s work nor the physical playground of Malaeb is in Singapore, but both are part of Natasha’s experience.

Natasha is also about publishing. How to bring some of these remote or unpublished realms to the exhibition imagination? One idea was to print elements from the references, shown or not presented, as stickers and circulate them. Here, people can choose what works they want to organise as a presentation on the cover or inside pages of their notebooks. Their collections of work stickers befriend their papers of diminishing to-do lists or intimate journals.

Natasha

I would like to thank Dina Taha for her valuable remarks on the structure of this text

Notes

1 Poem translated by Chae-Pyong Song and Anne Rashid, Korean Poetry in Translation, 15 January 2013; https://jaypsong.blog/2013/01/15/ natasha-the-white-donkey-and-me-by-baek-seok/

2 ‘Britta Marakatt-Labba: History in Stitches‘, e-flux, 19 November 2018; https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/226277/britta-marakattlabbahistory-in-stitches/

3 FOMO: I’ve been in Tromso, so distracted that I did not realise that I landed on Britta’s Island, and so I have not seen her twenty-four-metre work, Historjá (History), also known as the Tromsø Frieze

4 It may rain on the way to the site visit, so in the SB’s backpack are masks, umbrellas, candy, juice, scented hand sanitisers, and small battery-operated pastel-colour fans

5 Samia Halaby’s footnotes for the drawings shown in Singapore Biennale 2022

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 Samia Halaby’s statement, ‘KINETIC PAINTING WITH SOUND’, was produced in the context of this collaboration

11 Kanitha Tith in How heavy is time? (2020), a performance documented in the video. Organised by Casco Art Institute, Utrecht, 5 June 2020; https://youtu.be/vs0e05Bc_Tc

12 Ibid.

13 https://www.efeo.fr/base.php?code=216#2

14 ‘US Embassy and National Museum to Unveil Goodwill Moon Rock’, US Embassy in Cambodia website, 15 June 2018; https://kh.usembassy. gov/u-s-embassy-and-national-museum-to-unveil-goodwill-moon-rock/#:~:text=The%20moon%20rock%20was%20donated,17%20mission%20 in%20December%201972

15 Artist statement to be published in the biennale guide

16 From an unpublished statement by Doa Aly

17 Ibid.

18 Founded in South Korea by novelist, Kim Hyona, and visual artist, Kim Inkyung

19 SWANA: South West Asia and North Africa, a less Eurocentric term for Africa north of the Sahara and a varying number of territories in West or South-West Asia

20 Letter from Assem Hendawi to Ala Younis, 11 October 2022

21 I took it while I was in town in June 2021, installing the Hands show, I co-curated with Madhusree Dutta, Akademie der Künste der Welt, Köln

Reframing the post-ʹ89 generation of Chinese artists in Australia

The fabric of historic, demographic, economic, political and cultural ties binding Australia and China has seen some wear and tear in the half-century since formal diplomatic relations were established in 1972, alternately frayed by fluctuations in public opinion and woven anew to ornament a range of culturally enriching, politically expedient and crudely financial motives. As Nicholas Jose, the Australian Embassy in Beijing’s Cultural Counsellor from 1987 until 1990, observed so eloquently in 1994, “Australia’s China [is] a complex, various, historically evolved, and specific entity.”1

The truth of this statement is evident in the stark difference between the vision of China that prevailed when Jose wrote these words and that which grips the popular imagination and political agenda today. The decade began inauspiciously with reports of the atrocities inflicted by the Chinese Communist Party on their own people at Tiananmen Square, provoking outrage across Australia and a temporary freezing of diplomatic relations. It didn’t take long, however, for the mood to thaw as the Labor government sought to sustain the momentum of the historic trade agreements of the 1980s. This economic focus continued to prevail after the re-election of the Labor government in 1991, yet reports of massive increases to military spending and rising popular nationalism in China fuelled a shift toward a more suspicious outlook that rapidly gained ground under the Coalition government elected in 1996. While ideology and economics dominated the headlines, the 1990s also saw a cultural shift toward China driven largely by a massive influx of Chinese émigrés. Arriving in the country at a moment of growing tension between policies of multicultural integration and an increasingly conspicuous undercurrent of fear and prejudice, the public reception of these émigrés can tell us much about the attitudes and archetypes that coloured understandings of China in both that decade and our own.

For many observers of the arts, the young Chinese artists and writers who arrived in Australia after 1989 heralded the dawning of a new generation of talent who would transform the local scene. Surveying the achievements of those who he considered to be the leading stars in this transformation for the Australian Financial Review in 2002, art critic John McDonald proclaimed that these “post-Tiananmen exiles” had kindled “a revitalisation of contemporary Australian art.” He reserved special praise for Ah Xian, then recently anointed a rising star after receiving the first National Sculpture Prize in 2001, and Guan Wei, “the outstanding success story of the postTiananmen diaspora.”2 Art critic Benjamin Genocchio, writing for The Australian not long after the tenth anniversary of the Tiananmen tragedy in July 1999, also named Guan Wei as the “most prominent” among “a group of... artists [who] left China in the aftermath of the massacre.”3 For both Genocchio and McDonald, these artists were united not only by their birth in China but also

a shared endurance of state-sanctioned violence and the agony of political exile. These experiences, along with an apparently mutual interest in an aesthetics of cultural fusion exemplified by Guan Wei’s hybrid visual vocabulary, seemed to imply a generational affinity.

Writers Nikki Barrowclough and Neil James were among the first to trace the outlines of a specifically ‘Post-’89 Generation’, establishing a convenient frame of reference for Genocchio, McDonald, and others. Writing for The Sydney Morning Herald’s supplement Good Weekend in July 1996, Barrowclough offered readers a useful primer in the “wealth of talent and knowledge [brought by] the new wave of Chinese who began arriving... in the late 1980s.” Focusing on the literary talent of authors like Sang Ye and Ouyang Yu, she compared their rising influence with that of “Indian writers like Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, and Amitav Ghosh [in the United Kingdom].”4 Guan Wei is notably the only artist mentioned in Barrowclough’s account. James, writing for The Australian’s Review of Books in 1997, also sought a historical precedent to comprehend this ‘Tiananmen generation’ of writers, although, rather than the recent history of the UK, he emphasised the demographic and economic aspects of their arrival by casting readers’ minds back to “the gold rushes of last century,” a comparably momentous Chinese influx.5 Anna King Murdoch made the same comparison in The Age in 1998, while Michael Reid, writing for The Australian in 2001, regarded the “wave of Asian artists... breaking on our shores” as the latest of many such injections of talent from overseas that had “helped create a robust Australian art world” in the centuries since colonisation.6 In contrast to earlier, predominantly European waves, however, he praised this as “a particularly talented... politicised, sarcastic, excessive [and] confronting” deluge that would “have a far greater social and artistic effect.”7 A wealth, a wave, a goldrush—these terms neatly capture the blend of anxiety and acquisitive interest with which many in Australia regarded China, and Chinese émigrés, during this decade.

Although now known as the Post-’89 Generation, this wave could more accurately be termed the ‘Post-’86 Generation’. In that year, the Labor government approved an agreement with the CCP under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership to allow state-sponsored Chinese students to enrol in ELICOS (English-Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students) programs under the new Overseas Student Policy introduced in 1985. This legislation had signalled a significant shift in the political currency of educational exchange. Previously, the Colombo Plan had been the primary mechanism through which exchange took place, offering financial support for students from developing countries to study in Australia, on the assumption that they would return home after completing their studies to put the knowledge they had acquired to good use. After 1985, however, educational exchange came to be seen instead as a lucrative export industry and a central pillar in Labor Prime Minister Hawke’s ambition to benefit from China’s economic rise. The architects of these policy changes were unprepared, however, for the speed and scale of their impact. In 1986, there were 273 students from China enrolled in ELICOS programs; by 1990, there were 13,142, accounting for almost eighty percent of the total population of Chinese students in Australia. In the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Hawke offered students who had left China before 20 June 1989 a four-year visa extension on humanitarian grounds, while those who arrived after this could seek political asylum. By the end of 1992, another 34,793 students had made their way to Australia, and in November 1993 the 16,000 students who qualified for the visa extension were granted permanent residency.8 While the events of 4 June 1989 undoubtedly prompted a new interest in Australia among students who may not otherwise have made the journey southward, this interest was in fact an extension of a trend initiated several years earlier.

These shifts in the educational exchange sector also coincided with a more general turn among young artists in China toward the opportunities offered by travel or relocation overseas. Though much of the inspiration for this turn grew from the same economic reforms that had prompted Prime Minister Hawke to seek closer ties with China, like the rapid uptake of the Overseas Student Policy it arose primarily from individual ambitions. In her landmark study Breakout: Chinese Art Outside China (2006), Melissa Chiu remarks that while columnists like those cited above tended to portray “the exodus of the art world [after 1989 as a] migration of dissident artists escaping an oppressive regime... this is not entirely correct.” Instead, she explains, the Post-’89 artists and writers were but one tributary of a larger torrent afflicted with ‘leave the country fever’, who chose to leave in search of opportunities overseas.9 Looking not only to Australia but also to Europe and the United States, these artists were in part inspired by a desire to seek the sources of the imported ideas that many had so voraciously consumed after the book bans of the Maoist years eased. Yet they also sought to advance their careers beyond the limits of the state-led arts ecology by ‘going international’ and ‘breaking out of Asia’.10 While the fear and anxiety provoked by the Tiananmen Square massacre certainly added a new urgency to such plans, these motives provided the first inspiration to move for many artists—further encouraged by programs like those developed under the Overseas Student Policy—and they remained a primary motivation throughout the 1990s. Nevertheless, the myth of the Post-’89 Generation as one of idealistic young artists and writers desperately fleeing authoritarian rule to seek sanctuary in the democratic haven of Australia has proven remarkably enduring. Considering how closely it aligns with current public and political impressions of China, this is perhaps not unsurprising. In the days before the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 2019, for example, Michael Smith reported for the Australian Financial Review that artist Guo Jian remained “haunted by bloody images of [that] nightmarish evening when the Chinese Army was sent in to crush student protests.”11 Guo had returned to Beijing in 2005 after living in Sydney since 1992 but, after the publication of an interview with the Financial Times to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary in 2014, he had been detained and forced again to leave China following an interrogation, recounted at length in Madeleine O’Dea’s first-hand chronicle of the Chinese art scene.12 While his exile had been due to expire two weeks after publication of the AFR piece, Smith remarked, “[Guo] says it is no longer safe [in China, so] he will remain in Australia.” Several of the artist’s friends, Smith continued, “told [us] they could not talk about these events, even thirty years on,” and had been “warned not to make political statements.”13 The horror of June 1989 and the continued suppression of open dissent in China cannot be denied, yet the frequent reference to these circumstances by journalists and politicians as a useful foil for claims of democratic sanctuary must also be acknowledged. “To be in a position to offer compassion, to dole out help, can be confirmation of superiority,” Jose reminds us, while the sensationalism of such events can all too easily “[play] to Australian prejudices.”14 Even while it served to harden popular opinion of China and fuel a growing tide of antiAsian prejudice, however, this narrative of persecution and salvation also proved useful during the 1990s for those endorsing policies of multicultural integration. The circulation of this trope is most evident in exhibition catalogue essays and arts magazines, in which Post-’89 artists—like Asian-Australian artists in general—are frequently positioned as intermediaries between their adopted and birth countries. This is especially notable in writing about Guan Wei, whose role as the de facto leader of the Post-’89 Generation prompted many to ascribe him a comparable part in the forging of ties between Australia and China. Sue-Anne Wallace, for example, noted excitedly in

Reframing the post-ʹ89 generation of Chinese artists in Australia

her review of one of Guan Wei’s first exhibitions in Australia in 1991 that the artist had “been studying English and already has conversations in this foreign language,” while his art offered an equally promising fusion of “Asian roots... tempered by Western idioms.”15 Curator Judy Annear, writing a few years later for Asian Art News, similarly remarked on Guan Wei’s ability to create a “synthesis [of] Chinese traditions and Western influences,” praising his talent as “a juggler of systems, images, [and] traditions.”16 For author Evelyn Juers, it was above all “the migrant artist’s special vocabulary of old and new... East and West” that distinguished his work, along with that of his fellow “energetic trader[s] and traveller[s],” as a key vehicle for “the process of exchange of goods and ideas” between China and Australia.17 Exhibitions of Post-’89 art could even be directly involved in multicultural community-building. Shanghai Star (2001) at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, for example, offered locals in Sydney’s outer west a chance to learn from Fan Dongwang, Li Shan and Yu Youhan with a program of “masterclasses in colour memory painting, charcoal drawing, and Chinese flower baimas [to] expand their knowledge [and gain] a better understanding of Chinese culture.”18

As many have argued persuasively elsewhere, state-driven visions of multiculturalism were in several respects fundamentally flawed, no matter how inclusive they were intended to be or how successful they appeared to have been in fostering an acceptance of diversity.19 The most notable sign of this in the discourse framing the Post-’89 Generation is a persistent inclination toward the repetition of a ‘good migrant’ narrative. McDonald, for example, in his 2002 AFR piece, hailed Ah Xian and his younger brother Liu Xiaoxian as “success stories of contemporary Australian art” in their rise to respectability after “[beginning] their careers... working at the lowliest part-time jobs and learning English in their spare time.”20 Rodney Chester, writing for The Courier-Mail a year later, also drew readers’ attention to the “struggle and hardship” that Ah Xian had endured, “his dream of being a full-time artist put on hold as he carved out a life... [painting] houses for a living [while] his wife, Mali, worked in a factory and his brother drove taxis.”21 McDonald described Shen Jiawei’s first years in Australia in similar terms, remarking that he had “eked out a living as a portrait sketcher at Darling Harbour... while he waited to resume the life of a professional painter.”22 By 2004, this theme had become so prevalent in coverage of Post-’89 artists that Fan Dongwang, speaking with David Wilson for the Sunday Morning Post, could remark, “with a wince, [that journalists] mistakenly—or, perhaps, not so innocently—[had] interpreted his love of painting cityscapes as... a former career as a painter and decorator.”23 While Ah Xian, Liu Xiaoxian, Shen Jiawei, and many other Post-’89 artists did indeed struggle to make ends meet when they first arrived in this country—as many migrants did, and still do—the presentation of these struggles as the preface for a ‘rags to riches’ story of artworld fame and fortune can tend to conceal a more complex reality. These tropes of democratic sanctuary, multicultural integration, and the redemptive salvation of the good migrant defined the immediate circumstances for the reception of work by the Post-’89 artists. Yet they are also momentary expressions of more deeply engrained habits of mind that have long shaped contact between Australia and China, both before and after 1949. Writing in 1994 of the Australian government’s ‘turn to Asia’ under Prime Minister Paul Keating, Jose remarked that many of the public figures then debating the merits and limitations of this pivot tended to overlook the long history of contact between the two countries.24 This is a history marred by systemic prejudice and persecution, something which the diplomats charged with fostering closer ties may have been eager to forget. “In searching for the ‘fit’,” however, Jose argued that it would be “necessary to recognise [these] points of non-connection... resistance, even of repulsion”

Reframing the post-ʹ89 generation of Chinese artists in Australia

to understand “what we are, and where we come from.”25 Meaningful dialogue across cultural difference cannot arise from reductive narratives created to serve political ends—it requires a mutual commitment not only to open conversation but also to earnest self-reflection.

Academic and writer Alison Broinowski, another historically minded observer of the ‘turn to Asia’, identified several points of resistance in her formidably wide-ranging survey of Asian inspiration in the arts from the nineteenth century to the 1990s, The Yellow Lady: Australian Impressions of Asia (1992). Her study of these “impressions,” she wrote in the preface to the first edition, had revealed in no uncertain terms “how powerful images are and, once received, how resistant to change,” shaping responses to the unknown and unfamiliar for decades.26 To aid readers in identifying such images in their own study of the arts, both past and present, Broinowski offered a useful vocabulary of terms. A lingering Australian tendency to deny our geographic proximity to Asia and instead regard our own region as “a remote place... more distant and exotic than Europe” is neatly summarised in The Yellow Lady as the “Far East Fallacy.” Our literary and filmic visions of the region as a backdrop for the typically “male, superior, [and] authoritative... bringer of enlightenment and... setter of examples” to educate and lead local populations characterised by “immorality, treachery, and savagery” have gestated a mythology of the “Adventure Zone.” The extent to which “civilised norms [of] behaviour could be abandoned [in this] place where the white adventurer could be tempted in ways unknown at home” has contributed to a vision of this regional playground as an alternately alluring and repugnant “Illicit Space.” Finally, the combination of these fantasies of the exotic and the fears of miscegenation that have haunted Australians concepts of nationhood since 1901 finds expression in the “Butterfly Phenomenon”—the stereotype of Asian women as “exotic, beautiful, and transient” yet always fated to perish in tragic circumstances, “a fragile art object [and] cheap, replaceable commodity.”27

These habits of mind appear throughout the substantial critical commentary and scholarship dedicated to the artists of the Post-’89 Generation. They are most evident, however, in those aspects of this discourse that are conspicuous for their absence, the deafening silences in the critical record that can reveal far more than the familiar refrain. This well-rehearsed melody is in many ways a duet between the two voices now associated most frequently with the Post-’89 label, Guan Wei and Ah Xian, with occasional accompaniment from other players. Mention should also be made here of Xiao Lu and Shen Shaomin, who, while they didn’t enjoy as much critical attention as the former two artists in the years immediately following their move to Australia, are now major names in the broader field of contemporary Chinese art and have to a certain extent transcended the confines of the generational brand. This transcendence can be partially attributed to their return to China, Xiao in 1997 and Shen in 2001, though Xiao holds Australian citizenship and moved back to Sydney in 2021 after living between the two countries for several years. Both artists also retain strong connections with Australian arts organisations like the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and White Rabbit Gallery. It could therefore be more accurately attributed, perhaps, to the style and content of their work, which tends to focus on issues of materiality, mortality, and bodily experience that hold universal appeal. Their shared preference for installation and performance art likely appeals as well to the coterie of curators and collectors on the biennale circuit who shape the contemporary artistic mainstream. Consequently, while Xiao and Shen should be acknowledged as formative members of the Post-’89 Generation, for various reasons they stand slightly apart from the names now most frequently associated with this label and from the artists discussed in this essay.

Reframing the post-ʹ89 generation of Chinese artists in Australia

While the artists, works and styles that enjoy popular and critical acclaim reveal much about the visible social dynamics of taste, only that which remains largely unseen or unsaid can show the underlying habitus of attitudes and archetypes on which such judgments are based. In the second half of this essay, I have sought to uncover several aspects of the work created by five members of the Post-’89 Generation who received much less critical commentary than Guan Wei and Ah Xian in the 1990s and the first years of the current century, but, partially because of this relative lack, prove especially revealing of tropes like those which Broinowski outlines in The Yellow Lady. Shen Jiawei and Wang Zhiyuan were the first of the five to arrive in Australia, both in 1989 as ELICOS students. Shen, who arrived in January, numbered among the 16,000 Chinese students who received a fouryear visa extension and were then granted permanent residency in 1993. Wang, however, because he arrived in November (after 4 June), could only apply for (and receive) asylum. Next to arrive were Liu Xiaoxian and Fan Dongwang in 1990. Liu and his older brother Ah Xian had been invited to participate in the first Sydney Spring International Festival of New Music and Visual Arts in September of that year, following Ah Xian’s two-month artist residency (with Guan Wei) at the University of Tasmania’s School of Art in early 1989. Fan had secured a Distinguished Talent Visa, in recognition of his potential as an artist and aspirations to pursue further study. Finally, Guo Jian moved to Australia in 1992 after several years in the Yuanmingyuan Artist Village on the outskirts of Beijing. He had been an active participant in the Tiananmen hunger strikes that preceded the June crackdown and had hoped to escape further harassment in the relative seclusion of the former imperial gardens. Discovering that he could not elude the eyes of the state even here, however, he fled further afield. Of the five artists, then, Guo most closely adheres to the archetypal narrative of the Post-’89 Generation.

RED TIDE

The colour red... should be inoffensive. After all, sunsets are red and so are apples... Roses are red, as every Valentine knows. So far it seems innocent enough. But add a touch of tribalism to the equation: sporting teams have red colours and so do nations. Australian schools used to have wall maps of the world according to Victorian Britain, with red proudly proclaiming the far reaches of political influence. Our simple concept begins to lose its innocence. The Red of Empire. The Red Army.28

These opening lines from Neil James’ account of Post-’89 Generation writers neatly summarise the mixture of optimistic curiosity and growing anxiety with which many in Australia regarded China in the 1990s. As the final words in the associative sequence indicate, the primary source of apprehension for James and other cultural commentators at this time was the prospect of a newly ascendant communist state, apparently intent on global domination. As early as 1993, Jose could observe that three archetypal narratives tended to predominate in media reports on all things Chinarelated: “the free-wheeling capitalist road story... the oriental communist despotism story... [and] the freak story.” Regardless of which narrative they chose to pursue, he added, writers were forced to navigate the narrow pass between “the Scylla and Charybdis of fear of immigration and anxiety about [Australia’s] trade competitiveness.”29 In the case of Post-’89 artists, the second narrative proved most alluring—especially for those writing about the work of artists, like Guo Jian and Shen Jiawei, who once served the CCP but now seemed to have renounced their prior ideals to embrace Australian democracy.

O’Dea’s The Phoenix Years again proves the richest source for the details of Guo’s experience. Sharing insights gathered from many conversations with the artist, she records that he chose to enlist in the People’s Liberation Army in late 1979, not long before his eighteenth birthday, because “[it] seemed like an adventure and a way out of poverty.” He was assigned at first to complete training as a signals officer and given responsibility for his division’s radio, “up half the night chasing frequencies, smoking local tobacco... too excited to sleep.” When an officer noticed his talent for drawing, he received additional orders to design propaganda posters to raise the morale of his fellow soldiers, an experience he later considered to have been “more valuable artistic training than anything [he learned at] university.” These remained his primary duties until he resigned from military service in 1982.30 Speaking with writer and sinologist Linda Jaivin for the text published to accompany his breakout exhibition Mama’s Tripping at Canberra Contemporary Art Space in 2000, Guo recalled that his stint in the army had been “a way to leave home, [to] become independent ... I was attracted by the image of the PLA... I was just out of puberty. I thought, if I survive this, [I’ll] get the prettiest girlfriend!” He found the propaganda posters that he and others were assigned to produce, as well as revolutionary productions like The Red Detachment of Women, especially alluring. “I loved it. We all did... all those women in shorts!”31

The imprint of these years is evident in works like his raucously theatrical Trigger Happy II (1999), in which the scantily uniformed protagonists of his favourite model opera leap across the canvas, rifles at the ready, while the artist himself appears semi-naked and leering in glee, his pink water pistol firmly grasped in both hands. In other works in the series, Victoria Hynes wrote for The Sydney Morning Herald in 2002, “sexually voracious, panting [PLA] soldiers and semi-naked pin-up girls’ erupt from the canvas, like Chinese revolutionary art on acid... with glamour girls in military fatigues wielding machine guns, army officers lounging in a drug-induced stupor or hysterical frenzy.”32 In National Anthem (1999), the addition of a bathrobe-clad Mao Zedong and semi-naked Jiang Zemin, China’s President from 1993 to 2003, suggests a satirical intent that critics like Hynes and McDonald were quick to embrace. McDonald saw in these “ribald, satirical images” an attempt on the part of the artist to “[exorcise] the demons of his four traumatic years spent in the People’s Liberation Army” as well as a wry comment on “the tidal wave of kitsch being produced in the new, consumer-friendly, sex-mad world of a China that has opened its doors to capitalism.”33 Hynes saw evidence of the “disillusionment with mainstream politics [that] led to [Guo’s] metamorphosis [from PLA soldier] to Tiananmen Square protester,” sowing the seeds of a narrative that would come to full fruition after the artist’s 2014 detainment and deportation.34 For both critics, his sexualisation of propaganda imagery could only be read as a satirical comment on the corruption and hypocrisy of Chinese politics, defusing contemporary anxieties of a resurgent communist state. Shen Jiawei, too, has frequently spoken of the formative influence of the years he spent as an official propaganda artist. While Guo’s talents lay in the creation of morale-boosting posters, however, Shen found early fame as a skilled practitioner of Revolutionary Realist oil painting. In his memoirs, Painting History (2018), Shen recalls the enthusiasm with which he answered Mao’s call to revolt when the Chairman launched the Cultural Revolution in May 1966, joining a faction of Red Guards at his secondary school. In 1969, he was enlisted to train peasants in revolutionary painting at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, where he gained “special access to the library [and] all kinds of foreign art catalogues.” The following year saw him assigned to the Heilongjiang Production and Construction Corps far to the north on the border with the USSR, where he spent several months with a student collective at the Great Northern Wilderness Printmaking Studio.

Reframing the post-ʹ89 generation of Chinese artists in Australia

Reframing the post-ʹ89 generation of Chinese artists in Australia

He remembers this fondly as time spent “[working] collaboratively on paintings... like going to art school without paying tuition... a stroke of good luck, sheer enjoyment.” His first major painting, Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland, was selected in October 1974 for the Second National Art Exhibition in Beijing, where it earned praise from the formidable Jiang Qing herself—chief architect of the artistic components of the Cultural Revolution, including the Model Operas that Guo so admired.35 These years of ideological conflict were profoundly destabilising for China and catastrophic for many of those swept up in the violent frenzy of political persecution, with frequently fatal consequences. As the experiences shared by Guo and Shen indicate, however, they were also a time of boundary defying personal exploration and experiment when old hierarchies were forcibly inverted, and widespread disorder provided the perfect cover for transgressive and even potentially subversive behaviour.

Shen continued to develop the techniques he learned during these years following his move to Australia in early 1989, dedicating himself to the pursuit of realist history painting as an art of public record and a means to work over the inherited assumptions of the past. In paintings like his monumental At the Turn of the Century (1998), Shen applied his past training to the national mythology of his new home. Yiyan Wang identified this triptych in 2002 as a marker of Shen’s metamorphosis into “a politically conscious citizen in Australian society,” comparable in ideals and ambition to Heidelberg artist Tom Roberts’ iconic Opening of the First Parliament of the Australian Commonwealth (c.1903).36 Other assessments of Shen’s work, however, were not so flattering. In the same year, writing for The Australian, Genocchio described Shen’s equally monumental The Third World (2002) as “clumsy and contrived” and criticised what he saw as the artist’s “lack of engagement with... Australia, or an Australian perspective... almost as if Shen has been working in Sydney but living in China—mentally commuting each night back home.”37 Bruce James, writing for The Sydney Morning Herald, scolded the artist for “technical deficiencies that a painter of [his] experience should be avoiding” and found little to praise in The Third World and other works “in every way as propagandistic and as conservative as their epic predecessors,” marred by a “turgidness of touch and confused aims.”38 The timing of the first showing of this work at what was then Gallery 4A (now 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art), in Zai-jian Revolution (2002), as well as Shen’s inclusion of Osama Bin Laden among the assembled third-world leaders depicted in his canvas, may have partially inspired such judgments. There is an unmistakable note of patriotic fervour and ideological rigour in these remarks.

HAPPY HYBRIDITY

[This is the] shadowed and complex... terrain of the cross-cultural traveller [moving] in the darkness... between the bright lights of urban clarity... [a] world of partial views and stuttering speech [where] realm moments of illumination may occur.39

Writing about the critical reception of Asian-Australian theatre at the turn of the millennium, Jacqueline Lo coined the term “happy hybridity” to describe a tendency to ignore any potential for unsettling conflict or tension. This perspective, she explained, instead sought to emphasise “a fusion of disparate elements... to settle cultural differences and contestations,” cultivating a “political indifference to underlying issues of political and economic power” and providing, intentionally or otherwise, “a kind of ‘whitewash’ for the status quo.” Lo contrasted this with the “intentional hybridity”—a phrase borrowed from Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin—practiced by those critics

who sought to “dismantle hegemonic relations [by emphasising] the processes of negotiation and contestation between cultures.” Unlike the desire for fusion without tension that continues to prevail in much public discussion of cultural difference, this model of hybridity exposes “the complexity of local histories and cultural-specific knowledges in all their density, contradictions, and contingencies.”40 Although Lo identified these attitudes in writing on Asian-Australian theatre, they can be discerned as well in the reception of Asian-Australian art, including that of the Post-’89 Generation. The description of this art, and of the artists who created it, in terms suited to a narrative of multicultural integration comparable with Lo’s model of happy hybridity has already been noted, with reference specifically to Guan Wei as a “juggler of systems” capable of creating new syntheses of East and West. As the quote used to open this section suggests, while Fan Dongwang’s art has been deployed in the service of similar aims—in Shanghai Star, for example—his strategic foregrounding of unassimilable difference has also frustrated a critical desire for fusion.

At first glance, Fan’s paintings present a relatively straightforward merging of diverse cultural styles and motifs. Like Guan Wei’s frequently cryptic “pictorial puzzles,” they seem to invite us to join the artist on “a treasure hunt for meanings,” to crack the code needed to open these mysterious “boxes within Chinese boxes” through a process of “retrieval, sorting, re-sorting, and excavation.”41 This is also how several notable critics have framed his art. McDonald, for example, remarked in 2002 that Fan was “aware that the ‘exotic’... element in [his work] is a powerful source of its appeal,” seeking to achieve “a mixture of traditional Chinese motifs and contemporary technique” with his “images of robed mandarins and emblematic dragons, filtered through a ... Pop Art palette.”42 Wilson, too, though aware of the extent to which Fan’s public image as a ‘good migrant’ is a journalistic fiction, nonetheless defined his paintings in similarly reductive terms as a fusion of “ancient Chinese technique and western contemporary art... [combining] the old and the new.”43 Many writers on Fan’s work, including Wilson, have highlighted his professional training in calligraphy, ink painting, and, especially, ivory carving as the foundation of his artistic practice, a ground of tradition that he then ornamented with European-inspired points of reference following his relocation to Australia. The sheer quantity and wide range of sources that these writers have identified as influences in Fan’s paintings, however, belie the ease with which they believe he can traverse multiple disparate cultural spheres. French Impressionism, Tibetan thangka painting, pop music, animation, commercial branding, ink landscapes, Baroque tapestries, Renaissance frescos —these are not differences that can be easily reconciled within a harmonious fusion.

In the two major bodies of work that Fan created during the 1990s, Descendant Bodies (1996) and Shifting Perspectives and the Body (1999), fragments of these various traditions and visual vocabularies couple and decouple within the disorientating illusionistic space of his canvases. In Descendant Bodies #1 and #2, androgynous yet classically proportioned nude figures float freely within a dazzling brocade-like void, shifting between the intersecting pictorial planes of the composition and even appearing at times to detach entirely from the surface of the image. These swirling arrangements of partial torsos and amputated limbs could be mistaken for cut-out collages, if not for Fan’s strategic overlapping of ground and figure. Fan further highlights the meticulous artifice of these works by pairing his classical nudes with strangely pareidolic, machinelike motifs. In Descendant Bodies #1, these are scattered across the canvas with little sense of meaning or order; in the second painting, however, they have merged with the nude figures to create a race of androgynous human-animal-machine hybrids. This combination of mechanistic and biomorphic elements appears again in Shifting Perspectives and the Body, a frieze-like sequence of five canvases in

Reframing the post-ʹ89 generation of Chinese artists in Australia

which religious icons and historic figures compete for attention with sporting heroes and ornamental emblems. In these works, the restless motion of pictorial planes that Fan introduced in Descendant Bodies finds echo in a parallel mobility of meaning as these conflicting motifs alternately emerge from and sink back within the dense morass of writhing forms. Both bodies of work disclose “a provocative synthesis—not really a fusion, but [a] kind of montage,” confronting the viewer “with as many conflicting perspectives of an object or image as possible.”44 Fan’s aim with these works, as art historian Rod Pattenden has astutely observed, is not to develop a “new hybrid personality” but to draw attention to the tensions and contradictions that arise in the process of negotiating cultural difference. Their meaning, therefore, cannot be decoded by identifying specific motifs but must be sought in the points of connection and disconnection between these motifs, the “shadows, gaps, and separations in [their] folded and complex anatomy.”45

As such, in addition to the inadequacy of the prevailing ‘happy hybridity’ mindset, Fan’s works also force us to acknowledge what Sarat Maharaj has termed the “untranslatability” of cultural difference. Like Lo, Maharaj decried a tendency in the public discourse of the 1990s to ignore conflict, “narrowing [hybridity] into a reductive, celebratory term” rather than “an unfinished, selfunthreading force... shot through with memories and intimations of the untranslatable.” He urged those who sought to meaningfully engage with this force to account for the “opaque stickiness” of that which cannot be seamlessly translated from one cultural sphere to another, “like blood stains in a fairytale [that] cannot be rubbed off.”46 A comparable untranslatability and commitment to the politics of intentional hybridity can be found in Shen Jiawei’s Suddenly Back to 1900 (2000) and Liu Xiaoxian’s My Other Lives (2000). In each of these works, Liu and Shen project their own visibly Chinese features into Australia’s colonial past, thereby drawing attention to the ‘blood stains’ of institutionalised racial prejudice that the ‘happy hybridity’ of the 1990s sought to smooth over. Shen’s Suddenly Back to 1900 is one in a series of portraits depicting prominent Chinese-Australians or Anglo-Australians with a connection to China that he completed throughout the decade, seeking to counter a persistent “historical amnesia.”47 While most of these depict friends—as in Mabel Lee (1991), Dr John Clark in Black Kimono (1992), Hedda’s Camera: Portrait of Claire Roberts (1993), and Guo Jian and Elly (1998), or historic figures as in Try Quong Tart’s Tea (1996)—this work is notable as a portrait of the artist himself, wearing Qing-dynasty Manchu robes and standing in front of a pastiche of King Street in Sydney’s inner west at the turn of the nineteenth century, a sulphur-crested cockatoo sitting contentedly on his head.

My Other Lives also exposes historical absences. While Shen’s witty self-portrait softly eases the viewer into a realisation of an overlooked past, however, Liu’s appropriation and digital manipulation of an authentic nineteenth-century stereograph print is jarring and potentially unsettling. Stereographic prints enjoyed widespread popularity during the colonial era and were intended to be studied with the aid of a stereoscope, through which the paired frames, each taken from a different focal point, would merge into a single three-dimensional image. By altering one of these prints, Liu denies this fusion. If viewed through a stereoscope, his image would fail to coalesce, and the divergent gendered and racial features of the artist and the anonymous subject of the photograph would overlap, creating a disorienting intersection of perspectives comparable with that found in Fan’s paintings. Writing about My Other Lives for The Sydney Morning Herald in February 2001, Richard Jinman found these images both amusing and “vaguely disturbing,” noting the uncanny composure of the sitters, “unaware of the stranger who has suddenly materialised in their midst.”48

ILLICIT VENTURES

Guo Jian restages China as a theme park, a pleasure resort... where anything goes... people are perpetually high, [and] excess turns beauty into ugliness and ugliness into endless play... We get high just looking at his brilliant playgrounds of flesh. 49

While the crassness of Guo’s canvases has been read as a satirical comment on the contrast between the rigorous enforcement of public morals in China and the depraved antics that CCP members are rumoured to indulge behind closed doors, the above comments penned by Nicholas Jose indicate their capacity to exceed these narrow political boundaries. In addition to the hypocrisies of party rule, Guo’s works force viewers to confront the repressed appetites and desires animating our own subconscious fantasies. As such, they could simultaneously be read as images of the ‘Illicit Space’ that Broinowski has identified with Australian visions of Asia. “In [this] Adventure Zone,” she writes, “Western men [could enjoy] erotic experiences with women” like those who dominate these paintings, sexually available and apparently willing to “be manipulated, abandoned, or bought off.”50 Guo’s ‘Illicit Space’ also perhaps evokes the “corruption, crowding, cheap labour, exploitation, [and] lack of humanity” that Jose has appended to Broinowski’s trope, “a fouled nest, the flipside of Asia the Beautiful... that lotus land [where] to be sleazy [is], after all, only to be polite.”51

Unlike the interpretation of these works as a satire on government corruption in China, which does much to reinforce the association of Post-’89 artists and especially Guo with a flight from authoritarian persecution, their imaging of the ‘Adventure Zone’ is more difficult to reconcile.

To recognise the full satirical potential of these works, Australian viewers must acknowledge and come to terms with their own latent inclination to regard China, and Asia in general, as a ‘brilliant playground of flesh’ where they can indulge their most outlandish fantasies without judgment or consequence. In the fractured social context of the 1990s and early 2000s, when ideals of unimpeded cultural fusion coexisted with fears of inundation provoked by the basest forms of racial prejudice, this realisation divided critics. Art critic Sebastian Smee was an early advocate for Guo’s work, revelling in the gleeful audacity of paintings “so debauched, so limitlessly venal [that] moral structure—even the idea of authentic individuality—goes into meltdown.”52 Jose, too, as the above comments indicate, realised the value of Guo’s perspective as “a subversive outsider... exposing the disorder rather than the order of things” in the “garish sexuality and gross comedy” of his work.53 A note of distaste or even discomfort arises, however, in Hynes’ assessment of Guo as an “outlandish renegade” whose “images of debauchery [may] tickle the fancy of some [while] others may find them unpalatable and disturbing,” due to their “in-your-face eroticism and barely contained hysteria.”54 While the kneejerk reactions of delight and discomfort alternately provoked by Guo’s brazen canvases confirm the persistence of an ‘Adventure Zone’ mentality in Australian visions of Asia, the women who populate these canvases notably subvert another of Broinowski’s tropes. The ‘Illicit Space’ desired by the thrill-seeking tourist, she explains, is typically one inhabited by an “emotional, instinctive, subservient, and exploitable” race forced to endure the cruel whim of despots legendary for their “tyranny, luxury, artistry, and sensuality.” The women of this race are imagined to be inherently fragile “china dolls [who must be] broken... a commodity, a victim, and dispensable.”55 The women in Guo’s paintings, however, are far from vulnerable. In works like National Anthem (1999), they meet the viewer’s desiring gaze with their own, entirely conscious and in control of their seductive power. In addition to our own fantasies of adventure and indulgence, Guo’s canvases therefore compel viewers to recognise the agency of those who they would seek to

Reframing the post-ʹ89 generation of Chinese artists in Australia

reduce to a sexual fetish, and even the complicity of these would-be femmes fatales in the construction of their allure.

Wang Zhiyuan also drew attention to the persistent attraction of ‘Illicit Space’ and the ‘Butterfly Phenomenon’ for many admirers of Post-’89 art. Initially, in contrast to Guo’s explicitly crude and confronting canvases, Wang’s interpretation of this theme seemed more reserved. In his Beauties Captured in Time (1994) series, he translated the evocative poetic moods portrayed in a volume of eighteenth-century Chinese erotic prints encountered by chance in a second-hand bookshop into an uneasy vision of suppressed desire.56 The ‘Illicit Space’ of these works is entirely contained, first within the recessed perspective of the image itself and then within a surrounding brocade-like painted border. The enigmatic women who inhabit this space are comparably confined, unable to stand without stooping or to fully extend their arms and legs. At the same time, each woman skilfully avoids the viewer’s gaze, turning instead to enjoy the antics of her captive companion, to admire the beauty of her own figure, to contemplate the artistry of her folding a fan, or simply to stare impassively at the featureless wall of her prison. While this avoidance may seem to return a measure of choice to these women, almost playful and even flirtatious in their studied postures of demure restraint, this impression is abruptly dissolved by the realisation that the shadows moving across the walls of each box don’t match the movements of those within. Wang returned to this play of seen and unseen, seduction and constriction, in his Underpants series (2001) of ‘sculptural paintings’ in which the complex symbolism of Beauties Captured in Time is condensed into a single object: a pair of exaggeratedly feminine underpants. As an item of clothing intended to conceal as well as allure or entice, Wang’s pink fibreboard lingerie most visibly recall the painted silk robes worn by the women in his earlier series. Yet a parallel could also be drawn between these sculptural adornments and the perspectival space of the paintings—both imply a covering or containment of something desired, inviting the viewer to imagine the pleasure of opening and gazing within. The shadow cast by the fibreboard onto the wall of the gallery recalls the apparition haunting Beauties Captured in Time, implying that the viewer has become the viewed, watched by a hidden observer within the confines of the museological white cube as they stop to admire Wang’s work. These are best understood, then, as fetishes in the Freudian sense of the term: erotic standins for an absent object of desire. This symbolism is clearest in the most sexually suggestive piece in the series: a crotchless and disconcertingly anthropomorphised thong that confronts the viewer with a pair of parted lips. The fetish, Wang reminds us, is not only a focus for transference but also a source of anxiety and unhealthy attachment that can consume the desiring subject if they become too obsessed. As in Guo Jian’s riotous playgrounds of flesh, then, Wang’s Beauties Captured in Time and Underpants imbue the fatalistic and objectifying logic of the ‘Butterfly Phenomenon’ with an air of threat and reciprocated lust that complicates the easy indulgences of the ‘Adventure Zone’.

Guo Jian, Shen Jiawei, Fan Dongwang, Liu Xiaoxian and Wang Zhiyuan are now highly sought-after and widely respected figures in Australia’s contemporary arts ecology. For much of the 1990s and even the first years of the current century, however, critical reception of their work reflected the broader tensions between multicultural integration and anxious prejudice that coloured Australian impressions of China during that decade. These tensions are all too easily forgotten or overlooked, yet careful analysis can tell us much about attitudes and assumptions that continue to influence our public discussions and private understandings of China today. As we mark the fiftieth anniversary of diplomatic relations between China and Australia, it is now more important than ever that we acknowledge the sources of our preconceptions and challenge inherited narratives.

Notes

1 Nicholas Jose, ‘Australia’s China’, Chinese Whispers: Cultural Essays, Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1995, p. 45

2 John McDonald, ‘The Cultural Revolution’, Australian Financial Review, 29 November 2002

3 Benjamin Genocchio, ‘Enrichment from a Chinese wave’, The Australian, 2 July 1999

4 Nikki Barrowclough, ‘Lost in translation’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 13 July 1996

5 Neil James, ‘Altered Images’, The Australian: Review of Books, 9 April 1997, p. 11

6 Anna King Murdoch, ‘The China Syndrome’, The Age, 21 March 1998; Michael Reid, ‘Drawing on Views from East’, The Australian, 30 June 2001

7 Reid, ibid.

8 Timothy Kendall, ‘Exporting Australian Educational Services to China’, Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management 26, no. 1, 2004, pp. 23–30

9 Melissa Chiu, Breakout: Chinese Art Outside China, Milan: Charta, 2006, pp. 8–9

10 Geremie Barmé, ‘Exploit, Export, Expropriate: Artful Marketing from China, 1989-93’, Third Text vol. 7, no. 25, 1993, pp. 72–73

11 Michael Smith, ‘Amnesia and Nightmares’, Australian Financial Review, 1 June 2019

12 Madeleine O’Dea, The Phoenix Years: Art, Resistance, and the Making of Modern China, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2016, p. 276

13 Smith, ibid.

14 Nicholas Jose, ‘History Repeats: Ernest Morrison’s China’, Chinese Whispers, p. 79

15 Sue-Anne Wallace, ‘Postcards from Asia’, Art Monthly Australia no. 40, 1991. p. 15

16 Judy Annear, ‘Juggler of Systems’, Asian Art News 5, no. 5, 1995, p. 55

17 Evelyn Juers, ‘Spirit-Man Guan Wei’, Art & Australia 33, no. 3, 1996, pp. 431-32

18 Kon Gouriotis, foreword in Lisa Havilah (ed.), Shanghai Star (exhibition catalogue), Casula Powerhouse, 2007, p. 4

19 For a summary of these arguments with specific reference to the reception of Chinese-Australian art, see Alex Burchmore, ‘Guan Wei’s “Australerie” Ceramics and the Binary Bind of Identity Politics’, Index Journal no. 1, 2020; https://index-journal.org/issues/identity/guan-weiaustralerie-ceramics-and-the-binary-bind-of-identity-politics-by-alex-burchmore

20 McDonald, ‘The Cultural Revolution’

21 Rodney Chester, ‘China art flowers in a new land’, The Courier-Mail, 29 November 2003

22 McDonald, ‘The Cultural Revolution’

23 David Wilson, ‘Working class, my arts’, Sunday Morning Post: The Review, 15 August 2004

24 Nicholas Jose, ‘The Embarrassment of the Kangaroo’, Chinese Whispers, p. 26

25 Ibid., pp. 25–26

26 Alison Broinowski, The Yellow Lady: Australian Impressions of Asia, second edition, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. xii

27 Ibid., pp. 26, 49–50, 119–120

28 James, p. 11

29 Nicholas Jose, ‘Green Oil: Media Images of Australia/Asia’, Chinese Whispers, pp. 167–168

Reframing the post-ʹ89 generation of Chinese artists in Australia

30 O’Dea, pp. 63–64, 68–69, 86

31 Guo Jian, ‘All Those Women in Shorts! Guo Jian in Conversation with Linda Jaivin’, Mama’s Tripping (exhibition catalogue), Canberra Contemporary Art Space, 2000, p. 11

32 Victoria Hynes, ‘Brash Strokes’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 3 May 2002

33 McDonald, ‘The Cultural Revolution’

34 Hynes, ‘Brash Strokes’

35 Shen Jiawei, Painting History: China’s Revolution in a Global Context, Mabel Lee (ed.), New York: Cambria Press, 2018, pp. 1–10

36 Wang Yiyan, ‘History, Portraiture, and Cultural Citizenship’, Aaron Seeto (ed.), Shen Jiawei: Zai-jian Revolution (exhibition catalogue), Gallery 4A, 2002, pp. 7–8

37 Benjamin Genocchio, ‘Not All About Mao’, The Australian, 12 October 2002

38 Bruce James, ‘Artist with awesome promise must escape the mosh pit’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 2 October 2002

39 Rod Pattenden, ‘Culture is Difference: I only see shadows’, Vantage Point: The Art of Fan Dongwang (exhibition catalogue), Macquarie University Art Gallery, 2005, p. 5

40 Jacqueline Lo, ‘Beyond Happy Hybridity: Performing Asian-Australian Identities’, Alter/Asians: Asian-Australian Identities in Art, Media, and Popular Culture, Ien Ang, Sharon Chalmers, Lisa Law and Mandy Thomas eds, Sydney: Pluto Press, 2000, pp. 152–154, 158

41 Juers, ‘Spirit-Man Guan Wei’, p. 432; Charles Green, ‘Guan Wei: Nesting, or the Art of Idleness 1989-1999’, Art & Text no. 67, 1999, p. 94

42 McDonald, ‘The Cultural Revolution’

43 Wilson, ‘Working class, my arts’

44 Bernice Murphy, ‘Constellations from Shanghai’, Shanghai Star, p. 30; Benjamin Genocchio, ‘Dong Wang Fan’, Australian Art Collector no. 14, 2000, p. 66

45 Pattenden, pp. 5–6

46 Sarat Maharaj, ‘“Perfidious Fidelity”: The Untranslatability of the Other’, Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts, Jean Fisher (ed.), London: Kala Press, 1994, pp. 28–30, 34

47 Nicholas Jose, introduction to Shen Jiawei: Zai-jian Revolution, p. 4

48 Richard Jinman, ‘Photo Synthesis’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 16 February 2001

49 Nicholas Jose, ‘Guo Jian: Mama’s Tripping’, p. 6

50 Broinowski, p. 147

51 Jose, ‘The Embarrassment of the Kangaroo’, pp. 25–26

52 Sebastian Smee, ‘Grotesque Ire’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 16 October 1998

53 Jose, ‘Guo Jian: Mama’s Tripping’, p. 6

54 Hynes, ‘Brash Strokes’

55 Broinowski, pp. 117–122

56 Claire Roberts, review of Wang Zhiyuan, Art Asia Pacific no. 15, 1997, p. 92

Hong Kong art historiographies and pitfalls of political desire

As paroxysms of protest brought Hong Kong to a standstill through 2019 to 2020, the city and its people were cast in the role of underdog in a high stakes David and Goliath narrative. Western news media closely followed these developments, focusing subsequently on the draconian punishment being handed out for minor miscalculations,1 and the rapidity of Hong Kong’s transformation into a Kafkaesque maze of politico-legal restrictions under the National Security Law implemented in 2020. This coverage has been framed, as academic Hentyle Yapp has observed, by the values of liberalism—its logics of freedom and of speech—which inform “not only Western media’s descriptions of the protests in Hong Kong, but also the activism itself.”2 It is difficult to turn away from the grand and deeply profound calls for freedom, dignity and self-determination expressed by Hong Kong’s people en masse over the last several years. Stepping back, if not away, from these urgencies however, highlights the potential blind spots that this narrative, with its cadence of oppression and resistance so familiar in the context of China, seems destined to reproduce. In cultural terms, art criticism and scholarly literature has been attentive to these dramatic socio-political ruptures (including the 2014 pro-democracy Umbrella Movement, but in particular the 2019–20 anti-extradition protests) as “artistically productive event[s]”3 that have precipitated responsive and dynamic forms of participatory, community-based and activist art. A brief review of recent scholarly literature on “art” and “Hong Kong” uncovers a quantity of new discourse that theorises artistic praxis in relation to a nexus of socio-political strategies, inscribed through a predominance of terms including resistance, resilience, community, collectivism, activism, identity and the articulation of a social commons.4 Indeed, one likely positive outcome of the otherwise devastating historical circumstances produced by China’s intensified presence in Hong Kong is the quantity of such literature likely to emerge in response. This is a level of attention comparable to that prompted by Hong Kong’s last ‘fifteen minutes of fame’,5 the 1997 handover, of the transfer of its sovereignty from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China. The handover was the other critical inflection point from which significant theoretical frameworks on Hong Kong emerged. These, in some cases (notably US academic Ackbar Abbas’ 1997 theory of “disappearance”), retain their intellectual monopoly almost a quarter of a century on, remaining the most widely cited texts on Hong Kong’s visual culture.6

This attention, insofar as it will generate new forms of knowledge, is undoubtedly welcome. However, the entirely predictable nature of its amplification sheds light on a wider pattern in Hong Kong’s art historiography, the quantity and nature of which can in general be tracked against the ebb and flow of political events to the exclusion of alternative histories and practices.7 This begs

the question of sustainability: how long will the spotlight last, given the ceaseless pressure of other global urgencies? And further, what accounts of this period will we be left with, and how will those accounts shape the forms of knowledge that we have about Hong Kong and its visual culture? The manner in which answers to these questions ultimately unfold will tell us much about the nature of our interest in Hong Kong, and the ways in which this interest tracks with the art world’s broader economies of attention.

ARTIST AS ETHNOGRAPHER: TSANG TSOU CHOI AND HONG KONG’S PURCHASE ON THE GLOBAL CONTEMPORARY

The dominant parameters of visibility afforded Hong Kong art are illustrated in the public and institutional profile of Tsang Tsou Choi (1921–2007), commonly known as the King of Kowloon. The “improbable”8 rise of this outsider figure to local hero for his profligate and unschooled calligraphic urban interventions protesting British colonial occupation, and then, after 1997, China’s neo-colonial presence, has been of general interest since the 1990s and is well documented.9

Beginning in 1956, Tsang (who received only two years of formal schooling) used Hong Kong’s public space to declare an ancestral claim over Kowloon, writing out his lineage in misshapen calligraphy over walls and electricity boxes. Popular and institutional historicisation of Tsang’s endeavours over the last decade, however, has seen his position as an originator of contemporary art as well as a local cultural identity, become thoroughly canonised. In a commercial and institutional context this has been through a framing of Tsang as the “first properly contemporary artist in [the] region,”10 or a foundational cultural avant-garde.11 While there have been commercial motivations at play in this context,12 the cardinal position afforded Tsang in Hong Kong’s contemporary art history narrative is also evident in scholarly accounts. In the Hong Kong chapter of their authoritative 2012 book, The Art of Modern China Julia Andrews and Kuiyi Shen select Tsang as the first artist for discussion (subsequent to the New Ink Movement of the 1960s–1970s), introducing their section on the post-handover contemporary period. At the popular level, the manner in which Tsang’s story refracts issues related to sovereignty, cultural and political dispossession, memory, the negotiation of public space, as well as his recalcitrant marginal status, has seen him claimed in public affection as the “story of Hong Kong writ large.”13 Demonstrative of his solidifying pride of place in both an art historical and populist narrative, the first artwork encountered in the inaugural exhibition of Hong Kong’s new institutional repository of a local visual history and identity, the M+ Museum, is a pair of wooden doors inscribed by Tsang in 2003.

The various readings applied to Tsang (often in the absence of his own voice articulating his imperatives14) are of interest, not in terms of what he means to Hong Kong and its people, but rather insofar as they illuminate the major discursive frames which facilitate the circulation of Hong Kong art. That is, in its articulation of cultural identity, which, particularly in the contemporary period,has been intimately bound by its political condition. In the 1960s–1970s, the New Ink Painting Movement became Hong Kong’s ‘official style’ to a not insignificant degree on the basis of its harmonious integration of sinicised Western elements with Chinese painting in a manner that broadly aligned with British colonial government branding of Hong Kong as the place where ‘East-meets-West’.15 In the post-handover contemporary this has been increasingly cast in political terms, of the relationship of Hong Kong’s subjects to the authoritarian pressures of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It is these parameters which determine the projection of cultural authenticity, and by extension the circulation and historicisation of art in a global field. The growing

public and commercial profile of Tsang Tsou Choi might therefore be explained by the artist’s fulfillment of the dual expectations that the global art critical and commercial establishment holds for non-Western art broadly: being, on the one hand, readily identifiable in terms of its cultural or national point of origin (in this case through the use of calligraphy as an autochthonous characteristic) and, on the other, offering a critical intervention into sites and symbols of cultural and political power in a manner that is consistent with ethical and aesthetic values of postmodernist and postcolonial deconstruction.16 As noted by art academic Simon Soon, exhibitions and texts which have facilitated Tsang’s evolution, from a local marginal figure to internationally recognised artist have frequently sublimated the specific logics and methods of his irredentist claims (which were fundamentally motivated by political concerns and a lack of education, rather than skill) into an act of conceptual radicalism.17 This move to locate Tsang within a contemporary art paradigm turns on a Western, or more specifically “North Atlantic”18 equation between negative values of resistance or refusal and ethical, philosophical or political positivism. Within this framing, Tsang is allocated an ethnographic role, tasked with summarising a collective history and subjectivity in ways that contradict the intensely individual nature of his work. In this sense, recent local and international traction of Tsang’s work is illustrative not only of the criteria by which contemporary art from Hong Kong and, more broadly, China is appreciated in the wider art world, but also the processes of exchange, loss and discrepancy of meaning that participation in the “incompletely shared present”19 of the global contemporary art project necessitates.

ART HISTORIOGRAPHIES OF HONG KONG

Consistent with these logics of attention, the most substantive international and scholarly engagement with art from Hong Kong has occurred in concert with its politico-historical ruptures.20 Mainstream coverage of Hong Kong’s art scene spiked in relation to the 2019–2020 anti-extradition protests. However, and predictably, this has largely not been in terms of meaningful engagement with actual artworks—their histories, interpretation, or aesthetics. Instead, it has focused on evolving conditions of censorship and restrictions the arts community has faced subsequent to the imposition of the National Security Law, as well as anxious speculation on the stability and sustainability of Hong Kong’s status as a key node in the global art market.21 A similar tendency to collapse the boundaries between political and artistic expression was observed by art historian Paul Gladston several years ago, when he described the way in which relics and ephemera from the 2014 and 2019 Hong Kong protests were being “upheld and therefore institutionally decided within the purview of the international art world’s currently fashionable social turn as indexes of radical socially-engaged artistic expression.”22 For Gladston, such a transfiguration “maintains the expanded field accorded to the aesthetic as part of postmodernist-lite discourses, whereby all modes of expression have the potential to be considered as art.”23 Attention to this groundswell of visual material culture (inclusive memes, graffiti, posters etc.) is accorded on the basis of an indexicality to political developments which are understood as globally significant, or history-making. Looking further back, the period up to and surrounding the 1997 handover saw a spate of exhibition-making and research through which the major interpretative paradigms for contemporary art were established. The advent of the contemporary—both as a socio-historical condition and aesthetic sensibility—has long been wedded to the introspective turn in the lead up to the 1997 transfer of sovereignty. Within existing art historiography, it was in the shadow of the handover, that moment when “history with a capital H”24 visited Hong Kong, that the SAR and its

Hong Kong art historiographies and pitfalls of political desire

art “came into its own,”25 increasingly characterised by forms of expression oriented towards a local audience newly aware of its own cultural autonomy. For art historian David Clarke, author of what remains one of the most authoritative texts on contemporary Hong Kong art and visual culture, Hong Kong Art: Culture and Decolonization (2002), this moment of localisation was epistemologically postmodern, taking the form of a “rejection of all master narratives, whether of Chineseness or of Western-centred conceptions of modernity or contemporaneity.”26 The desire for cultural autonomy in the absence of any possibility for the same kind of self-determination in the political domain precipitated the beginnings of a “psychic decolonisation,”27 through the deliberate disaffirmation of Chinese national identity “in order to open up an alternative space of Hong Kongness.”28 Formulated in this way, the contemporary is bound up with the articulation of a visual culture which, for the first time, took Hong Kong as its primary horizon and was catalysed by threats to Hong Kong’s way of life, which encouraged residents to realise their own histories, culture and identity in ways that would come to take on an increasingly activist tone in the post-2003 era.29

Clarke’s text, the first major scholarly account of contemporary Hong Kong art, which explicitly took as its frame of reference, “the response of artists to a major socio-political event,”30 functioned to elevate a range of artists and artistic strategies of the retrocession period. It also, significantly, dated the origins of contemporary Hong Kong art and culture to the handover as a “primary impetus.”31 This reiterated a causational claim already made several years earlier in Ackbar Abbas’ influential text of cultural theory, Hong Kong: Culture and

the Politics of Disappearance

For Abbas, the “cultural self-invention” of the postcolonial Hong Kong subject emerged in response to what he describes as a “space of disappearance” that is a symptom of new historical demands of the handover, but can also describe Hong Kong’s historic status as a transit space or thoroughfare and the abstraction of space in the digital era.32 As well as being the only text to offer a survey of contemporary Hong Kong visual culture, Clarke’s historiography gained traction through his role as an advisor and catalogue essay writer alongside Johnson Chang Tsong-zung for the Hong Kong section of the acclaimed touring exhibition Inside Out: New Chinese Art (1998–99) curated by Gao Minglu. Inside Out was the only international exhibition of China’s new art in the 1990s to substantively co-present contemporary art from Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Chinese diaspora and mainland China under a single curatorial framework. Although the exhibition technically covers the period from 1984 to 1998, the five works selected from Hong Kong are from 1994–96, and the majority deal directly with the handover.33 This is consistent with Clarke’s historiography which moves directly from a discussion of modernist artists working in either harmonious or critically disjunctive forms of hybridity, such as Wucius Wong (b. 1936) or Luis Chan (1905–1995), to the response of artists “living in the shadow of the future.”34 Works selected were overwhelmingly weighted to the 1990s and the demonstration of a “growing concern for Hong Kong cultural identity” as a “parallel” to the desire for self-determination in the political arena.35 Other authoritative accounts of Chinese art history, notably by Andrews and Shen, follow the same inflection points, and as a result the few contemporary Hong Kong artists that they select for discussion are also related to the retrocession period, delimited by the same political horizon.36

Within this dominant story of the Hong Kong contemporary, art has been allocated the role of handmaiden to identity and history: “participating in this desire to affirm Hong Kong identity or subjecthood and even to some extent help[ing to] give birth to it.”37 This ascription of a socioutilitarian function to art can in many ways be attributed to the exceptional nature of Hong Kong’s political history.38 In a break from the typical experience of decolonisation via insurrection animated

by nationalism (which perhaps better describes the society-wide protests that rocked Hong Kong in 2019), Hong Kong’s one hundred and fifty-six year British colonial period came to a ‘natural’, although not necessarily preordained end in 1997, due to the expiry of the legal contract which had leased the New Territories from China for ninety-nine years from 1898.39 The term “decolonisation” does not accurately encapsulate an experience in which the exit of the coloniser ended with the transfer of sovereignty from one global power to another in place of the progressive acquisition of autonomy. Much of the scholarly literature on Hong Kong is marked by a desire to understand the city, possessing a cultural expression figured against the fluctuating forces of (post)colonialism, free market capitalism and Chinese nationalisms throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, offering postcolonial historians a hybrid post-national identity par excellence.40 Accordingly, such scholarship is often marked by a prevailing interest in Hong Kong’s cultural identity and political narrative rather than in its art, per se.

The assessment that “there may well be no historical equivalent for the questions raised”41 by Hong Kong’s struggle for self-determination is persuasive.42 The experience of Hong Kong’s people, situated in an increasingly concrete historical space between colonisation and a prescheduled return or re-colonisation, is unparalleled. Artists have, as they do everywhere and across time, responded to these events in novel and compelling ways. But the handover itself did not loom as large in the psyche of Hong Kong’s artists as one might imagine from the extant art historical narrative (as given by Clarke), at least not at the time of its occurrence. Writing in 1996, one year prior to the handover, artist/curator/art critic Oscar Ho Hing-kay reports, with some bewilderment that, “despite the fact that the city has entered probably the most political era in its history,”43 the response of the local visual arts sector to these issues was piecemeal at best: “there are no artists who deeply and persistently investigate the issues of ’97.”44 More broadly, Ho suggests that “With the exception of the democracy movement in 1989, political art has never been an important art genre in Hong Kong.”45 This apparent apathy (which could also be described as simply incorporating a wider range of interests beyond the political domain) is verified by artist and curator Ellen Pau, when writing on the development of video art in the SAR for the journal V-Text in 1997, suggested that despite works related to issues of local identity and the “turmoil”46 of 4 June being the most widely circulated at the time (notably through the program… Will be Televised: Documents from Asia programmed by Shu Lea Cheang and broadcast in the US via Deep Dish Television in 1990) “the number of production [sic] of this nature is less than ten annually.”47 According to Pau, up until the formation of Video Power48 in 1988–89, “most video works were not about social documentary or commentary”49 and “was not seen as an empowering tool for personal/political ends.”50 Unlike Taiwan, where the “emphasis [was] on documentary and activist work,”51 in Hong Kong this first decade of video art was generally conceptual and concerned with articulating “the ontology of the medium,”52 an aesthetic priority that was to some extent inherited from German influence through the early involvement of the Goethe Institute in Hong Kong.

Despite this, the authoritative accounts of this period focus on Hong Kong art in terms of the interdependent domains of cultural identity and politics to the exclusion of almost all else, taking as their domain of inquiry as the “cultural self-invention of the Hong Kong subject”53 or “the problems of cultural identity that Hong Kong may represent.”54 This framing radically delimits the terms by which Hong Kong art is able to be understood, and, more significantly, divorces contemporary Hong Kong art from its own art historical genealogy. While rupture, as academic Charles Green recently reiterated, figures consistently in the emergence of modern and contemporary art, it can

Hong Kong art historiographies and pitfalls of political desire

Hong Kong art historiographies and pitfalls of political desire

only ever be a partial account of these art historical turns.55 These historical severance points (war, conflict and de- or re-colonisation), described by curator and critic Patrick Flores vis-à-vis the work of John Clark as an “irritation that festers, as it were, into a distinct condition”56 must be counterbalanced by “the deep structure of inheritance”57 that is emergent in artists and artworks via dual processes of chance and agency. Thus, even while apportioning appropriate weight to the plight of Hong Kong and artists’ engagement in these terms (both historically and now), it remains the case that the attention given to socio-political paradigms, at the expense of other readings, has encouraged an overreliance on Hong Kong’s position in relations of geography and of power to interpret cultural production. This has had the corollary effect of rendering periods of relatively apolitical and/or culturally oblique artistic innovation and exploration largely invisible. Tying the advent of the contemporary (art and Hong Kong subject) to the handover as a local political catalyst—for cultural self-introspection and a broadly deconstructive impulse —obscures a far longer and richer history of contemporary art in Hong Kong. Attention rather, to Hong Kong as a site of latticed connection to both local histories and global discourses, indicates an alternative and equally significant point of origin. This can be found in the dynamic and highly interdisciplinary art scene of the late 1970s and 1980s, as well as the earlier if idiosyncratic experiments in conceptual art, environments and performance by Frog King Kwok Mangho (b. 1949), from the early-to-mid 1970s. It was during these two decades that large numbers of artists, dancers, choreographers, poets and filmmakers returned to Hong Kong from studying overseas at arts institutions across Europe and North America. They brought with them first-hand knowledge and experience of emergent global contemporaneous developments in areas including conceptual art, minimalism, feminism, performance art, video, postmodern dance and theatre, as well as the wider social ruptures of student activism and the counter-cultural currents which characterised the American campus experience from the mid-1960s. Back in Hong Kong, this rich intellectual interplay was amplified by the nascency of the city’s art ecology as well as a productive distance from the evaluative mechanisms of the North American art world.

While the return of a generation of overseas trained artists is widely acknowledged as a “precondition for the subsequent evolution of a contemporary arts scene,”58 the specificity of artists’ diverse pedagogical heritage has remained vague, obscuring an alternative and art historical source of contemporary art developments. From this energetic and richly transnational context (descriptors which can be applied to Hong Kong generally) emerged a range of new, often interdisciplinary, artistic experiments. These included the new mediums of video and installation by Choi Yan Chi, May Fung Mei-wah and Ellen Pau, which developed in dialogue with experimental dance and theatre contexts; installation and performance by Joshua Hon and Kwok Mangho in response to the local material culture and phenomenological experience of Hong Kong; disruptive forms of ‘action art’ by Fung Manyee and Ricky Yeung Sau-Churk influenced by local anarchist groups, international student movements of the 1960s and 1970s and the social orientation and institutional critique of artists including Hans Haacke and Joseph Beuys; and a community-based curatorial practice informed by anthropology, sociology and West Coast Funk art as practiced by Oscar Ho Hing-kay. I could go on.

Although this history is widely known in Hong Kong, it’s significance as a radial point for contemporary art has generally been obscured by the dominant narrative of political rupture. To displace the precipitative role of the political allows us to see, for example, that the “local turn”59 of the 1990s was not only a direct response to the pressures of the handover, but emerged from a

much broader and globally inflected range of factors. One pertinent example here is Danny Yung’s history of community organising for Chinese and Chinese-American communities in New York in the 1970s with the Basement Workshop,60 informed by socio-political activism around civil rights, the Vietnam War, affirmative action, and wider Third World solidarities. Another example, Oscar Ho Hing-kay’s interest in both the populist tendencies of the Californian Funk Art Movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the Marxist approach of art historian John Berger while studying at University of California, Davis in the early 1980s.61 This predisposition for narratives of rupture also makes invisible various forms of continuity that exist between Hong Kong’s modern and contemporary periods. Numerous artists of the 1980s generation trained with Modern ink painters Lui Shou-kwan or Ding Yanyong, and frequently followed their advice to travel to the same international universities as their predecessors.62 A reconsideration of this history points to alternative genealogies for many of the major strands of contemporary Hong Kong art as they emerged in the 1990s. This includes the use of urban material detritus in installation art in order to index local concerns; activist tendencies in performance art; an increasing localisation of publics and concerns; and what has previously been identified as a broadly postmodern tendency evident from the 1980s.63 Decoupling contemporary Hong Kong art from the political horizon allows for its emergence, development and significance to be framed by a far richer and more expansive set of transnational aesthetic, technological and art historical factors. Freed from the burden of representation, Hong Kong art is able to re-stake its claim to the vast and asymmetrical terrain that is the global contemporary, a terrain that is “energised by specific local, national, regional, and global contingencies, often all at once.”64 It is this longer history, its aesthetics and genealogies, that risks being lost through the recent reinstatement of the political as the major interpretative framework, as pervasive pressures to engage with art in terms of newness, urgency, and relevance produce a myopia of rupture.

HONG KONG IN/AND HISTORIES OF CONTEMPORARY CHINESE ART

The catalytic role ascribed to the handover in narratives of contemporary Hong Kong art and visual culture is symptomatic of a broader set of issues which have troubled contemporary Chinese art since its entrance into the international arena in the 1990s. In broad terms, this can be related to the desire for the non-Western artist to perform the role of ethnographer, as part of an “anthropological turn” in contemporary art which Hal Foster identified as early as 1995.65 This is a paradigm that relies on a number of assumptions, namely, that the artist who is culturally or socially ‘other’ has automatic access to a site of transformative alterity, in which their artistic intervention is also politically real.66 In the context of Greater China, the international appetite for artists and artworks that confirm an existing set of (Western) beliefs about the CCP as a globally preeminent authoritarian government has seen over the last three decades artists and artworks that propose a relationship of dissidence with the state achieve tremendous institutional and economic success.67 As Hentyle Yapp has argued, this reliance on Western values (particularly freedom of expression) as the “model for how the state functions with regard to the individual”68 facilitates the circulation of contemporary Chinese art in global markets. This ‘major’ narrative obfuscates what Yapp has proposed as the ‘minor’,69 namely aesthetics and the actually nuanced relationships that exist between artists and state power, entanglements that exceed the bounds of the Western liberal imaginary. Curator and art historian Carol Yinghua Lu has similarly argued that the manner in which scholarship on contemporary Chinese art is overwhelmingly scribed in terms of rupture and linear historical progress—“descriptions [that] tend to be based on the binary narrative models of

politics versus art, orthodoxy versus heterodoxy, suppression versus rebellion, dependence versus independence, official positions versus non-official positions and so on”70—functionally “exclud[es] artistic approaches and the attitudes of those who didn’t display such criticality in their political and social positioning.”71 Owing to the presumption of exogenous Western understandings of contemporary art which prefer art and its aesthetic to be the locus of deconstructive criticality72 or a “liberal antidote”73 to illiberal expressions of power, key accounts of Chinese art history locate the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 as a ground zero in the development of contemporary Chinese art. As a result, the total (and socially totalising) political and aesthetic apparatus of Socialist Realism and a revolutionary narrative are excluded as the basis for its development and interpretation—a history which Lu recuperates.74 Narratives of contemporary Chinese art that understand it as emerging in reaction to the CCP, rather than in many ways existing in continuity with the system that the CCP established, are attractive because they allow for the Chinese state to be reiterated as “inherently illiberal, behind and needing to catch up to the West.”75 However, as Lu astutely observes, “in China, at least, setting up oppositions to narrate the appearance of contemporary art is actually the passive acceptance and extension of a revolutionary narrative that was transformed into an avant-garde rhetoric, emphasising resistance to state ideologies and existing authority.”76 Art historiographies of Hong Kong that emphasise political rupture are framed by this wider context. It is no coincidence that Hong Kong art first achieved its limited attention at the precise moment that the CCP came to occupy significantly more real estate (both in Hong Kong and internationally) and as Britain exited. The handover, while being its own unique historical event, is also marked by this wider nexus of global expectation and desire. Re-positioning the political is not an effort to minimise the precarity of Hong Kong’s circumstances nor to deny the manner in which art invents itself everywhere in response to local and culturally specific needs. It rather forms part of the necessary work of resisting the demand that art from outside Euro-North American centres should always justify its significance by recourse to something outside itself, as a lucid articulation of a place, culture or political event, in precisely the same way that the identity of Hong Kong has always been made legible by way of simplistic reference to places and cultures beyond its territorial boundaries.77 When art historian David Teh compared Hal Foster’s 2009 Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary’ with Asia Art Archive’s four-part rejoinder from 2012, An Expanded Questionnaire on the Contemporary, he noted that, “[I]n the October exercise, words referring to nation (nation/al/ism, country, government, state) appear just 33 times; in the Asian survey, they recur 120 times… we can hardly avoid the conclusion that in Asia the state exerts a far greater gravity on contemporary art, and figures more in the thoughts of those studying it, than in Europe and North America.”78

As Teh observes, the role of art in relation to society is culturally determined, and in Hong Kong, like much of Asia, the troubled quest for nationhood (here uniquely cultural due to the foreclosure of the political) has occupied much artistic interest. There is no escaping politics, particularly not in a place like Hong Kong, a city in which the fundamental questions of living —access to space, discourse, expression—are politically overdetermined. It remains possible, and arguably desirable, however, to encounter art on its own terms, something which would allow for a far wider range of artworks and meanings to be articulated. Such an encounter would necessitate not a denial of the political (an impossibility) but it’s re-positioning to a space outside the studio door, even while acknowledging that to open the door would be to encounter a typhoon.

Hong Kong art historiographies and pitfalls of political desire

With such a buffer in place, it becomes possible to perceive a richer set of histories and more complex ambits of meaning for art from Hong Kong. The decentring of political and rupture-based art historical narratives also complicates methods of additive pluralism that are inherent to a project of global art that proliferates art history’s subjects without attention to its methods. As Patrick Flores warns, “the plural cannot be affirmative, an incessantly expansionist complexification and relentless extraction of irresistible local articulations of the immovable norm reared elsewhere and reigning supreme.”79 The addition of Hong Kong to a project of global art history vis-à-vis its political context functions as such an affirmation, maintaining a simplistic and exclusive narrative of the Chinese state as illiberal, and Chinese artists, including those from Hong Kong, as anti-heroes. In the context of Greater China, resisting these normative pressures requires a critical engagement with our desire to inscribe art into history through the ‘major’ narratives of rupture and political resistance or intervention in ways that might increase the visibility of art from this region, but nevertheless maintain the global art historical status quo.

Notes

1 See, for example, John Yoon, ‘Hong Kong Sentences 5 Over “Seditious” Children’s Books’, The New York Times, 10 September 2022; https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/10/world/asia/hong-kong-childrens-books-free-speech.html

2 Hentyle Yapp, Minor China: Method, Materialisms, and the Aesthetic, Durham: Duke University Press, 2021, p. 212

3 Laikwan Pang, ‘Arendt in Hong Kong: Occupy, Participatory Art, and Place-Making’, Cultural Politics, vol. 12, no. 2, 2016, p. 156

4 See, for example Isaac Leung, ‘The Resilient City: When Social Activism Meets Media Arts in Hong Kong’, Art and Activism in the Age of Systemic Crisis, London: Routledge, 2020; Pang, ‘Arendt in Hong Kong’; Stephanie Cheung, ‘Taking Part: Participatory Art and the Emerging Civil Society in Hong Kong’, World Art 5, no. 1, 2015, pp. 143–66; Minna Valjakka, ‘Co-Authoring the Space: The Initial Lennon Wall Hong Kong in 2014 as Socially Engaged Creativity’, Cultural Studies 34, no. 6, 2020, pp. 979–1006; and Wen Yau, ‘Art as a Gift of Empowerment: Civil Engagement in Hong Kong’, Antithesis 31, Defy, 2021, pp. 24–35

5 Kin Wah Lau, ‘Polemical Position–Art’s great leap in Hong Kong and its denial of the local’, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 13, no. 2, 2014, p. 128

6 Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. In his book Abbas examines Hong Kong cinema, architecture and literature to argue that the Hong Kong subjectivity has been formed in response to a culture of “disappearance”. Abbas’ book has been cited at least 1,500 times. His work has also been directly referenced by artists. See, for example, May Fung and Danny Yung’s video work, Image of a City (1990)

7 This is not to discount the sustained and important work currently taking place, including the Art History Department of the University of Hong Kong, which has recently published the Hong Kong Art History Timeline; https://arthistory.hku.hk/hkarttimeline/, and Asia Art Archive in their ongoing collection and creation of new resources in this area

8 Louisa Lim, ‘Chasing the King of Kowloon’, The Atlantic, 19 April 2022; https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/hong-kongchinese-calligraphy-democracy-indelible-city/629582/

9 Art critic Lau Kin-Wai is credited with first bringing Tsang substantively into the local art world with a controversial solo exhibition held at the Goethe Institute in 1997. Tsang’s calligraphy was a familiar sight to Hong Kong residents from the early 1970s, and he was the subject of sporadic local arts coverage from as early as 1978. Tsang’s first major international recognition came with his inclusion in Hou Hanru’s and Hans Ulrich Obrist’s touring exhibition Cities on the Move (1997–99) and reiterated through his inclusion in the Hong Kong pavilion for the 2003 Venice Biennale co-curated by Hou Hanru. Although Hong Kong did not receive its own pavilion until 2003, Hong Kong artists Ellen Pau, Ho Siu-kee and Leung Chi-Wo with Sara Wong Chi-hang were included in the China/Hong Kong Pavilion curated by Johnson Chang TsongZung in 2001

10 King of Kowloon (exhibition catalogue), Saamlung Gallery, 2012, in Simon Soon, ‘Reading Tsang Tsou Choi: Margin, Madness, and a Hong Kong Avant-Garde’, in Preservation, Radicalism, and the Avant-Garde Canon, Rebecca Ferreboeuf, Fiona Noble and Tara Plunkett eds, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, p. 200

11 A position first articulated by Hong Kong art critic Lau Kin-Wai in 1992. See Soon, ibid., p. 195

Hong Kong art historiographies and pitfalls of political desire

12 The highest price Tsang’s work achieved to date is US$237,238 for a scooter covered with calligraphy which sold at Sotheby’s in 2013

13 Soon, ‘Reading Tsang Tsou Choi’, p. 191. See, for example, academic and journalist Louisa Lim’s use of Tsang as a lodestar for Hong Kong’s history and identity in her recent book Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong, New York NY: Riverhead Books, 2022

14 Simon Soon presents a cogent critique of the ways in which the complexities of Tsang’s political motivations have been sidelined in accounts that seek to position him as a cultural avant-garde

15 The trope of ‘East meets West’ was elevated to a civic ideology following the 1967 anti-government riots which prompted the British administration to invest in a range of localisation policies and encourage a sense of local cultural identity formulated around the principle of harmonious East-West relations outside the influences of communist China

16 The framing of Tsang’s unschooled calligraphy as contemporary Chinese art serves to locate it in relation to other international contemporary Chinese artists working with calligraphy, including Gu Wenda, Wu Shanzhuan and Xu Bing

17 See Soon, ‘Reading Tsang Tsou Choi’.This includes, for example, the 1999–2001 group exhibition of contemporary ink, Power of the Word curated by Chang Tsong-zung; a 2012 commercial exhibition at Saamlung Gallery; the touring exhibition Cities on the Move (1997–99), and the 2013 monograph edited by David Spalding, The King of Kowloon: The Art of Tsang Tsou Choi, Bologna: Damiani

18 James Elkins, The End of Diversity in Art Historical Writing: North Atlantic Art History and its Alternatives, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2020, p. 107. Elkins employs the term “North Atlantic” to refer to “the general geographic region that art historians in different parts of the world take as optimal practice.” Elkins, p. 47. As Elkins describes, this centre is flexible and varies according to one’s geographic and cultural position, but at its most specific can be identified with the journals October and The Art Bulletin, and institutions Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Berkeley, Courtauld, Humboldt University and select others. See pp. 44–48

19 David Teh, Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary, Singapore: NUS Press, 2017, p. 2

20 The other major curatorial framing which facilitated the international circulation of Hong Kong art was globalisation and urban development as explored in exhibitions Hong Kong etc. as part of Okwui Enwezor’s 2nd Johannesburg Biennale (1998) and Cities on the Move curated by Hou Hanru and Hans Ulrich Obrist

21 See, for example, H. G. Masters, ‘ArtAsiaPacific: M+ Removes Controversial Paintings about Chinese History’, ArtAsiaPacific, 26 April 2022; https://artasiapacific.com/news/m-removes-controversial-paintings-about-chinese-history; ‘Two Hong Kong Universities Remove Tiananmen Artworks after Pillar of Shame Dismantled’, The Guardian, 24 December 2021; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/24/ two-hong-kong-universities-remove-tiananmen-artworks-after-pillar-of-shame-dismantled; Vivienne Chow, ‘Hong Kong’s Local Art Market Is Flourishing. But Under Its National Security Law, Many Fear an Artist Exodus’, Artnet News, 28 September 2021; https://news.artnet.com/ market/hong-kongs-local-art-market-flourishing-national-security-law-many-fear-artist-exodus-2014185

22 Paul Gladston, ‘Beyond the Pale: Critical Reflections on Society, Politics and Aesthetics Within and at the Borders of China’, di’van | A Journal of Accounts 7, 2019, p. 97

23 Ibid.

24 David Clarke, 24 X 365 X Hong Kong: A Year in the Life of a City, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007

25 David Clarke, Hong Kong Art: Culture and Decolonisation, Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2002, p. 10

26 David Clarke, ‘The Culture of a Border Within: Hong Kong Art and China’, Art Journal 59, no. 2, 2000, p. 90; https://doi.org/10/dtr9n5

27 Clarke, Hong Kong Art, p. 8

28 Clarke, ‘The Culture of a Border Within’, p. 91

29 For reference to politicisation of Hong Kong’s art post-2003, see Lau, ‘Polemical Position – Art’s great leap in Hong Kong...’

30 Clarke, Hong Kong Art, p. 38

31 Clarke, ibid., 8. As well as Tsang Tsou Choi, whom Clarke highlights, these are, broadly, artists engaged in strategies of cultural distinction including visual/verbal puns on the Cantonese dialect and the excavation or fabrication of local histories, as well as installation art particularly that which related to the circle of artists surrounding Para Site Art Space from the mid-1990s

32 Abbas, p. 65

33 Works by Hong Kong artists included are Kum Chi-keung, Transition Space (1995); Ho Siu-kee, Walking on Two Balls (1995), Phoebe Man, Beautiful Flowers (1996), Pan Xing Lei, To Weun, Tim Yu and Ma Jian, Cultural Mourning (1996) and Danny Yung, Gifts from China (1994). The lack of attention given to practices prior to the 1990s in this exhibition perhaps explains Gao’s utter disdain for conceptual art from Hong Kong when he again was tasked with presenting Hong Kong to an international audience for the landmark exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, Queens Museum of Art, New York, 1999

34 Clarke, Hong Kong Art, p. 38

35 David Clarke, ‘Found in Transit: Hong Kong Art in a Time of Change’, Inside Out: New Chinese Art, Berkeley Los Angeles London New York: University of California Press, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Asia Society Galleries, 1998, p. 175. Other inaugural presentations of Hong Kong contemporary art to international audiences were curated by Johnson Chang Tsong-zung. Chang was responsible for the selection of the Ho Siu-kee work, Walking on Two Balls included in Inside Out, for Hong Kong’s first inclusion in the 1996 São Paulo Biennial, and for the Hong Kong presentation at Venice in 2001 where Ho Siu-kee was exhibited alongside Ellen Pau’s Recycling Cinema (2001) and Leung Chi-wo’s Crossing Skies (2001) and City Cookie (2001), with Sara Wong Chi-hang

36 In the case of Andrews and Shen this is Phoebe Man, Ho Siu-kee, Tsang Tak Ping, Tsang Tsou Choi and Wilson Sheih. Hong Kong is broadly excluded from major surveys of contemporary Chinese art on the quite reasonable basis of its “very different contexts and histories.” Wu Hung, Contemporary Chinese Art: A History: 1970s–2000s, London: Thames & Hudson, 2014, p. 10

37 Clarke, ‘The Culture of a Border Within’, p. 91

38 What Abbas has described as a “mutant political entity,” Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, p. 142

39 The island of Hong Kong became a British Crown Colony in 1842 through the Treaty of Nanjing which ended the first Opium War of 1839–42; the Kowloon Peninsula was acquired in 1860 after the Second Opium War of 1856–60, and the New Territories, a large area of land abutting mainland China along with over 200 outlying islands was leased from China for 99 years in 1898

40 Xiaoying Wang, ‘Hong Kong, China, and the Question of Postcoloniality’, Postmodernism and China, Xudong Zhang and Arif Dirlik eds, Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2000, pp. 89–115.

41 Ashish Rajadhyaksha, ‘Hong Kong from the Outside: Four Keywords’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol 16, no. 3, 2015, p. 488

42 See, for example, Yiu-Wai Chu (ed.), Hong Kong Culture and Society in the New Millennium: Hong Kong as Method, Singapore: Springer, 2017

43 Oscar Ho Hing-kay, ‘The Long Road Back Home: Hong Kong in 1997 and Beyond’, ArtAsiaPacific 15, 1997, p. 52

44 Oscar Ho Hing-kay, ‘The Limits and Possibilities of the 1997 Handover’, Art Criticism For the People: News Clippings of Oscar Ho Hing-Kay, 1980-90s, Anthony Po Shan Leung (ed.), Hong Kong: Typesetter Publishing, 2020, pp. 133–34

45 Ho, ‘The Long Road Back Home’, p. 52

46 Ellen Pau, ‘Development of Hong Kong Video Art’, V-Text: A Magazine About Video, Digital Image, and the World of New Media, 1997, p. 31

47 Ibid., p. 56

48 Video Power was a socially oriented video art collective, which actively invited young people to use video in order to record local demonstrations and support of the Beijing student movement in 1989. Pau, p. 156

49 Pau, p. 56

50 Pau, p. 55. Alice Ming Wai Jim also attributes this to the “historical indoctrination of a British colonial practice that dissuaded overt political expressions.” Alice Ming Wai Jim, ‘Urban metaphors in Hong Kong media art: reimagining place identity’, PhD Thesis, Montreal, McGill University, 2003, p. 34; https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/concern/theses/7w62f868g

51 Pau, p. 54

52 Ibid., p. 55

53 Abbas, p. 1

54 Frank Vigneron, I like Hong Kong: Art and Deterritorialisation, Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2010, p. xi

Hong Kong art historiographies and pitfalls of political desire

55 Charles Green, ‘The Asian Modern’, di’van | A Journal of Accounts 11, 2022, p. 90

56 Patrick Flores, ‘Finally, or in Hindsight, the Contemporary’, introduction to John Clark, The Asian Modern, Singapore: National Gallery Singapore, 2021, p. 212

57 Ibid.

58 Clarke, ‘The Culture of a Border Within’, p. 70

59 Clarke, Hong Kong Art, p. 8

60 The not-for-profit Basement Workshop (1970–86) was aimed to provide arts and social services programming related to Chinese and Chinese-American communities in New York. It later expanded to become an umbrella organisation for pan Asian-American artistic expression and community activism and was central to the articulation of an Asian-American identity during the 1970s

61 Email correspondence with Oscar Ho Hing-Kay, 7 August 2022

62 As well as artists of the New Ink Painting Movement whose connections with Lui Shou-kwan are well known, artists Kwok Mangho and Choi Yan Chi both studied with Lui Shou-Kwan during the early 1970s. A number of artists including Danny Yung, Evelyna Liang Yiwoo and Eva Yuen studied with Ding Yanyong during this period. Others, including Choi Yan Chi, Eva Yuen, Ming Fay and Wucius Wong were educated at the Columbus School of Art and Design in Ohio, USA

63 See Clarke, ‘Found in Transit: Hong Kong Art in a Time of Change’

64 Teh, Thai Art, p. 4

65 Hal Foster, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer?’, The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology 302, 1995, p. 309

66 Ibid.

67 Obvious examples include Political Pop, Cynical Realism, the ‘unofficial art’ of performance art in the 1990s in particular, and the exemplar political subversive, Ai Weiwei

68 Yapp, pp. 209–210

69 Yapp, p. 210. This is distinguishable from the ways in which the Chinese state is experienced as major by those minor in and to it, namely Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet and the Uyghur populations. See the afterword in Yapp, pp. 209–221

70 Carol Yinghua Lu, ‘The Historical Formation of Chinese Contemporary Art and the Socialist Legacy’, PhD Diss., Melbourne, University of Melbourne, 2020, p. 2

71 Ibid., p. 45

72 See Paul Gladston, Contemporary Chinese Art: A Critical History, London: Reaktion Books, 2014

73 Yapp, p. 2

74 This transformation of China’s modern art into an international avant-garde with connotations of criticality and originality is exemplified in Gao Minglu’s selection of the English title, China/Avant-Garde for the renowned 1989 exhibition, instead of the direct Chinese translation, “Chinese Modern Art Exhibition”. See Lu, ‘The Historical Formation of Chinese Contemporary Art and the Socialist Legacy’, pp. 31–32

75 Yapp, p. 2

76 Lu, p. 2

77 See Joan Kee, ‘Art, Hong Kong, and Hybridity: A Task of Reconsideration’, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 2 no. 2, 2003, pp. 90–98

78 Teh, p. 1

79 Flores, p. 215

Hedda΄s camera: and ΄the real΄

The contingencies of life. This essay was revised at the news of Jean-Luc Godard’s death, who gave his character to the words, “Photography is the truth. And cinema is the truth at 24 frames a second.”1 From an iconoclast and one of the most innovative directors in contemporary cinema, it is a flippant comment, for all his films are but driven by the opposite, a distrust of realism. I began this essay as an elaborate footnote to my text in the previous issue of this journal on the artist Sim Chi Yin and her postcolonial critique of the British counterinsurgency in Malaya (1948–60).2 Her photographs showed participants on both sides of the conflict: the British soldiers in manipulated images, the captured communist insurgents piteously real under watch at the police station, and her martyred guerrilla grandfather was evoked as a ghost of memory. Realism, in Sim’s handling, was denied to ‘the enemy’, but lavishly bestowed upon those with whom she politically aligns. It was an odd artistic strategy, I suggested. For realism offers no final arbiter of truth; it can potentially distort and falsifies as with any method of artistic creation.

In my critique of Sim’s work, it was relatively easy to lever oneself into an anti-realist position. As I wrote, I was alerted to the fact that the writings on photography are ‘anti-realist’ or ‘anti-photography’, questioning at every move, the metaphysical sincerity, the perceptual integrity of the camera. At the end, the polemics is so cuttingly persistent that it made me pause. Thus, in a modish gesture of autocritique, I shall revisit the inquiry and cast it in a zone less conclusive, where thoughts and the senses reside, where the experience of seeing demands reckoning.

It has been said that “The history, criticism, and theory of photography is a relatively new and eccentric discipline.”3 Indeed; and an eccentric discipline calls for an eccentric, or better, a capricious approach—to show the fecklessness of photography as a means of capturing the real. The invention of photography in 1826 stands as one of the signature events in the age of mechanical reproduction. Photography is essentially an analogue medium, in the sense that it seeks a direct, almost literal connection with a subject. Said differently, each photograph functions as metonym —like the Whitehouse is to the US Presidency, or Canberra to the Australian Parliament—which makes a straight equivalence of reality. Metonym is not metaphor which deploys a connection “in terms of an imaginary resemblance.”4 In other words, photograph has little sense of conceptual or visual distance from the object; while art, as metaphor, involves a good deal of imagination or reinvention on the part of the artist and the viewer in the making of meaning and significance. The photograph allows little lassitude in this regard. ‘Art’, or ‘invention’, of course, can be embedded in a photographic print by manipulation, distortion and other means, but the intimate tryst of image and the real remains its primary quality.

This insistence on photography as ‘art of the real’ is contentious, until we remember the reverse: the almost universal distrust among writers and critics of the photograph’s claim to exactitude. This distrust has all the signs of modernist avant-gardism. It debunks the seeing-isbelieving maxim, and it belittles the ground-holding veracity a photograph boldly claims. The legacy goes back at least to the Greeks, whose preoccupation with the question ‘what is real?’ became the foundation of Western metaphysics. That in Plato’s cave, what you see is a mere phantom of

the real—philosophers are haunted by it, and writers on photography base on it their profound incredulity towards the medium. The camera lies! From this it is but an easy step to tie photography to modernity’s anxiety to put any givenness, any established criterion of signification to radical scrutiny. It is not too much to say that writers on photography, from Susan Sontag to John Berger, Max Kozloff and Allan Sekula, is each an essayist of the mind, less an essayist of the visual. In their writing, there are brilliant intellectual insights and sharp political speculations, but there is little of the jouissance, the sensuous puzzlement of one who has unwaveringly ‘looked’. Essentially, their method is to read outside the image and draw inferences from the social and political circumstances. The ‘big picture’, less the images, drive the arguments. Reading John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), it is hard not to feel impatience to get to the exegesis: an image, a photograph, is but an alienated object, its main purpose to give substance to the prevailing idea of power and class. As he writes, “An image is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced. It is an appearance, or a set of appearances, which has been detached from the place and time in which it first made its appearance.”5 For Susan Sontag, “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power”; in other words, what feels like power is mystification and falsehood.6 Photography is simply “the most realistic, therefore facile, of the mimetic arts.”7 Berger’s Marxist discoveries, Sontag’s cultural and political readings: they rage against photography’s literalism and metonymic potency, and make much of its detachment from history. These approaches run the constant risk of reductionism. Since what you see cannot be trusted and ‘the real’ lies outside the image, the viewer is hauled away from the visual in search of the prey in the forest of meaning and significance. In not too subtle a fashion, it denigrates the eye, and cast aspersions upon the senses and the carnal affirmation of the world. This academic pleading comes from an anthropologist who packs a camera each time he goes to the field. The camera is a Nikon FM2. Nikon FM2 can function without a battery—an important consideration when battery-run devices often fail in the heat and high humidity of the jungle. The camera is used to record ritual dances and the harvesting festival in the longhouses; for day-to-day use he uses an iPhone so he can instantly share with people what has been captured of events. Back from the field, he would do a bit of testing of the ‘reception theory’: how do people of another culture perceive what is familiar and understandable to us. The results are revealing. The verdict on his VitaWeat high fibre crackers is, dry, tasteless, “like burnt rice at the bottom of the pot.” Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations reminds them of a sewing machine: the change in tempo is like a woman working on her machine, slowing down or picking up the tempo as the sewing job demands. These may be rather idiosyncratic views, but they are recognisably the principle of Levi-Strauss’ structural anthropology. The symbolic analogy is not a:b, that is, crackers to burnt rice, or Bach to sewing machine. It is more suggestively a+b in reference to a third category: thus, a+b as to food, and a+b as to a set of rhythms.8 The analogy makes sense—from the native’s point of view.

With ‘the photograph’, a similar approach dominates. The way they look at the images entails the principle of ‘structural correspondence’. The images—of closeups and people in motion —evoke curiosity and pleasure: “Ah, do I really look like that?” “Why did I look so sad when I was actually happy.” “My son is nine-months old, and you can see the front teeth!” What they see matches what they know of themselves, but each image nonetheless tilts slightly the scale of the familiar. For a moment, it is as though they don’t recognise themselves in these images. The ‘correspondence’ between object and image is direct but never in the form of perfect mimicry. The images are real

—but not quite. This modest experiment shows that photographic images are invariably ‘strained’. What makes them real is a partnership between the images and the viewer’s inventiveness and fancy. The viewer’s input does not distort, so much as participating in the recreation of scenes and passions they recognise in their own lives. Ideological sham or cultural wrong-thinking is not the only story of photography.

The Kenyah men and women in the longhouse believe in what they see. They trust their senses. Their eyes carve out an intimate zone where things are undeniably real, where scepticism has no purchase. No wonder the viewers of the photos are self-absorbed, the range of their reading limited to their experiences and familiar social surrounds. They trust what they see and the feelings the images evoke—less what they think. For the anthropologist, it has much of the character of the post-Enlightenment philosophy. Thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, in their assault on the body-and-mind split, aim to restore the role of the senses in the sharpening of human consciousness. Leaving out their ideas’ serpentine detours and byways, the pertinent question is: how do we see when the body regains its rightful place in the merging with the mind? Sartre, who believes literature is the best form that lends truth to his idea, has given an answer. In the novel Nausea (1963),9 in a classic existential moment, the character Roquentin observes the exquisite “thinghood” of a tree. He sees the “compact sea-lion skin,” “that oily, horny, stubborn look” of the roots.10 And with this intense regard, Roquentin says of his experience, “I was the root of the chestnut tree. Or rather, I was all consciousness of its existence. Still detached from it —since I was conscious of it—and yet lost in it, nothing but it.”11 What exists “lets itself be encountered, but you can never deduce it.”12

This elevation of the visual: it is a struggle against the denial of the body, against a mind forever busily making comment and judgements. Nausea is a classic existentialist text, and as literature it makes you see, it dazzles you with images at once powerful and undeniably real (“compact sea-lion skin”, “that oily, horny, stubborn look”). What is described is as near as possible the nature of human consciousness—when the body no longer plays second fiddle to the mind. Actually, any piece of good writing would attempt to achieve to do so. This, from the beginning of travel writer Jonathan Raban’s Bad Land: An American Romance (1997), Breasting the regular sweels of the land, on a red dirt road as true as a line of longitude, the car was like a boat at sea. The ocean was hardly more solitary than this empty country, where in forty miles or so I hadn’t seen another vehicle. A warm westerly blew over the prairie, making waves, and when I wound down the window I heard it growl in the dry grass like surf. For gulls, there were killdeer plovers, crying out their name as they wheeled and skidded on the wind. Keel-dee-a! Keel-dee-a! The surface of the land was as busy as a rough sea—it broke in sandstone outcrops, low buttes, ragged blutes, hollow combers of bleached clay, and was assured with waterless creek beds, ash-white, littered with boulders. Brown cows nibbled at their shadows on the open range. In the bottomlands, where muddy rivers trickled through the cottonwoods, were fenced rectangles of irrigated green.13

It is all seeing, all hitting on the senses. Outside the car window the scene is colonised by a vertiginous listing of things (“The surface of the land was as busy as a rough sea—it broke in sandstone outcrops, low buttes, ragged blutes, hollow combers of bleached clay…”). And your senses are bolstered by a dispersal of metaphorical connections (“the car was like a boat at sea”). Images and meanings are not the binary thinking of postmodern woes, but as intimate as love-making.

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When the historical musing comes, the ground has been prepared. The West as centre of pastoral capitalism, the pioneers and the landscape of solitude, the natural conservatism of the American West: they are footnotes—critical, urgent—to a literary enterprise full of sight and sound and the feeling of worldliness. It is the same with photography. Certainly, there is truth beyond the image. But to get there, the viewer must be made to see, to be dazzled by the senses—before they can be led to think about what an image means. ***

Before me, on my desk are some heavy tomes of the work of the photographer Hedda Morrison. To read a photographic image requires us dipping into the ‘big picture’, its social and political conditions where the artist makes their work; and here the ‘big picture’ is diverse, colourful, transnational—from pre-Communist China, to Sarawak, East Malaysia, to Australia. Hedda Morrison (nee Hammer) was born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1908, and died aged eighty-three in Canberra, Australia.14 After high school, she studied medicine at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Expressing no interest in becoming a doctor, she got her parents to enrol her in the Bavarian State Institute for Photography in Munich, where she completed a certificate course in 1931 and commenced working in commercial studios in Stuttgart and Hamburg. Sensing the rise of Nazism, she left Germany and secured a job at the German-run Hartung’s Photo Shop in Peking (Beijing), China. Japanese troops occupied the city in August 1937. Hedda remained in Peking as a freelancer and travelled across China. Her photographs of temples, palaces and the life of Chinese people, taken between 1933 and 1946, were featured in a series of books, including Hua Shan, her observation of one of China’s sacred mountains, based on her visit in 1935, but published in Hong Kong only in 1973. A Photographer in Old Peking was published in 1985, including commentaries she penned in 1946. Her other book, still widely available is Travels of a Photographer in China 1933–46, first published 1985 by Oxford University Press.

In 1940 Hedda met Alastair Morrison, son of G. E. ‘Chinese’ Morrison (1862–1920), the famous Australian journalist and advisor to the government of the Chinese Republic. The couple married in Peking in 1946, at the height of the civil war. The following year, they left China and Alastair Morrison joined the British colonial service and became a district officer in Sarawak where they lived for the next twenty years. The post-China sojourn proved to be equally prolific, accompanying her husband on his official journeys to the longhouses, and made photographic tours of her own. From sacred mountains and temples to dusty folks in shops and streets of China, her work shifted to the less moribund tribal communities in the jungle and riverbanks. The titles of her books tell the story: Sarawak (1957), Life in a Longhouse (1962) and, as co-author, Vanishing World: The Ibans of Borneo (1972). In the mid-1960s, she was with the Sarawak government’s information office, training photographers, and founding a photographic library.

Sarawak was granted self-government and admitted into the Federation of Malaysia in 1963, ending the British colonial rule established in 1946 after the Japanese occupation. The year 1967 began the final stage of the Morrisons’ travelling life when they settled in Canberra. After her death in 1991, her archive of negatives and photographs was bequeathed to the Harvard-Yenching Library, Harvard University, Cornell University and the National Library of Australia. Smaller collections were gifted to the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, which held in 1993 an exhibition of her work under the title, In Her View: The Photographs of Hedda Morrison in China and Sarawak 1933–67.

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Hedda Morrison’s life and work traversed the timeline of modern Asia’s tumultuous history. Almost a century before her sojourn in China, in 1839, the First Opium War took place in the same year as Daguerre’s announcement of his newly invented photographic process. As the camera become popular among Western diplomats and missionaries, there appeared daguerreotype records of the subsequent wars of foreign invasion. By the mid-1930s, when Hedda Morrison started photographing in Peking, China had witnessed the anti-Qing revolution and the founding of the Republic of China whose expeditionary army marched north to unite the nation. On the cultural and political front, the country had gone through a series of reforms, including the May Fourth Movement of 1919. The early Chinese Republic may be a land of rural poverty and technological backwardness, but it had an urban cultural elite with an extraordinary modern outlook who produced writings that attacked China’s feudal tradition and Western and Japanese imperialisms. This was the cultural milieu in which Morrison produced her major work in China. The photographs she made were a long way from the antiquated look of the daguerreotype. Each holds a sense of perspective that pampers the viewer and their sovereign eye—a recognisably modern aesthetic. Each affirms who sees and who/what is being seen. And in these images, the “shifting relativity of the border between nature and culture” that typifies modernity makes its mark.15 Moving from street to street, village to village, from sacred mountains to age-old temples, from funeral processions to family workshops, Morrison’s photographs recorded the vast contrast of a land slowly emerging from its ancient slumber. Overall, viewing these images gives one the sensation of “the acceleration of time, and the dispersal of places.”16 Behind the quietude and meditative ease was the gathering storm of history which China could not escape.

Looking North from Chongwenmen Gate, Peking, 1933–46 was taken from the eastern gate of Peking’s inner city, with the Forbidden City at its centre. The gate was a part of a system of fortification designed to blunt an invading army making an assault on the palace. Peking was an imperial capital for several dynasties, including the Yuan with Genghis Khan as its first emperor. In the 1930s, like the rest of Peking, the Tartar City (which the inner city was called) had taken on distinctively contemporary features: as the photograph shows, the German Hospital walled off from the street, traffic police, naked legs beneath khaki shorts, most likely a Sikh, the electric wires overhead. Then signs of older things: rickshaws and single-wheel carts in mid-street, a train of camels—seven sauntering beasts—their humps weighed down with goods. Only these beasts of conveyance are visible, though you suspect motorcars are there outside the frame. Camels in the Tartar City: they evoke scenes of another era. Besides serving as the imperial capital, Peking sat on a plain that links Northeast and Southern China. Western and Middle-Eastern trade travelled along the Silk Road, entered the western borders, then the central plain, and terminated in Peking. It is a story told of Xinjiang; its desert, remoteness and hardship were allied with a trade that had brought riches and power to the Central Kingdom.

Looking at Morrison’s pictures, a great deal of pleasure comes from their ethnographic feel. A Photographer in Old Peking is filled with portraits of merchants in their shops, friends sitting on a heated-kang playing chess, diners enjoying a feast over a well-stacked table, medicine sellers performing kungfu in the street. The click of the camera froze, in time and place, the rich everyday life in mid-twentieth century China. Yet these images do not appear to you as a cadaver of history. In the aesthetics of stillness, the real and the contemporary are but a slim line away from seizing hold of your attention.

The young performer in Child Acrobat, Tianqiao, Peking, 1933–46, looks healthy and well-fed, he is no street urchin. His performance has a certain gravity, a professional acuteness: he needs no comic excesses of a Jackie Chan to incite his audience. The pained, wrinkled brow, and the tensed upper lip signal the strained labour in the execution of his art. The camera has, just for a moment as the shutter speed allows, stalled the flux of doing and acting. You see the boy tensed up, his legs twisted back to front, on his inverted buttock sits a tower of china bowels, tea or water flowing from top to bottom. As you observe, questions intrude upon your mind: is he a child sold to the theatre troupe by parents who cannot feed him? Has he gone through the punishing tutelage—always a mixture of praise and the use of the cane—in order to gain such skill? You are affixed to what you see, the body’s artful contortion cuts the impulse to place him in the land of the Other. The acrobatic act is the boy’s life-at-work, an affirmation of a selfhood not easily given to social and psychological speculation.

Child Acrobat was photographed in the street under natural lighting. When the camera migrated indoors, the constraining of Othering became even more palpable. Women Assembling Glass Grapes in the Chang Family Workshop, Peking, 1933–46 is filled with shady modulations that bring out the figures in sharp relief. The light from the window glosses over the women’s hair, their clothes, the dexterity of their fingers, but the contour of their faces are barely visible. Yet, there is no mistaking in what you see: a sedate scene of women at work in a family workshop. The political economy of petite capitalism makes a claim on your attention, like a busybody feeding you with gossip. But it soon gives way to insignificance—when you truly see, when you trust your eyes. The two women (sisters? Daughter and daughter-in-law?) in pleasant joint labour belittles Marxist grandstanding. In the family workshop, if there was exploitation of women’s labour, there was also commitment of daughters and wives to a domestic economy in which they too had a share.17 The women are settled in the centre of the frame, which gives the feeling of a statement being made. Exploitation and domination of women is not the only story of Chinese petite capitalism. Women Assembling Glass Grapes alerts you to two women who have found their place in a society at the cusp of radical change. Morrison’s China photographs are real for their dense social and cultural inferences. Each image depicts a situation or an activity recognisably modern and Chinese. Each is the work of culture and history, and the act of seeing embraces the assurances of the eye. In this, the eye works in tandem with history in guiding what you see, a partnership as intimate and uncertain as marriage. And this is the contradiction: confronting an object, the eye makes you see only by being blind to some aspects of it. Seeing, we may say, is a selective process; when you see, the mind has to shut off what it has decided as irrelevant. This is the legacy of John Berger’s influential The Ways of Seeing 18

To say, as Berger does, that an image is distorted by history, “because a privileged minority is striving to invent a history which can retrospectively justify the role of the ruling classes” is to put forward a view both remarkable and conventional.19 If ideology and culture make you see an image in a certain way, it is also the case that ideology and culture do not, by themselves, ‘see’. There is much happening, from cultural ideology to the physiology of the eye. An approach like Berger’s prompts the leap from image to social context and spurs the escape from carnality to meaning. Notably in postcolonial critique of photography, the result is the elevation—the overstating—of history allegedly embedded in the image of the colonial subject, an embeddedness that awaits the deft hand of deconstruction.20 There is a great deal of this in the artist Sim Chi Yin’s images of the British counterinsurgency in Malaya referred to at the beginning of this essay. A criticism can be raised when history is so dominant, so comprehensive that everything can be explained and explained away.

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Facing the sinuous relationship between images and power, it serves little purpose to do away with our curiosity, our puzzlement that struggles to find intelligibility in what we see.

Reductionism is a risk created in the social and political reading of art. When the main task is the exegesis, when preoccupation is the force beyond the images, it takes a subtle yet vigilant viewer to rein in the extravagance of meaning and significance. It is perhaps no accident that a novelist like John Updike makes a sharp and whetted critic, as evident in his two volumes of essays, Just Looking: Essays on Art (1989), and Still Looking: Essays on American Art (2005).21 For Updike, the extrapolation “to include ‘psychological’ and ‘social’ along with ‘visible’ ideally sums up what the poet and storyteller hope to render.”22 On Alfred Stieglitz’s Winter-Fifth Avenue (1893), the Updike writes with flair, “the sensation of a city in a snowstorm, down to the texture of the slushy rutted snow and the American flag distantly whipping in the gray sky, has been brought eternally fresh from the era of horse-drawn carriages.”23

Besides reductionism, there is another issue. As the social and political analysis puts a certain spin to an image, where does that leave the photograph’s subject? This is a question about agency. The ethical point, it seems to me, is that a photographic subject’s views and rectitude deserves recognition. Even in a colonial context, did photography invariably transform a native into a hapless victim of the European gaze? The insight of anthropology has been that in many instances, in colonialism the ruler and the ruled shared common interests in infrastructural improvement, economic development, peace and order—power differences and conflict notwithstanding.24 This is true of British rule in Malaya and in much of Africa. Colonial rule is not invariably an undertaking of naked exploitation and violence as was the case in the Belgian Congo. By giving the colonised a stake in the social and political order, racism towards the natives was moderated, if only out of expediency. Speaking of photography, the natives may see themselves in other ways than the European image makers intended. Agency is not too modish a term to describe colonised people and their sense of selfhood outside European rule. The total destruction of native customs and cultures did not happen under colonial rule, and tribal consciousness became the spirit of anti-colonial struggle; the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya (1952–60) being a classic example. The point is that neither European repression nor the natives’ cultural identity can exhaust our understanding of power and production of images in a colonial context. Our postcolonial commitment often encourages a rush to judgement, but the concept of the European photographic gaze remains problematic. ***

I have been going to Sarawak since 2012 to study the trading system at the upper reaches of the River Rejang, the state’s main waterway. A great deal of my time has been spent in the longhouses of the Keyah people, one of the tribes in the Sarawak interior. They make their living by growing rice and cash crops—cocoa, pepper, rubber—which they sell to the Chinese traders in Belaga township downriver. It is a riverine existence worthy of a Conrad novel: the tribal people in their stilted dwellings; the movement of goods along the dark, winding river; the Chinese merchants, greedy and voracious, typical middlemen in the exchange of goods for cash. And befitting a Conradian plot too is the Rajah Brooke dynasty that staged incursions into the interior, opening up the territory for exploitation. In 1947, when the Morrisons arrived, the Brooke family had ceded power to the British Colonial Office. The handover coincided with the heightening of the Cold War. British rule was one by development. In the fight against communism, the aim was social and economic improvement

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with the view of eventually transferring power to a liberal, capital-friendly government.25 This was the context of Hedda Morrison’s photographic work in Sarawak. Accompanying her husband, she travelled upriver and visited the longhouses, while also travelling on her own. Taken over twenty years (1947–67), the Sarawak photographs are even more modern and contemporary than her China photographs. Many appeared in Life Magazine and National Geographic—of dense jungle, idyllic scenes of Iban women by the river attending to their toilet au naturel, longhouse existence, government officials attending ceremonies and rituals of tribal people, and public health nurses dispensing services.

The theme of development is pervasive in the Sarawak photographs. If modernity and modern selfhood defined the China images, here it was government assistance and peaceful existence. Viewing of the photographs is enlivened by the bewildering political backdrop. During the Cold War, the West was preoccupied with how to fight communism.26 In the Third World, it was argued, the best way to lessen communism’s appeal was to improve the lives of the poor and the marginalised through government planning. Instead of revolution, development—and modernisation—were the stairways to freedom and prosperity, with a little help from capital and the free market.

Demonstrating by a Kenyah midwife and Health Assistant, Long San, Ulu Baram, Sarawak, 1966, shows a midwife teaching a native woman how to bathe a baby the modern way, not in the river, but in an enamel basin with soap and talcum powder. The mother is attentive as she listens to the instructions. The midwife from the health services is friendly and proficient. There is a quiet, glowing intensity about her that suggests a sense of pride—at her profession, at earning a livelihood outside the family farming. The photograph has the feel of a government department services pamphlet, aiming to be accurate and informative. Which invites the question, is this an example of modernisation’s intrusion on the traditional way of life and that threatens to bring about its destruction? The Marxist ‘underdevelopment’ theory is abstract and long-winded. For the mother the health clinic is simply a part of the government largess, like the fertiliser, the seeds, the fry for the communal fishpond. And the mother notices the health worker’s stretched ear loops kept in shape by heavy silver rings: she and her assistant are like her, Kenyah people. Kinship has made easier the transition to modernisation. Travelling along the Rejang River, one encounters scenes and activities reminiscent of what Morrison had set down a few decades before. Things have not radically changed. Iban Ancestor Festival, Betong (Saribas) district, Sarawak, 1960s is a fair depiction of the Iban Gawai celebration, a seasonal ritual that appease the ancestors who have brought abundance to the community. The same parade outside the apartments, the same watchful women, the same bare-footed men in rich headgear of feathers—though women are now commonly dressed in blouses and sarongs, the men in cheap polo-shirts and cargo pants. The camera was not there to record the night-to-morning drinking in which the visitor was obliged to participate, and Tiger Beer now supplements the traditional rice brew tuak. Retained in my memory is the noise, the rowdiness of the proceedings. In the photograph, the Iban elder who heads the parade holds a bowl from which he would have taken a big gulp, as he takes his steps forward. He is advancing though a corridor of people, like a narrow road with trees alongside it. When you dwell on the photograph long enough, stillness gives way to motion. The drink in the man’s hand, the music you could hear if you try hard enough, the rapt attentiveness of the audience; everything comes alive.

The age-old craft of Penan sword making is faithfully captured in Penan Sword Smith, Ulu Baram, Sarawak, 1960s. The Penan are still hunters and gathers who live in simple shelters of

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attap leaves propped up by wooden stakes. The Morrison picture shows their relative ‘primitive state’ compared with the Ibans, the Kenyahs, and the Bidayuhs along the Rejang River. Some have taken up farming and moved into model villages to be near schools and other government services. Morrison’s image is eerily true to life: the hand-operated bamboo pumps, the molten iron, the shaping of a sword in a mould of clay, the messy floor of a hut-turned-workshop. Your eyes register the skill, the proficiency, the pride. A sword, a parang, can be purchased for a few ringgits at the trading store, but these people would not let go of the tradition and artistry.

The Sarawak territory was for nearly two decades, from 1946 to 1963, a British Crown Colony. In the consideration of colonialism-and-photography, it almost impossible to view Morrison’s work in terms of the single narrative of race-and-European rule. In the expansive field of theoretical criticism of colonial imagery, there is Elizabeth Edward’s pioneering Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920.27 Many of the by now familiar portraits of native people of the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries are found in the contributed chapters of this book. From page to page, from contributor to contributor, the reader is led through a plethora of grimy-faced men and women, natives posing as human specimens for the study of physical anthropology, men each with a fetish in their hands—a prop for their arcane beliefs and ritual practices. These pictures present a soft target for postcolonial critique. If European racism is evident in these images, it is also that daguerreotype demanded the subject to pose in absolute stillness, which partly explains their intensely forced gaze back at the camera. It can be considered that technology had something to do with the stilted postures of these photographic subjects. We are on surer ground when we revisit the question, how did colonial subjects perceive the images made of them? It is a question about shifting political thinking and the effect of a different mode of administrative rule.

As Sarawak state was propelled forwards by its development, the native people too had their own view of policy and their needs. It is the genius of British rule to emphasise the common ground between the aim of political stability and the promotion of the social and economic welfare of the native communities. The tribal leaders I have met were young men during the British takeover. Being shown the Morrison pictures, they recall the ‘development fever’ of their time: another visit from the agricultural officer, the District Officer squatting on the floor consulting with the longhouse residents, the opening of a road or a small bridge attended by officials and local leaders; the government-funded repair of an old jetty. People complained too—about the pressure to plant cash crops, about the unpopular poll tax, but they recognised too the benefits and services the government had brought.

One can’t blame Morrison, or her photographic subjects, for not discerning British strategy. We do not expect a photographer to be a philosopher nor a social scientist. Morrison’s work displays no ideological preoccupation that would fire up a postcolonial critique. In the Republic of China and later in Sarawak, Morrison was following what was considered good practice at the time. Different circumstances called for different concepts, but the tools were the same, the impulses were allied. Looking at the photographs of post-independence Sarawak, they exude optimism and a sense of a fresh beginning. Still, there is the ominous element to consider.

Call it the tragedy of modernisation where liberal freedom is market freedom, some benefit more than others. Sarawak’s transition from colonial rule to independence was more or less as planned. Currently, elections are fundamentally free, but competition among political leaders with rich natural resources invites corruption and misuse of state authority. The Morrison photographs may lack ideological bite, but they prove remarkably prescient—if you know where to look.

From 1960 to 1966, Hedda Morrison was a photographer with the Information Office of the Sarawak government, a position that took her to numerous government functions. Reception at The Istana (Government House), Kuching, Sarawak, 1963, depicts one such occasion. We are far away from the longhouse existence; in the cocktail party, two men are deep in conversation. Each holds a drink in his hand, a teeth-baring smile on their faces. On one side is Dato Temenggong Oyong Lawai Jau, a Kenyah chief; on the other side the then Malaysian Ambassador to the United States, an ethnic Chinese. Both are wearing a suit and tie, though the Kenyah chief has the trademark mop-topped haircut and extended earlobes. In a government reception like this, the hangers-on and the low rank officials would, as a matter of course, make their appearance. The photographer has relegated the minor guests to the dark recesses; a ghostly presence unworthy of the eye. Yet, they make up the army of aids and enablers who help grease the machine of grift and corruption. Reception at The Istana has seized on a situation that encapsulates the many strands—all allegedly positive—of the British legacy. The picture shows two men having a good time. Pick what you will, it is instance of crosscultural communication, a display of inter-ethnic trust among the official circles, an evidence that the Westminster system of government works.

Malaysia’s ethnic relations do not have quotidian charm as in other countries. Built into national politics, they define the race-based policy that favours one community and discriminates against others. As a reflection of the wider society, Reception at The Istana is jarringly real. The photographer has captured all that was relevant when surveying the scene. The bacchanalian enjoyment has an intensity and rhythm that both the eye and mind register. If the ‘ethnic communication’ is emblematic of the wider state politics, the image is both mystifying and revealing.

Hedda Morrison died in 1991. Having settled in Canberra, Australia’s capital city, they had enjoyed the city’s intellectual life and rural surroundings. She had remained busy, giving lectures and taking photographs for the Australian Information Service. A keen observer of the local society, she was made a life member of the Canberra Photographic Society. The Australian Dictionary of Biography describes her as, “A perky sparrow with a wonderful dry wit and a touch of wickedness.”28

Morrison lived through compelling times and her prodigious record of observation was extraordinary. However, her work is not easily deployed for an enquiry into the nature of photography. The German photographer showed no pretension for avant-gardism. The uneasy struggle of reality and its representation was not her métier, but the veracity of what she saw and registered was. Do we need to cast doubt on her images via the theoretical modes now applied to works of photography? Death has, so to speak, put the question to rest. Things and images, of course, live on after death. For Morrison, the cessation of her life has left a legacy, and a range of work that puzzles and intrigues and invites new readings.

Morrison was a documenter, whereas Sim Chi Yin is an artist of postcolonial certitude in the way she sees herself. Sim’s exhibition One Day We’ll Understand, at Zilberman Gallery in Berlin in 2021 made arduous viewing. The history of the Malayan Emergency was presented as given, its facts and the political ambitions of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) left unexamined. For an artist working in the twenty-first century, it seems remarkable that a communist revolution could be perceived with such guilelessness. Almost next door to us in Malaysia and Singapore, there had been a ‘people’s revolution’ that was the harbinger of communism’s social and moral catastrophe. Who’s is to say, if the MCP had gained power, struggle sessions and the ‘cleansing’ of the old order would not have taken place in Malaya/Malaysia? The point is that after Cambodia (not to mention the USSR and Maoist China) it is impossible to see communism with an innocent eye. And in this sense,

Sim’s political artlessness has much to do with the overriding nostalgia in One Day We’ll Understand. From images of captured “communist terrorists” to the evocation of her insurgent grandfather who died in exile, each is shrouded in a veil of longing—as though the violent struggle is something we should miss, as if the insurgency universally wants our ideological sympathy. Deploying realism, Sim let her photographs do the work. The piteous images of captured insurgents, and the wretched recollection of her grandfather who had fought the good fight and paid for his suffering: they pull at the heartstrings and leave unanswered the crucial questions about communism’s political and moral failures. Sim and Morrison are artists of different temperament, of contrasting approaches to the art of capturing the real. One gives over to the romanticism of an aborted revolution; the other maintained her day-to-day observations. One tries hard and is driven by a certain engagement, the other uncomplicated and purposeful. It is the German-born photographer who allows us the meditative ease to make what we will of her photography. We are endeared to her work, because we are granted the freedom to wander among rich and diverse images, and thus revisit the past and the circumstances of their making. Great art changes us a little. Political art—art with a political agenda—is often too full of checklists and world-changing ambitions to enable this to happen. It is artists like Morrison, modest and lacking in bluster, who make us trust our eyes and truly see, and in the process make one think.

Hedda΄s camera: and ΄the real΄

Hedda΄s camera: and ΄the real΄

Notes

1 From his 1960 film, Le Petit Soldat

2 See ‘Nostalgia and intervention in colonial archives’, di’van | A Journal of Accounts 11, 2022, pp. 50–63; see https://artdesign.un2sw.edu.au/ sites/default/files/atoms/files/4._nostalgia_and_intervention_in_colonial_archives_souchou_yao.pdf

3 Nancy Shawcross, Roland Barthes On Photography: The Critical Tradition in Perspective, Gainesville FL: University Press of Florida, 1997, p. xi

4 Ibid., p. ix

5 John Berger, Ways of Seeing, London: Penguin, 1972, p. 9, emphasis added

6 Susan Sontag, On Photography, New York NY: RossettaBooks, 1973, p. 2

7 Ibid., p. 59

8 See the method of analysis in, Claude Lévi-Strauss Structural Anthropology, Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf trans., New York: Basic Books, 1963

9 Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, New York NY: New Directions, 1963

10 Ibid., pp. 185–86

11 Ibid., p. 143

12 Ibid., p. 144

13 Jonathan Raban, Bad Land: An American Romance, NY: Vintage Books, 1997, p. 1

14 Claire Roberts, Morrison, Hedwig Marie (Hedda) (1908–1991), Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 19, 2021; https://adb.anu.edu.au/ biography/morrison-hedwig-marie-hedda-20706 accessed 24 August 2022

15 Peter Conrad, Modern Times, Modern Places: Life & Art in the 20th Century, London: Thomas & Hudson, 1998, p. 8

16 Ibid, p. 9

17 See Souchou Yao, The Shop on High Street: At home with petite capitalism, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020

18 Berger, op cit.

19 Ibid., p. 11

20 See for example, Anthropology & Photography, 1860–1920, Elizabeth Edwards (ed.), New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992

21 John Updike, Just Looking: Essays on art, New York NY: Alfred. A. Knopf, 1989, and Still Looking: Essays on American Art, New York NY: Alfred. A. Knopf, 1989, 2005

22 Updike, Just Looking, p. 200

23 Updike, Still Looking, p. 138

24 See the analysis in Max Gluckman, ‘The Bridge: Analysis of a social situation in Zululand’, Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand, Manchester: Manchester University, 1968, pp. 53–58

25 See W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960

26 Ibid. The subtitle A non-Communist Manifesto all but gives the game away

27 Anthropology & Photography 1986-1920, Elizabeth Edwards (ed.), New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992

28 Roberts, op cit.

Crossing the wire: Western contemporary war art in the interbellum

In 2022, war is again at the forefront of international consciousness, to degrees not seen for two decades. The response of the Administration of US President George W. Bush to the terror attacks in America on 11 September 2001 embroiled global geopolitics in an upheaval that dominated the news cycle for many years. America’s already precarious post-9/11 righteous indignation was eroded in a series of Coalition atrocities, ghost prisoners, black sites, extraordinary rendition, torture, humiliation, and festive cruelty at Abu Ghraib. Global attention to the seemingly endless deployments inevitably waned in the war’s second decade, after the election of US President Barack Obama and the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. The visibility of the War on Terror mutated into the more banal-sounding ‘Overseas Contingency Operation’,1 while Obama increased the number of attacks on foreign soil through drone strikes, prompting Derek Gregory’s 2011 coining of the term “everywhere war,” in which the monolith of war dissolves into less visible acts of “self-defence” that “obscures the systematic cumulative nature of the campaign.”2 Obama’s sleight-of-hand did the trick and attention waned, only to emerge briefly as a coda in 2021 with images of desperate Afghans falling from an American C-17 onto the runway at Kabul.

Two decades of the global War on Terror taught the world nothing new about war. Nearly twenty years later we know exactly what six-to-ten million protesters on 15 February 2003,3 against the invasion of Iraq, might have suggested—that war is the violent exercise of existing power relations, usually colonial, if only vestigial, that it fires-up long-standing and deeply ingrained injustices, that the wealthy profit while the already impoverished and vulnerable pay with their uncountable grief, their lands, their bodies and lives. War is nonlinear and stochastic, and its outcomes are synergistic and unpredictable. Neither those who had chanted “no war!” back in 2003 nor those who moved resources around maps in the Pentagon could predict the extent of the final costs; yet all knew generally someone would pay, and who they would likely be. Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Relations and Public Affairs found that up to August 2021, 387,072 civilians died in Iraq, Afghanistan and other nations in the region, as a direct result of the War on Terror. That is more than a third of all deaths in those wars.4 This is the point underlying Muhub Esmat’s recent text in this journal on the video installation and photography work of Aziz Hazara, an Afghan artist working between Kabul and Ghent, whose five-channel video installation Bow Echo (2019), was included in the 2020 Biennale of Sydney. In that work, young Afghan boys struggle to stand on a windy mountain top with Kabul down below, while blowing a tiny toy trumpet. The work speaks of vulnerability and a stoic endurance in the face of forces that are both great and indifferent, that could literally blow life away.

In this text, I want to briefly consider a handful of recent Western contemporary war art works, while picking up on a powerful point made fleetingly in Esmat’s essay, in which he argues that “Hazara’s works aim to incite examination and investigation,” unlike what he disparages as the “facile compassion often aroused by the widely circulated images of the war.”5 The implicit targets of Esmat’s ire are the works of many Western contemporary artists who have travelled to the war in Afghanistan as it stretched over the last two decades. These artists have been the focus of much of my own research since 2009, initiated by a series of interviews with Australian artist, Shaun Gladwell leading to the book Double War (2016), which discussed the video installation artist’s work as Australia’s Official War Artist in Afghanistan in 2009, particularly within the broader visual politics of the War on Terror.6 Over the past four years, I have worked closely with Australian academic Uroš Čvoro on three books published by Bloomsbury as part of the large ‘Art in Conflict’ project, two of which are due out in 2023. We are also about to enter our next project in 2023, ‘Art of Peace’. What has become clear to us is that art can be powerful, even in the face of war, but it can do virtually nothing to prevent it or change its course. The grandest of humanitarian statements against war—a tapestry at the United Nations of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937)—was simply covered with a blue curtain as Colin Powell presented falsities and outright lies to the Security Council on 5 February 2003 to justify the American invasion of Iraq. That moment attests to both the power and limitations of art.

As art historian Terry Smith convincingly argues, “contemporary art” is deeply enmeshed within contemporaneity; both reflective and constitutive of our time’s “currents,”7 and this is strongly the case with contemporary war art. In reflecting contemporaneity, as Smith argues, contemporary art tends to map-out, explore and articulate deeper historical shifts that take place over larger timeframes. After two decades of contemporary war art from the War on Terror, we now live in an atmosphere of a tense and seemingly fleeting interbellum. One generation after the beginning of the War on Terror, and nearly thirty-five years after the end of the Cold War, the threat of nuclear war has returned as a geopolitical tool, gambling with the highest stakes possible. This moment seems appropriate for some critical reflection on ‘contemporary war art’, or, more perhaps accurately the focus of this article, on Western contemporary art that addresses the wars that Western nations, Australia, the United States, NATO, wage elsewhere in the world. How are Australian artists and other artists from the West to address something as profound as the human cost of war, while negotiating reductive or performative modes of compassion? This text briefly considers not only the question of what war art can incite in audiences in the West, but also what we, that audience, demand of contemporary war art.

In Susan Sontag’s final book Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), written in the early days of the War on Terror, she argues audiences make ideological demands on images of war.8 Sontag discusses Three Guineas, published in 1938 on the precipice of World War II, in which Virginia Woolf suggests that images of human destruction in war incite a universal response of horror with the potential force to stop war in its tracks. Sontag rejects Woolf’s assertion, arguing that any compassion is actually contingent on the extent to which the audience of the image identifies with the victim depicted: “identity is everything.”9 In other words, Sontag argues, compassion is ideologically conditional. Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere, audiences can impose emotionally driven demands on images, which are sometimes left unsatisfied by the images themselves. In instances where the images are important enough to an audience, those demands are met by iterative mediated reimaginings of those images, until they are fully rehabilitated in the service of the audience’s demands.

One such example is the image of the supposedly dead Osama Bin Laden that was widely broadcast following his assassination by the US Navy Seals on 2 May 2011. The photo briefly did the rounds on different television and online media outlets, before it was swiftly debunked as a bad Photoshop job that had been circulating on the net since 2009. And yet, a year and a half later, as if to satisfy the popular thirst in the US for an image of Bin Laden dead, that had been effectively stolen away when the photo was debunked, a representation of the ‘real’ photographic image reappears in Kathryn Bigelow’s film Zero Dark Thirty (2012), as a photograph taken by the Navy Seal commanding officer, seen fleetingly on the back viewfinder of his digital camera.10 Sontag says in her earlier landmark work, On Photography (1977) that images can goad conscience but can never be ethical or political knowledge.11 If compassion is ideologically conditional and, in turn, we make demands on images to align with what audiences want of them, the highly subjective field of visual art is particularly apt to act as a mirror to popular fears and desires.

In his 2015 lecture,12 and his later 2017 article,13 Rex Butler considers the possible forces of the collective Id at work in the popularity of Ben Quilty’s After Afghanistan exhibition as it toured Australia. Butler is particularly swingeing of what he saw at that time as the uncritical “nationalist group-think” of Australia’s art critics around Quilty’s work.14 The After Afghanistan series mostly consists of large oil-on-canvas portraits of Australian Defence Force soldiers, posed in Quilty’s studio in the town of Robertson in regional New South Wales in the months following the artist’s time in Afghanistan as Australian Official War Artist in 2011. It is now ten years since After Afghanistan began its tour, met with the almost unanimous praise of Australia’s art critics. Focusing on Quilty’s virtuosic execution of impasto painting, applied in thick swathes with a cake icing knife, Butler points out that this signature style is what critics claim connects the audience with the individual psychologically traumatic experiences of his soldier sitters. Critics often applaud the artist’s own incisive empathy and the ways in which his gesturality and expressivity channel the soldiers’ traumatic experiences through the aesthetic enactment of trauma—“visceral technique supports the emotional response of the subjects to their wartime experience,”15 “sensuous layers of paint [that] reveal the emotional cost of war,”16 “given their pain a language.”17

Butler argues, however, that despite the fairly consistent reading of the paintings as capturing and conveying traumatic experience, their expressionistic aesthetic functions primarily as a vehicle for audiences to perform a generic empathy that has little to do with the actual sitters’ experiences. “The real experience of the work,” argues Butler, “is an empty expressiveness, the signs of expressivity but without anything actually being expressed.”18 The mainstay of Butler’s critique of Quilty’s After Afghanistan is less an attack on the paintings themselves or any accusation of Quilty engaging in “facile compassion”; but rather that the popularity of the works reveals much about what Butler calls the “wider ideology of our time,”19 that is, “solicitation at a distance or care without responsibility, that ‘interpassivity’ that is to be seen in all contemporary internet campaigns, Facebook signings and twitter trendings in the name of a good cause.”20 Butler borrows “interpassivity” from Slavoj Žižek, meaning a “mode of our participation in socio-ideological life in which we are active all the time in order to make sure that nothing will happen, that nothing will really change.”21

Butler’s analysis of the popular reception of After Afghanistan suggests that what Australian, and Western audiences more generally, want from contemporary war art is that “we just abstractly have to feel or sympathise with them [the traumatised returned soldiers],” Butler says, “and that is enough.”22 In other words, After Afghanistan provides its audience with the opportunity to publicly perform empathy and compassion—reassuring them they are good people, against war in the broadest

Crossing the wire: Western contemporary war art in the interbellum

terms—without mounting any ethical challenges to the larger political and structural contexts that lead to Australia’s involvement in Afghanistan in the first place.23 And I don’t say this smugly. My own analysis of Quilty’s After Afghanistan at that time focuses on the work’s adept affective capacities and discusses the gesture of the sitters through Warburgian analysis,24 while overlooking the more complex ethical problematic arising from the tour of After Afghanistan being supported by defence contractor Thales,25 a criticism of the exhibition I have only once come across, in a blog post by Australian blogger Natalie Thomas.26

Shaun Gladwell immediately preceded Quilty as the Australian Official War Artist and was sent to Afghanistan with the Australian Defence Forces in 2009. Gladwell and I worked collaboratively on bringing to print Double War: Shaun Gladwell, visual culture and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, my first book on contemporary war art with the artist contributing many images of his work and several interviews. What interested me about Gladwell’s approach was, in our interviews he talked about “an impossible empathy” that percolates through his Afghanistan works,27 the inability of him as an artist to align himself in any meaningful way with the experience of the soldiers. This is clear when we compare two works from Gladwell’s Afghanistan works, Double Field (2009-10) and POV: Mirror Sequence Tarin Kowt (2009–10). Both are synchronised twochannel video installations in which two opponents attempt to follow each other through the

viewfinder, moving sideways and strafing around their opponent. In Double Field, both opponents are ADF soldiers: “The overall effect is that the two points of view form a tight isolated hermetic feedback loop—nearly a mirror image;”28 on the other hand, in POV: Mirror Sequence Tarin Kowt, Gladwell takes the place of one of the soldiers, and the civilian/military divide becomes clear, through differences in both the visual framing of the points-of-view and the movements of Gladwell and the soldiers. Furthermore, I was acutely conscious that any in-depth discussion of a Western official war artist accompanying Coalition troops on a War on Terror mission, necessitated discussions of torture, the Bush Administration’s twisting of international law, the weaponisation of video games, the gamification of viewfinder warfare and the propaganda of movies like Zero Dark Thirty and NBC’s Saving Jessica Lynch (2003). Large sections of the book never mention Gladwell or his work.

During a public talk promoting Double War a year later, an audience member asked, where are the absent Afghans in Gladwell’s Afghanistan?29 It is an obvious point that can be fairly made about both Quilty and Gladwell’s Afghanistan works—the central topic of both bodies of work is ‘our’ pain, ‘our’ gaze. Questions aside of whether or not we get to know either of these dimensions through their respective bodies of contemporary war artwork, the perspectives of Afghans lie far outside their frames, in the sense used by Judith Butler in her book Frames of War (2009).

Crossing the wire: Western contemporary war art in the interbellum

To an Australian and Western audience more generally, the images in Hazara’s work make this contrastingly clear with images that we do not necessarily want to know about, that challenge the security of our long-held narratives of having defended Afghanistan’s liberty in the face of the tireless tyranny of the Taliban. How are we to know about the massive dumps of potentially toxic military material pictured in Hazara’s I am looking for you like a drone, my love (2021), or imagine the oppressive presence of the American surveillance blimps fixed 1,500 feet above the expanse of Kabul depicted in his Kite Balloon (2018), when images such as these are rarely on our news and never in Western contemporary war art? As Esmat says, even though the blimps are now gone, “the experience of living under them, that shaped the lives of many since their original introduction into the country in 2007, remains.”30 They are literally and figuratively beyond our frame.

Yet this is an inherent limitation surrounding any Western contemporary artist in an overseas war zone, many of whom are sent with their nation’s military in the capacity of official war artist. The very first Australian, British and Canadian official war artists worked alongside soldiers in the trenches on the front lines of the First World War. As Australia’s scheme developed and included high profile artists, such as Stella Bowen, William Dobell, Donald Friend, Ivor Hele and Arthur Streeton, they became less exposed to direct risk. However, Australia’s Official War Artists sent to America’s war in Vietnam, Bruce Fletcher and Ken McFadyen were required to be fully trained to fight in jungle warfare. When McFadyen was sent in 1968 he was shot in the leg, by accident.31 It is quite likely this incident is the reason why Australia appointed no more official war artists until 1999, when Rick Amor and Wendy Sharpe, were sent to cover Australia’s INTERFET peacekeeping operations in Timor Leste. With Amor and Sharpe, the scheme was broadened to include any Australian military operations,32 and has since included a greater representation of Indigenous artists and women artists after a long list of mostly white men.33 Yet risk management, insurance and workplace health and safety standards, which have clearly changed since McFadyen’s day, necessitate official war artists functioning in similar ways, and with comparable restrictions, as those of embedded journalists.

As art theorist Julian Stallabrass argued amidst the War on Terror in 2008, Western troops, their travails and stories, become the inevitable focus of work of embedded journalists and, moreover, they depend upon them for their very safety and survival.34 At a 2016 symposium at Kings College London, Stallabrass pressed Gladwell on this issue, to which the artist responded, “I was offered that vantage point, but I could not be outside of that space of power.”35 Similarly, British contemporary artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen was sent to Iraq as Britain’s Official War Artist, where he was embedded with British troops in Basra. McQueen felt completely constrained, not allowed to leave the base, and was told he would receive no protection if he left on his own.36 Of course, a Western artist within the danger and volatility of a war zone, in a foreign country and unfamiliar cultural context, unarmed and untrained, is extremely vulnerable, so the constraining protections are inevitable. This is not to naively suggest that Quilty, Gladwell and others needed to throw caution to the wind and cross the wire; but rather, that the possibility did not present to them as an option.37 However, not all recent Western official war artists have remained inside the wire. English artist David Cotterrell spent a month with British troops in Helmand Province at the height of the war in Afghanistan. Cotterrell was commissioned by the Wellcome Trust in association with Britain’s Ministry of Defence to create a major series of works around the intersection of contemporary war and medicine. His first trip to Afghanistan was in 2007 with the Joint Forces Medical Group and the Combat Medical Technicians of 40 Commando at Camp Bastion, Lash Kagar

and Sangin. However, he returned in 2018 as a tourist and observed, “I felt I saw more and I could look back at how strange that bubble looked from just beyond the wire. When I saw the armed columns racing through Kabul and I wasn’t in them, it was very interesting to get a sense of how threatening that looks, even when the soldiers are waving and trying to take the helmets off to look like they are relaxed.”38 Cotterrell began to understand the extent to which the very infrastructure and equipment considered necessary for protection functions symbolically. This brings to mind Esmat’s discussion of Hazara’s Kite Balloon and the ‘protection’ provided by American surveillance. As Cotterrell observes, “everything mitigates a risk, but what they never talk about is what it represents to people.”39

As Esmat’s article argues, Hazara’s work emphasizes the longer term, the deeper time, of lived experience within an ongoing zone of conflict. In I am looking for you like a drone, my love, Hazara conveys the scale of the garbage dumps left behind by the American military infrastructure, with a number of locals foraging among the expanse of tech waste and military junk. While Cotterrell’s images are clearly different in many ways, they share a similar deeper sense of time, as well as address the clash of temporalities that occurs in war zones. For an official war artist, whose experience of war zones is often measured in the total of a few weeks, Cotterrell spent a significant amount of time longer in Afghanistan creating Theatre (2009), a one hundred and eighty degree multichannel video installation at the Wellcome Collection, London, as part of the War and Medicine exhibition.40 Michael Corris says of Cotterrell’s Theatre, it is “a work of immense emotional power.”41 And, in 2009, Cotterrell continued to document returning injured British troops at Selly Oak Hospital and Headley Court (Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre) over the course of six months.

Of course, once again it is the narratives of the troops of Western military that are the focus, the Coalition perspective of the war in Afghanistan. However, Cotterrell is highly conscious of the differential temporalities that collide in war zones and within the frame of his own images, which inflects his work somewhat differently. His works address the gulf between the subjective experience of a war zone and the ways in which they are mediated visually: we do not see “twelvehour films of [solders] waiting to see if they’re going to be extracted on a plane or not,” yet, “that waiting is so important, and the problem is the formats which were used for actually conveying information deal with things which are resolvable in a short time, and digestible.”42 For Cotterrell, it is artists’ championing of the subject’s experience, “without the objective aspirations of a historian or the journalist”43 that is the greatest value that Western contemporary artists bring to war zones. Comparing his role with that of the news media, he says: “[journalists] had to form stories; and I think the problem is that it belies the fact that most conflict involves chaos, moments that don’t make sense. And it’s right they don’t make sense. Part of the trauma is the fact that there isn’t meaning and not all things lead to a conclusion. And the problem is, it’s very hard to represent those.”44

Cotterrell observes that the closer to the crucible of warfare, we see “less of the metanarrative.”45 War time is experienced by combatants in war zones, as the aphorism from the First World War goes, as months of boredom punctuated by moments of extreme terror. Much of the boredom is waiting, indefinite interruptions of the narrative flow; much of the terror is chaos, non-narrative. The hours of boredom cannot be mediated and represented, and so the moments of extreme terror cannot be contrasted against it. As Cotterrell says, this “means that we don’t really understand anything of the actual experience.”46 Cotterrell notes that in a war zone the chaos of events fragments narrative, and that it is often the ambiguity, incomprehensibility and the openended free-floating sense of volatility that is traumatic to experience.47 In the reconstructive process

Crossing the wire: Western contemporary war art in the interbellum

—whether this is in Cotterrell’s studio practice on returning to the United Kingdom, or in the news media’s reports of stories of the war—a form of ‘mastery’ is imposed upon events that were, in fact, fugitive and chaotic. That mastery was entirely absent in the subjective experience of the original moment as it happened. Events as they happen possess a sense atelicity—until a coherent narrative retrospectively forms and those events become teleological (this happened, then that, leading to this). After returning to the UK, Cotterrell’s photographs and diaries from Afghanistan served to remind him of the subjective experience of chaos that is lost in the later construction of narrative through his work: “my memory would swiftly try and provide a coherent narrative and the diary would remind me that it was fragmentary and unresolved… it’s important not to forget that so much of the trauma of a situation is actually the ambiguity. It’s not the clear understood moment of drama.”48 What is interesting about Cotterrell’s investigation of the trauma of war is that it is less rooted in the empathy/compassion/trauma nexus, enacting in an affect-trauma psychodrama, but is instead more concerned with the temporalities of trauma. It seems not to demand that we, the audience, connect empathically in order to understand trauma—and the surgical PPE in much of Cotterrell’s images further serves to disconnect us from the depicted subjects—but rather, in focusing on the disorienting atelicity experienced in war, we might understand something about trauma beyond how we imagine we might feel.

An even cooler head can be found in much of the work of Mladen Miljanović. Miljanović lives and works in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina, a republic of the former Yugoslavia—the ‘former East’ yet not a former member of the Warsaw Pact; now ambiguously East and West; a European nation and yet not within the European Union, a seemingly ambivalent aspirant to NATO membership with a problematic past with existing NATO members. His work often addresses the duality of straddling boundaries, of being none and both, of crossing the wires of Europe. Miljanović was a child in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Bosnian War (1992–1995) in a village around a kilometre away from the frontline. Following the Dayton Agreement, the war ended in ‘negative peace’—absence of conflict, rather than the ‘presence of peace’—and the compromise of one country with two ‘entities’, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska, and Banja Luka is the de facto capital of the Republika Srpska. As a survivor of the Bosnian War and then former military conscript, Miljanović’s work often addresses war, or rather the conflicting tensions that sometimes barely hold it at bay. Between military service and establishing himself as a contemporary artist (the first to represent Bosnia and Herzegovina at the Venice Biennale after a two-decade absence), Miljanović worked for a stonemason as a tombstone engraver (“In my village, I was a curse,” he jokes, “the curse was ‘I hope that Mladen would draw your portrait!’”),49 a technique that is often found in his work. In 2015, Bosnia and Herzegovina became the frontline of another type of conflict in Europe, as thousands of displaced people fled ISIS in Syria and northern Iraq, travelling west to seek asylum in the European Union, particularly in Angela Merkel’s Germany. In response, some EU member nations, notably Hungary and Slovenia, reinforced and militarised their borders, refusing to allow the asylum seekers passage through their countries. Anticipating the wave of European ethno-nationalism that has since followed, this moment saw the re-emergence of hard borders within the European Union.

In response to the ongoing humanitarian crisis and the hard-line taken by Slovenia and Hungary, Miljanović created Didactic Wall (2019), a large white marble work engraved with survival manual instructions and diagrams on how to cross a fortified border, use the sun and the hands of a wristwatch to determine direction and a multitude of other practical techniques for surviving

Crossing the wire: Western contemporary war art in the interbellum

outdoors and evading authorities. Didactic Wall’s first opening night, on 15 July 2019, was held at the city gallery of Bihać, a town in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bihać is ten kilometres from the border with Croatia, at the hard edge of the European Union. Between the town and border was the Vucjak camp, at that time housing eight hundred asylum seekers hoping to cross the border. Miljanović had the same survival manual diagrams compiled and printed into a booklet, one thousand copies of which were made available for anyone visiting the exhibition to take a copy. The booklets were stacked on two plinths next to wall text printed with the inscription from the survival manual given to Miljanović as he graduated military academy in 2001: “Believing that the knowledge you have gained in this military school would be successfully applied in peace, as well as in an eventual war, I wish you much luck in your future life.”50 A limited number of the booklets included a sachet of flammable coloured powder, which, if set alight, would emit brightly coloured smoke that could be used to signal for help. At the opening of Didactic Wall at Bihać City Gallery, the booklets found their way into the hands of some of the asylum seekers, who attended. Almost inevitably, one of those copies was set on fire by some of the children outside the gallery. In the time of Donald Trump’s Mexican border wall and the hardening of borders in Europe, Didactic Wall subverted military knowledge, smuggling it to asylum seekers as tools of active agency for crossing the wire. Miljanović’s works incite not just compassion, albeit a subversive one, but also action. Compassion is the starting point, not the destination.

Didactic Wall possesses the mischievous dissident humour found throughout much of his work, often actively resisting the wishes of his audience. On opening night of his 2013 Venice pavilion exhibition, Miljanović performed The Pressure of Wishes, in which he held in his arms a heavy granite slab engraved with text taken from various messages of best wishes and expectations leading up to Venice, the slab covering his face and body, turning the demands back on the audience. At several of his openings he has performed At the Edge, in which the artist hangs high up on the exterior wall of the gallery by only his forearms.51 At his 2017 opening at ACB Gallery Budapest, he performed In Low Flight, crawling along the floor of the gallery, amongst opening guests’ feet. Each performance is effectively a snub, eschewing the guests, the glasses of wine and the polite conversation, potentially with wealthy collectors and influential curators. Over the two decades since the War on Terror, an expectation has developed that good contemporary anti-war art is necessarily centred on performative modes of those things that are incontrovertibly good—compassion, empathy and emotionality—which in turn remind us that we are good people, against war, while overlooking the more critical structural, ideological and political dimension of war. Meanwhile, works such Didactic Wall addresses the messy specificities and complexities of the shifting geopolitics, from historical tensions, to displaced populations and xenophobic domestic politics, and remain less legible as contemporary war art.

The complex geopolitical context that characterizes Bosnia and Herzegovina—its duality, its straddling of the ideological East and West—is also central to the current war in Ukraine. Like Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ukraine is in the ‘former East’, a former republic of the Soviet Union, now an applicant to both NATO and the European Union. The threat seemingly posed by the Westernisation of its culture and its political integration into Europe was motive enough for Vladimir Putin’s Russia to invade on 24 February 2022, attempt to overthrow the government in Kyiv, and unilaterally annex the Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts in September the same year. Many Ukrainian artists became war artists by default, and the war art coming out of Ukraine since the invasion is immediate, raw and reactive. One such Ukrainian artist goes by the pseudonym ‘Ave’.52

Before Russia’s invasion, her works still possessed a graphic style that borrowed playfully from Eastern European twentieth century propaganda poster art. Prior to the invasion, it seems to be a largely aesthetic appropriation, and almost nostalgic adoptions of a style half-a-century’s historical distance. Yet since February 2022, all of Ave’s works now focus on the war. Some are figurative depictions of tragedy, while others are metaphoric and symbolic vignettes; and their style now takes on a different weight. I only saw many of Ave’s works at the very end of writing this text and I have yet to properly digest these works; but what is clear in them is their raw anger and lack of compassion. To varying degrees, each of Ave’s post-invasion works convey a deep sense of rage that to a Western audience may well feel uncomfortably forceful. In contemporary war art, we are not used to thinking about victims of war as active, creative agents, as vociferous. Maybe we are not used to hearing their voices at all.

Crossing the wire: Western contemporary war art in the interbellum

Notes

1 Scott Wilson and Al Kamen, ‘“Global War On Terror” Is Given New Name’, Washington Post, 25 March 2009; www.washingtonpost.com/ wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/24/AR2009032402818.html accessed 27 November 2020

2 Derek Gregory, ‘The Everywhere War’, The Geographical Journal vol. 177, no. 3, 2011, p. 241

3 ‘Millions join global anti-war protests’, BBC News, 17 February, 2003; http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2765215.stm accessed 12 October 2022

4 Neta Crawford and Catherine Lutz, ‘Human Cost of Post-9/11 Wars’, Costs of War, Brown University; https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/ figures/2021/WarDeathToll accessed 3 November 2022

5 Muheb Esmat, ‘To hold you close as you fall with the hope that you may rise in a better place’, di’van | A Journal of Accounts 11, 2022, p. 82

6 Kit Messham-Muir, Double War: Shaun Gladwell: Visual Culture and the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Melbourne: Thames & Hudson Australia, 2016

7 Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art?, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009, p. 7

8 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, London: Penguin, 2003, p. 6

9 Ibid., 9

10 Messham-Muir, pp. 81-99

11 Sontag, p. 24

12 Rex Butler, ‘Ben Quilty: The Fog of War’, Finest Art Seminar Series Tonight (FASST), Inaugural Seminar 14 April 2015, Part II, Panoptic Press, 24 June 2015; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr3ie4DT1qg accessed 7 November 2022

13 Rex Butler, ‘Ben Quilty: The Fog of War’, Intellectual History Review 27:3, 2017

14 Butler, ‘Ben Quilty: The Fog of War’, Finest Art Seminar Series Tonight

15 Michael Desmond, ‘Blood and Landscape: Ben Quilty in Afghanistan and at Home’, Contemporary Visual Art+Culture Broadsheet 43–1, 2014, p. 36

16 Kathleen Linn, ‘Ben Quilty: After Afghanistan’, ArtsHub, 6 March 2013; https://visual.artshub.com.au/news-article/reviews/visual-arts/ kathleen-linn/ben-quilty-after-afghanistan-194488 accessed 7 November 2022

17 Steve Proposch, ‘Ben Quilty: Spoils of War’, Trouble Magazine, 2 February, 2016; http://www.troublemag.com/ben-quilty-spoils-of-war/ accessed 9 November 2022

18 Butler, ‘Ben Quilty: The Fog of War’, Intellectual History Review, p. 443

19 Ibid., 442

20 Ibid., 449

21 Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View, Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press, 2006, p. 332

22 Butler, ‘Ben Quilty: The Fog of War’, p. 442

23 Ibid., p. 443

24 Kit Messham-Muir, ‘Conflict, Complicity and Ben Quilty’s After Afghanistan portraits’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 18:1, 2018

25 ‘Ben Quilty: After Afghanistan 2016’, Castlemaine Art Gallery, 2016; https://www.castlemainegallery.com/exhibitions/ben-quilty-afterafghanistan-2016 accessed 8 November 2022

26 Natalie Thomas, ‘Quilty: Sit Down Bitch. Be Humble’, Natty Solo, 2019; https://nattysolo.com/2019/05/11/quilty-sit-down-bitch-be-humble/ accessed 10 November 2022

Crossing the wire: Western contemporary war art in the interbellum

27 Shaun Gladwell, interview with Kit Messham-Muir, Hyde Park, London, 30 September 2010

28 Messham-Muir, p. 189

29 Gladwell’s images in Double War do include some images of Afghan military personnel within the wire of the Coalition camp

30 Esmat, p. 82

31 Ryan Johnston, ‘Recalling History to Duty: 100 years of Australian war art’, Artlink vol. 35, no. 1, 2015, p. 15

32 Ibid.

33 Catherine Speck, ‘The Australian War Museum, Women Artists and the National Memory of the First World War’, When the Soldiers Return: November 2007 Conference Proceedings, Martin Critty (ed.), Brisbane: University of Queensland, 2009, p. 278

34 Julian Stallabrass, ‘The Power and Impotence of Images’, Memory of Fire: The War of Images and Images of War, Brighton: Brighton Photo Biennial, 2008, p. 6

35 Shaun Gladwell, Traces of War Symposium, Kings College London, 1 October 2016

36 Adrian Searle, ‘Last Post’, The Guardian, 13 March 2007; https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2007/mar/12/iraq.art; accessed 10 November 2022

37 There is, of course, the fairly unique case of western war artist George Gittoes, who I have addressed elsewhere: Kit Messham-Muir, ‘Conflict and Compromise: Australia’s Official War Artists and the “War on Terror”’, The Palgrave Handbook of Artistic and Cultural Responses to War – Volume 1: Australasia, the British Isles, and the United States, Martin Kerby, Margaret Baguley and Janet McDonald eds., Melbourne: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

38 David Cotterrell, interview with Kit Messham-Muir, transcribed by Monika Lukowska, London, 31 May 2019

39 Ibid.

40 Michael Corris, ‘My Name is David and I will be your War Artist for the Day: David Cotterrell Shoots a Video’, War and Art, Joanna Bourke (ed.), 7-41, London: Reaktion Books, 2017, p. 291

41 Ibid.

42 David Cotterrell, ‘The Theatre of War Symposium Day One–David Cotterrell, Subjective Documentary’, Abbey Theatre, YouTube, 4 February 2015; https://youtu.be/Tvc8yZv8aWM accessed 10 November 2022

43 David Cotterrell, ‘Age of Terror: David Cotterell on making art in Afghanistan’, Imperial War Museum, URL: https://youtu.be/rD1j3ZHFK-Q accessed 9 November 2022

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid.

47 Ibid.

48 Cotterrell, ‘The Theatre of War Symposium Day One’

49 Mladen Miljanovič, interview with Kit Messham-Muir, transcribed by Monika Lukowska, London, 29 May 2019

50 ‘The Didactic Wall’, Mladen Miljanovič; http://mladenmiljanovic.com/The-Didactic-Wall accessed 10 November 2022

51 Oberfälzer Künstlerhaus in Schwandorf, Germany (2011), HDLU Zagreb, Croatia (2012), A+A Gallery, Venice, Italy (2012), Gallery MC, New York, USA (2012), DADO Gallery Cetinje, Montenegro (2013), ACB Gallery Budapest, Hungary (2014), PERA Museum, Istanbul, Turkey (2016), Synagogue, Varaždin, Croatia (2017), Gallery OFF, Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland (2018)

52 Ave brought to my attention by the Australian artist and filmmaker George Gittoes

Front cover

Taring Padi, People’s Justice, 2002

Photo courtesy the artists

In the days after documenta’s opening, one work immediately generated a windfall of controversy.

Taring Padi’s People’s Justice is… an epic depiction of various historical events in Indonesia, where the collective hails from. Created 20 years ago for the 2002 South Australian Art Festival in Adelaide, the work charts a period of Indonesian history spanning from the 1960s to the turn of the century… One particular focus of the mural is the genocide of 1965, in which hundreds of thousands of Communists, leftists, Gerwani women, Chinese people, Javanese Abangan people, and more were murdered by stateoperated forces. The mural alludes to some historians’ claims that Israeli intelligence helped the regime of Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president, conduct the genocide. The genocide ultimately gave way to a coup that led to the rise of Suharto, who held a dictatorship in the country for over 30 years, until his resignation in 1998, the year that Taring Padi formed. Almost as soon as the piece went up, pictures of the anti-Semitic imagery made their way around social media, and a wide-scale outcry ensued… Several days after its installation, the Taring Padi mural was covered over with a black fabric. The following day, documenta said it had made the decision to take away the mural altogether. Taring Padi said the work was not supposed to be anti-Semitic, adding, “This work then becomes a monument of mourning for the impossibility of dialogue at this moment. This monument, we hope, will be the starting point for a new dialogue.” Taring Padi apologised for the work and, in a follow-up statement, later admitted that depicting the anti-Semitic imagery was a “mistake.” Alex Greenberger, 22 July 2022; https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/ what-is-documenta-15-antisemitismcontroversy-1234635001/

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Taksim Square during Occupy Gezi, 2013

Testifying to the political dimension of urban public space, the occupation of Gezi Park transformed a protest against an urban planning project into a historic struggle for democracy. It is estimated that more than three million people were directly involved in the biggest demonstrations Turkey had seen for decades, comparable with those of the Arab Spring (2010–11), the Indignados (2011), the Occupy movement (2011) and even those of May ’68 in France. On 8 June, Mayor Topbaş publicly retracted and distanced himself from the decision to open a shopping centre and hotel inside the future replica of the old barracks, announcing that he was studying plans to go ahead with a public museum instead. A week later the Gezi Park camp was officially dismantled but the “chapulling” [Erdoğan labelled the demonstrators “çapulcu”, “marauders” in Turkish] movement continued to apply pressure from other parts of the city and, indeed, from all over the country. Eventually, local and international social pressure obliged President Erdoğan to cancel his construction plans for the park. Public Space, https://www.publicspace.org/ works/-/project/h312-occupy-gezi

has said that the protest would not be subject to an intervention unless it began to constitute a menace against public order… “If it doesn’t turn into an act of violence, does not disrupt the public order and does not limit other people’s freedom, everyone has such a right [to stage a protest]” … Union of Turkish Bar Associations head Metin Feyzioğlu also declared that the standing man’s act was not a crime according to the Turkish Criminal Code. “Standing does not constitute a crime by any means,” he said, adding that there was no stance more democratic than this. “Humanity cannot find a more democratic type of protest,” he said… The protest spread across the country hours after Gündüz’s launch; https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/standingman-inspires-a-new-type-of-civil-disobedience-inturkey--48999

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Erdem Gunduz during his Standing Man protest Taksim Square, Istanbul, 2013

Photo https://resistology.files.wordpress.com/ 2013/06/duranadam.jpg

A single man who started standing silently in the middle of Istanbul’s city centre has provoked a silent struggle across Turkey for the right to protest. The young man, later identified as performance artist Erdem Gündüz, stood in the same place without moving for eight hours on June 17, staring at the flag of modern Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on the Atatürk Culture Center. The police have been limiting access to the city centre following the crackdown on Gezi Park protesters. Over the weekend, the police evacuated the city centre to stop the Gezi Park occupation, which started three weeks ago against a controversial renovation plan, and the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality planted trees and flowers in the park, which is closed to the public now. Turkish Interior Minister Muammer Güler

Top: Atatürk Cultural Center, Taksim Square, Istanbul, with banners of left wing groups, Gezi Park occupation, early-June 2013. Immediately after the siege, the police removed banners hung by left-wing groups and replaced them with a portrait of Atatürk flanked by two Turkish flags. In an uncharacteristic departure from the usual iconography of the present regime, a portrait of Prime Minister Erdoğan is conspicuous by its absence; https://bubkes. org/2013/06/24/gezi-parktaksim-square-ataturkcultural-center-during-and-after-occupation-plus-aword-on-the-iconography-of-public-space/

Photo uncredited

Middle/bottom: Halil Altindere, Wonderland (video stills), 2013

Photos courtesy the artist and Pilot Gallery, Istanbul

Wonderland is a document of anger, resistance and hope voiced by the children of Sulukule, a neighbourhood which for six centuries hosted the Roma population and their culture, and was demolished… as part of an urban transformation project. As the prosperity promised by the Public Housing Project (TOKI)… ends up serving nothing more than social inequality, poverty and infrastructural problems, the deep-rooted lifetsyle shaped with music and dance of the people of Sulukule faces oppression and irreversible corrosion. Istanbul’s adventure of concretisation, gentrification… is voiced by the [hip-hop/rap] group Tahribad-i Isyan and accompanied by Altindere’s visuals which land a punch in our stomach, producing a dreamlike reality that is difficult to digest.

13th Istanbul Biennial guidebook

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Graphic design for the 13th Istanbul Biennial by LAVA, Amsterdam

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Gayatri Spivak, Imperatives to Reimagine the Postcolonial, March Meeting 2022. As global neoliberalism becomes the main instrument of exploitation, ideological oppression, and subalternisation, we have to re-imagine what the colonies were… What was there before the colonies? Did all deployment of power relations start with the colonies?… Are we nothing but post-colonial? As planetary destruction by human greed is upon us, the mindset change that is required must accommodate such questions and more; https://sharjahart.org/sharjah-art-foundation/ events/march-meeting-2022-imperatives-toreimagine-the-postcolonial

brick kilns to endure their extreme heat. After years of exposure, their feet become numb and hard like the bricks themselves. Wall text, 2022 Berlin Biennale: Still Present!

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Top and bottom: Neos Aristophanes, installation view (and detail) at the 3rd Athens Biennale MONODROME, 2011

Chromolithographies from the Neos Aristophanes magazine, circa 1889–94, part of the National Historical Museum Collection. Photography reproduction Klaus-Valtin von Eickstedt

Photos by Margarita Myrogianni

Page 31

Birender Yadav, Walking on the Roof of Hell, 2016

Photos courtesy the artist

Photos https://www.lynnecameron.com/blog

The promise of modernity in India has often been linked to industry as an engine to lift the country out of poverty. Sadly, the very industry that this political utopia is based on is entrenched in exploitative practices. Typically, brick workers are landless bonded laborers. Walking on the Roof of Hell consists of thirty pairs of wooden khadau sandals that these workers use when treading the

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Top: Taring Padi, People’s Justice, 2002

Photo courtesy the artists

Bottom: Mayuri Chari, I was not created for pleasure, 2022

Photo courtesy the artist

In the installation, I was not created for pleasure (2022), on view at the 12th Berlin Biennale, [Mayuri Chari] has affixed cow dung cakes to a wall, mocking the tradition of banishing menstruating women (seen as impure) from the home, whereas the use of cow dung as fuel and in religious purification rituals is accepted. For thousands of years, Indian miniatures depicted sensual forms and various aspects of nudity, especially within narratives of society and culture. However, recently Chari was excluded from a museum exhibition due to the presence of nudity in her works. In another group exhibition, the venue owners asked her to remove her stitched work, which celebrated the body of a woman who could have been a victim of body shaming. Instead, she covered it with a black curtain that read, “Don’t open, I am nude inside.” SumeshManoj-Sharma; https://12.berlinbiennale.de/artists/ mayuri-chari/

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Top: Andreas Angelidakis, Crash Pad, 2013 Photo courtesy the artist Andreas Angelidakis designed a multi-purpose room with a library… It picks up the idea of the intellectual 19th century salon as setting for cultural and political conversations. Angelidakis arranges Greek folklore rugs handmade in the Greek countryside in an Ottoman tradition. Thus the project refers to the German intellectual and scholar imagination of the Ancient Greece at that time that was inspired by contemporaneous researches like Heinrich Schliemann’s archeological excavations of those ideal ruins. The European idea of an ancient glory was a projection significantly developed by classicists like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the 19th century and followed by circles like the “George-Kreis” around German poet Stefan George at the turn of the century. It originated the imaginary of Greece as the heart of European’s civilisation and occident culture until today. There is also an economic parallel to today that Crash Pad

refers to: The liberation of the nation in 1830 and the introduction of the concept of a Modern Greece after the Greek War of independence was accompanied by differences and struggles between Britain and Turkey. It lead to the first bankruptcy of modern Greece in 1895. In order to supervise the debt of Greece, the original version of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was put in place by France, England and Germany. Today we find Greece and Germany in an awkward financial exchange and somehow history repeats itself. 8th Berlin Biennale press release.

Bottom: Neos Aristophanes (detail), 3rd Athens Biennale Monodrome, 2011

Chromolithographies from the Neos Aristophanes magazine, circa 1889–94, part of the National Historical Museum Collection. Photography

reproduction Klaus-Valtin von Eickstedt

Photo by Margarita Myrogianni

United States was compelled to assist “free peoples” in their struggles against “totalitarian regimes,” because the spread of authoritarianism would “undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States.” The Truman Doctrine, 1947, Office of the Historian; https://history.state.gov/ milestones/1945-1952/truman-doctrine

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Top: Stelios Faitakis, Socrates Drinks the Conium, installation view at the 1st Athens Biennale: Destroy Athens, 2007

Photo courtesy the artist and The Breeder, Athens

The work of Stelios Faitakis negotiates diverse styles and traditions, combining street art culture with Byzantine iconography, Cretan folk art, Mexican Muralism and Japanese art. Eastern traditions intermingle with Western culture in a unique artistic vision, where scenes from everyday life can be viewed through a plethora of metaphors and symbols. The invocation of religious conventions through the depiction of halos and extensive use of gold elevates his earthly figures to a divine status and moreover invests the scenes with a sense of eternality… The art critic Andrea Gilbert comments on political art and Stelios Faitakis’s work: “Political art, to be truly successful, must not only relate to the era and place of its creation but also transcend the topical, to speak a universal language, and to carry its impact into the future... art as a voice of dissent against normative societal values and as a means of deconstructing and undermining perceptions and systems, demonstrating that although art cannot change the world, it can certainly make people think... Stelios Faitakis conflates the anarchic gesture of street art, the socialist message of Mexican mural painting, and the devotional persuasion of Byzantine hagiography into a multivalent pictorial idiom that acknowledges the fundamental communicative power of the narrative image... creates a universal iconography that speaks to ‘The People’ across time and culture.” Artmap, Stelios Faitakis; https://artmap. com/thebreeder/exhibition/stelios-faitakis2009?print=do

Bottom: Pablo Picasso, Le Parthénon, 1959

Installation view at the 1st Athens Biennale: Destroy Athens, 2007

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Stefanos Tsivopoulos, Lost Monument (video stills), 2009

Photos courtesy the artist

With the Truman Doctrine… the United States would provide political, military and economic assistance to all democratic nations under threat from external or internal authoritarian forces. The Truman Doctrine effectively reoriented U.S. foreign policy, away from its usual stance of withdrawal from regional conflicts not directly involving the United States, to one of possible intervention in far away conflicts. The Truman Doctrine arose from a speech delivered by President Truman before a joint session of Congress on March 12, 1947. The immediate cause for the speech was a recent announcement by the British Government that it would no longer provide military and economic assistance to the Greek Government in its civil war against the Greek Communist Party. Truman asked Congress to support the Greek Government against the Communists. He also asked Congress to provide assistance for Turkey, since that nation, too, had previously been dependent on British aid. At the time, the U.S. Government believed that the Soviet Union supported the Greek Communist war effort and worried that if the Communists prevailed in the Greek civil war, the Soviets would ultimately influence Greek policy… a number of other foreign policy problems also influenced President Truman’s decision to actively aid Greece and Turkey. In 1946, four setbacks, in particular, had served to effectively torpedo any chance of achieving a durable post-war rapprochement with the Soviet Union: the Soviets’ failure to withdraw their troops from northern Iran in early 1946 (as per the terms of the Tehran Declaration of 1943); Soviet attempts to pressure the Iranian Government into granting them oil concessions while supposedly fomenting irredentism by Azerbaijani separatists in northern Iran; Soviet efforts to force the Turkish Government into granting them base and transit rights through the Turkish Straits; and, the Soviet Government’s rejection of the Baruch plan for international control over nuclear energy and weapons in June 1946. In light of the deteriorating relationship with the Soviet Union and the appearance of Soviet meddling in Greek and Turkish affairs, the withdrawal of British assistance to Greece provided the necessary catalyst for the Truman Administration to reorient American foreign policy. Accordingly, in his speech, President Truman requested that Congress provide $400 million worth of aid to both the Greek and Turkish Governments and support the dispatch of American civilian and military personnel and equipment to the region. Truman justified his request on two grounds. He argued that a Communist victory in the Greek Civil War would endanger the political stability of Turkey, which would undermine the political stability of the Middle East… Truman also argued that the

The Marshall Plan, formally European Recovery Program, (April 1948–December 1951), was a US-sponsored program designed to rehabilitate the economies of seventeen western and southern European countries in order to create stable conditions in which democratic institutions could survive. The United States feared that the poverty, unemployment, and dislocation of the post-World War II period were reinforcing the appeal of communist parties to voters in western Europe… Aid was originally offered to almost all the European countries, including those under military occupation by the Soviet Union. The Soviets early on withdrew from participation in the plan, however, and were soon followed by the other eastern European nations under their influence. This left the following countries to participate in the plan: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and West Germany; https://www.britannica.com/ event/Marshall-Plan

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Afifa Aleiby, Gulf War, 1991

Photo courtesy the artist

Photo by Ala Younis

Page 65

Installation view, Natasha 2022 Singapore Biennale

Left: Afifa Aleiby, Intifada, 1989

Right: Kanitha Tith, Hut Tep Soda Chan (Hut of an Angel), 2011/2017

Photo courtesy the artists

Photo by Ala Younis

Page 66

Top: Kanitha Tith, Hut Tep Soda Chan (Hut of an Angel), 2011/2017

Photo courtesy the artist

Hut Tep Soda Chan (Hut of an Angel) borrows its title from a famous Khmer film from 1968, a love story between an angel and a mortal man, with the former relinquishing her riches to be with the latter. It illustrates how the poor, though materially impoverished, are rich in happiness and love… Tith invited her neighbours to contribute objects from their home to her work, including personal belongings such as pictures and fishing equipment, and conversations around the items as extensions of their owners soon ensued. Standing as a mini anthropological ‘museum,’ Hut Tep Soda Chan continues to play an important role in documenting the effects of economic and social change in Cambodia in the private, public and urban spheres; https://www.singapore artmuseum. sg/about/our-collection/hut-tep-soda-chan

Bottom: Zarina Muhammad, Moving Earth, Crossing Water, Eating Soil, 2022

Photo courtesy the artist

The title of the work alludes to the multiple historical identities of Pulau Sekijang Bendera (currently known as St John’s Island). The work draws inspiration from islands that have lost their names, shapeshifting creation myths, lines plotted by animal navigation, trickster tides, submerged reefs and maritime arteries. The work unfolds over nine archetypal signatures and departure points… These nine points are presented as a diorama of (inter)cardinal directions, palimpsests and constellations that can be read or experienced through a variety of ways and engages with the entanglements of various knowledge systems; https://www.singaporebiennale.org/artists/zarinamuhammad

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Top: Heman Chong, The Library of Unread Books, 2016–ongoing

Photo courtesy the artist

The Library of Unread Books… is a living reference library with a collection of over 700 titles, which traces the perimeters of knowledge and reflects on notions of access, excess and the politics of redistribution. Every book in the collection [has been] donated by an individual who did not read it when it was in their possession… The Library of Unread Books sheds light on these once-hiddenaway titles to emphasise shared knowledge… Umberto Eco famously called for an “antilibrary” made up of unread books. The novelist and scholar argued that read books are far less valuable than unread ones and that a library should contain as much of what one does not know as finance might allow. “You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly”; https://www. singaporebiennale.org/artists/heman-chong

Bottom: Raed Ibrahim, Scripted Tablets, 2022

Photo courtesy the artist

Forty-five engraved terracotta clay tablets each depict a unique scene or texture. The nearinfinite permutations of available arrangements demonstrate the ways readings of history can be arbitrated over time, while the use of clay indicates the vulnerability of historical accounts to the elements and their ability to be reformed. Working with a symbolic lexicon ranging from the obviously representational (one tablet features a loose circle of electrical plugs, and another, sun and wind on skyscrapers), to the abstract, Ibrahim’s wry ordering also recalls the rhythms and structures of a new grammar and its ability to propose a new sense of the world. Alfonse Chiu, Ocula; https://ocula.com/magazine/features/will-thesingapore-biennale-speak/

Page 79

Fan Dongwang, Shifting Perspectives and the Body #3, 1999–2001

Photo courtesy the artist

The artist uses shifting perspectives as method (sculptural painting) to analyse different art styles while using shifting perspectives as metaphors to convey different cultural aspects. The environment (or the association of the forms) determines the concept of the object. The painting shows a series of mannerisms and conventions of shifting perspectives that serve in a way to impose a hidden order upon surface chaos to achieve a visual poetic; https://www.fandongwang.com/ shifting-perspective-painting

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Maile Meyer and Drew Kahu‘āina Broderick, KĪPUKA (for “Natasha”), 2022

Photo courtesy the artists

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Top: Shen Jiawei, Seven Self-Portraits, 1996

Bottom: Shen Jiawei, Suddenly Back to 1900, 2000

Photos courtesy the artist

In [Seven Self-Portraits], Jiawei Shen has borrowed the conception of reincarnation from the Buddhist faith to express some of his feelings about history and his life. The work is comprised of seven self portraits and images of himself in reincarnated personas; https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/prizes/ archibald/1997/18543/

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Zarina Muhammad, Moving Earth, Crossing Water, Eating Soil, 2022

Photo courtesy the artist

Photos courtesy the artist and ARC ONE Gallery, Melbourne

Arriving in Australia in 1992, Guo Jian’s art practice has been fuelled by his position as a reflective, sharply satirical Chinese expatriate who grew up during the Cultural Revolution… [his] early experiences of art were inevitably entwined with communist authority, ideology and militaristic power–his first acquaintance with art was time spent as a propaganda-poster painter for the People’s Liberation Army then later, as an art student in Beijing, he took part in the protests which led to the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Guo Jian takes the Socialist Realism he grew up with in China, subverts and transforms it, often humorously, into Socio-Realism in an almost celebratory act of protest and liberation. His flat surfaces and heightened colours owe much to the Chinese visual and political language of the Communist era. Dancing girls in dressed in traditional ballet costumes or in uniforms with weapons are either placed in the foreground with soldiers leering (usually in disquieting repetition of Guo Jian’s own face) or in the background as a lingerie-clad model straight out of a Western fashion magazine poses in the foreground; a contrast of unrestricted sexuality and enforced conformity… Underlying conflicting themes of sex and violence, East and West are dominant forces in Jian’s works. Soldiers are captivated and awestruck by female performers, sometimes in quiet contemplation, sometimes in overly excited wonderment, but a sense of false happiness, hypocrisy and hysteria often pervade the scenes; https://arcone.com.au/guo-jian-artist-profile

In the late 1950s, Mao Zedong called upon artists to combine ‘revolutionary realism with revolutionary romanticism’ in order that art should serve the people. In a very different 21st century context, by recording the impacts of globalisation, industrialisation and urbanisation on Chinese society, the current work of Chinese/ Australian artist Guo Jian comments fearlessly on the ills of his — and our —society… His experiences of the tumultuous events of China’s recent history—his childhood during the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, military service, and first-hand experience of the events of 1989—influenced his autobiographical approach to painting. He became known for savagely satirical Pop-inspired realist works: populated by ‘Entertainment Soldiers’, the seductive dancers and singers deployed to motivate and mollify the troops, his paintings examine the sexualisation of propaganda. Luise Guest, The Art Life; http://theartlife.com.au/2017/the-romanticrevolutionary-a-profile-of-guo-jian/

Page 86

Top left: Wang Zhiyuan, Beauties Captured in Time #4, 1994

Bottom left: Wang Zhiyuan, Fragments (Underpants), 2000

Right: Wang Zhiyuan, Fragments (Monkey Holding Peach), 2000

Photos courtesy the artist

With the creation of Fragments (2000), Wang Zhiyuan has made this form a vehicle for the expression of ideas about contemporary life and society. Fragments seems a realistic reflection on the realities of an age when metaphysics is dead and society is awash in pop and commercial culture. One of the images [is] a pair of underpants. They were presented at the same size as all the other everyday objects, with no special meaning or emphasis. The sense of floating may also reflect a sense of disconnection from art history and one’s own identity. It is possible that Wang Zhiyuan’s move back to China in 2001 was motivated by the desire to rescue himself from that sense of floating. If so, it was a mistaken desire. For China has lost its spiritual roots, and its lust for material wealth is so extreme as to make

Australia seem like a pastoral Shangri-La by comparison. What Wang Zhiyuan has experienced here is only the “madness of desire for materialism”. In his newer works, underpants—items of clothing that are usually concealed—are hugely enlarged, conveying today’s hyperinflation of desire as well as the enlarged role of sexuality and everything connected with it… The items from daily life that made up Fragments and Wang Zhiyuan’s doubts about art have fused with a mood of mischievous absurdity and carnival; http://www.wangzhiyuanart.com/4_ text/4_texts_08.html

Page 96

Top: Tsang Tsou-choi, c. 1996–97 Long before they began showing up in exhibitions and auctions in the 1990s, the characteristic black ink scrawls of Tsang Tsou-choi’s kingly persona had been appearing across public surfaces in Hong Kong. For decades, he had written his claims of sovereignty over the peninsula on anything from pillars, lampposts, and utility boxes to walls.

Tsang’s ascent from street vandal to art star was extraordinary, as were the critiques that his work ignited along the way. Even today, he remains an enigma–and not just because of the ancestral documents he apparently found in 1956, which led him to believe in his regal birthright. But because he had no intention of masquerading as an artist in the first place, his work tends to evade neat categorisations. That very few works by Tsang from before the 1990s exist is due to the simple fact that they were not regarded as artworks back then. Most of Tsang’s ink inscriptions, which asserted that his rightful position as King of Kowloon was stolen by colonial pretenders, were either washed away or painted over by city authorities which viewed them as graffiti… Why did Tsang capture the imagination of the residents of Hong Kong in the 1990s? Perhaps in the years leading up to the 1997 transfer of sovereignty from Britain to China, he reflected how we all felt: at once powerless and powerful. Perhaps the city’s inhabitants were moved by the tenacity of his unwavering diatribes against the British colonisers and his desire to reclaim his home. As critic Fung Man-yee put it, Tsang was “the last free man” in the territory. (Fung would go on to launch an online petition to save his street calligraphy from erasure.) The art historian David Clarke observed Tsang’s “acute sense of the topography of power when pursuing his public mark-making,” while the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist called Tsang an “urban poet’ who fought “against forgetting.” In short, to borrow the words artist and writer Brandon LaBelle employs in his discussions of strategies of resistance, Tsang embodied “the weak and the radical”… As his popularity soared in the last decade of his life, Tsang calligraphed on any surface provided, from vehicles, lanterns, jugs, printed maps, and doors, to sheets of paper. Throughout it all, he maintained an amicable ambivalence. More than once in front of the camera, he said, with his typical grin, that he was unbothered if his ink writings were considered art or otherwise. To continue writing was all that mattered to him. Phoebe Wong, ‘Long live the King of Kowloon: Tsang Tsou-choi and the making of an icon’; https://www.artbasel.com/stories/ long-live-the-king-of-kowloon-tsang-tsou-choi

Page 85

Top: Guo Jian, Trigger Happy II, 1999

Bottom, Guo Jian, Military Party, 2001

Hedda Morrison, Young acrobat at Tianqiao market, Peking, China, 1933-1946

Powerhouse collection, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney. Gift of Mr Alastair Morrison, 1992

Page 96

Bottom left: Ho Siu-kee, Walking on two balls (video still), 1995

Photo courtesy the artist

In one of his seminal works, Walking on Two Balls (1995), the artist’s body is put into a state where day-to-day balance is compromised, and a new balance must be sought. The challenge is to walk on two wooden balls, sculpted by Kee himself, and of the course, the inherent risk is that Kee might fall… [he] mentioned the previous 9 times failing, which meant losing balance, was just as important as the 10th try in maintaining balance. Each attempt contributes to the body’s dynamism in adapting, which is an ongoing and ever-changing process. Each balance lost is the success in finding balance. This process validates an ever-changing state that yields hope in finding new balances; https://teahouse.buddhistdoor.net/a-meditationon-mind-body-and-place-ho-siu-kee/

In Walking on Two Balls, Ho… is attempting to progress forward whilst balancing precariously on two-ball shaped sculptural objects he had constructed. Ho’s concern is not merely allegorical, but one can’t help seeing this work as representing the situation of an artist attempting to acquire the responsiveness and fine sense of balance required to operate in the hybrid and ungrounded cultural space of Hong Kong.

David Clarke, ‘Found in Transit: Hong Kong Art in a Time of Change’, Inside Out: New Chinese Art (catalogue), University of California Press, 1998

Bottom right: Phoebe Man, Beautiful Flowers, 1996

Photo courtesy the artist

In Beautiful Flowers, Man transforms sanitary napkins from a general impression of being “dirty” and “shameful” things into chunks of poetic blossoming flowers, decorated with red eggs, incorporating traditional Chinese elements (red eggs means celebration of birth)… In an interview, she refuted an accusation that criticised these works were aiming at striking a moral stance. Man said the intention of these works was to realise her poetic feeling towards her anxiety of her body changes, though some art critics interpreted her art as an accusation of the female role as a “birth giving machine”; http://www.cyman.net/myworkreview/jess.htm

Page 100

Top: Kum Chi Keung, Door, 1995

Photo courtesy the artist Shown at Special Pre-97 Arts Zone, Exposition Hall, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (1995); Contemporary Hong Kong Arts Biennial Exhibition (1996); City at the End Time Hong Kong 1997, Vancouver, Canada (1997). It is the first installation by Kum that makes use of a birdcage to make a door. It is a metaphor of Hong Kong people at that time it was transferring from a British colony to Chinese control. [Here] Kum made a good use of the birdcage. It is easy for us to link cage and “being controlled and trapped”. Also, according to an interview with Kum, he released over one hundred doves at the opening of the exhibition. Doves can fly freely and go into the cage or escape from the exhibition centre. Hong Kong people at that time were just likes those doves, some of them chose to migrate to other countries, some of them stayed in Hong Kong and fed by the Chinese Government; https://waisiuwu.wordpress.com

Bottom: Leung Chi-wo, Crossing Sky, 2001 Photo courtesy the artist Crossing sky is a coffeeshop installation of 15 tables topped with images of urban skylines of both Hong Kong and Venice. Visitors can take a rest here. The biggest table displays the skyline merged by both Hong Kong and Venetian urbanscapes and hung above it is a chandelier in the same shape of the skyline; https://arthistory.hku.hk/hkaa/ revamp2011/artist_view.php?artist_id=031 Hong Kong is, undeniably, part of China, but it functions in the ambivalent space of the label, “one country, two systems”, a space that is continuously negotiated and redefined. In this negotiated space we can see the work of Leung Chi-wo as exemplary in the way he uses photography and installation to problematically map various urban spaces. His pinhole photographs are presented as negative shapes mapped onto various objects; tabletops, chandeliers, and even cookies. His work, though full of almost manic attempts at placing oneself in a particular time and space, interrupts efforts at this placement, as the architectural clues needed to find ones’ way have been eliminated, leaving only the abstracted shape of the sky to use as a signpost. Leung’s work only allows an unstable sense of place, disrupting what would normally be the photograph’s ability to support memory. Norman Jackson Ford, ‘Re–considered crossings: representation beyond hybridity’; https://www. fotogaleriewien.at/en/exhibition/re-consideredcrossings-representation-beyond-hybridity/

Page 112

Hedda Morrison, Man and children enjoying the winter sunshine, Peking, China, 1933–1946 Powerhouse collection, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney. Gift of Mr Alastair Morrison, 1992

Page 116

Hedda Morrison, Rickshaws, Peking, China, 1933–1946

Powerhouse collection, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney. Gift of Mr Alastair Morrison, 1992

Page 108

Pages 128–129

Shaun Gladwell, POV Mirror Sequence (Tarin Kowt), 2009–2010

Australian War Memorial collection ART94193

Photo courtesy the artist, Australian War Memorial Canberra and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne

When he went to Afghanistan and the Middle East, Gladwell wanted to analyse the war experience from a less dramatic perspective, using a less expected language, one that was empathetic but critical… For Gladwell, photojournalism and the newly emerging genre of soldier-produced documentaries via body and helmet cameras proved to be the best medium for describing the experience. “I was not a combat soldier and did not pretend to be. Instead, I conducted a series of experiments with photography and video that would not try to represent the pressure, the insanity, but generate its own pressure. For instance, I made a video of me stalking a fully equipped combat soldier. We both locked video cameras onto each other and mirrored each other’s movements. Then I asked two soldiers to also perform this almost ritualistic mirroring… Gladwell said he felt complicit just by accepting the commission. If he’d been asked today, now that he has a family, he probably wouldn’t have accepted.

“There are works of mine that are still enigmatic, even to me. I just seem to have arrived at more questions… I have never stopped thinking about the experience, and consequently, I have never stopped making work about it. I am not sure there will ever be closure”; Lilly Wei, ‘Art Made in Harm’s Way’, ARTnews; https://www.artnews.com/ art-news/news/art-made-in-harms-way-3888/

Page 132

Top: David Cotterrell, Sightlines I & II, 2008

Photo courtesy the artist

In November 2007, [Cotterrell] flew in an RAF C17 from Brize Norton to Kandahar… to join Operation Herrick 7. Focusing on these experiences and their inevitable aftermath, Cotterrell has produced a new body of photographic work. Sightlines, Principals and Supernumerary are arranged as diptychs and triptychs. Shot in the operating theatre, these images reference painters famous for their use of chiaroscuro. The lighting and formal arrangements caught in the artist’s lens for a moment distract the viewer’s gaze, suggesting the sublime beauty within horror, the human scale compassion in the face of destruction; https://dublin.sciencegallery. com/trauma-exhibits/sightlines-i-supernumerary

Bottom: Mladen Miljanović, The Didactic Wall (detail), 2019

The project Didactic Wall is a subversive educational installation that focuses on the issue of migrants, refugees, displaced persons and apatrids, and the difficulties they face when moving towards their desired geographic destination. This is an engaged set of illustrations that address directly those who are trying, in an “illegal” way, to cross national borders to get to their “land of dreams”.

The Didactic Wall is a kind of instruction on how to overcome natural and artificial barriers a “person on the move” may possibly come across; https:// www.mladenmiljanovic.com/The-Didactic-Wall

Photo courtesy the artist

Page 135

Ave, Meat grinder, 2022

Photo courtesy the artist

Page 121

Left: Hedda Morrison, Penan parang smiths, Ulu Barum, Sarawak, Malaysia, 1960–1970

Right: Hedda Morrison, Traditional Ngajat or war dance performed by an Iban, Sungei (Ngewah), Kanowit District, Sarawak, Malaysia, 1952 Powerhouse collection, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney. Gift of Mr Alastair Morrison, 1992

Page 122

Hedda Morrison, The artist Wang Qingfang painting, with children, Peking, China, 1933–1946 Powerhouse collection, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney. Gift of Mr Alastair Morrison, 1992

Page 124

Ave, Untitled, 2022

Photo courtesy the artist

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