Jasper Jordan-Lang: ‘Attention Interest Action’ at Cache

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Jasper Jordan-Lang’s exhibition ‘Attention Interest Action’ at Cache brought attention to the people and places who have come before us and provided a window into the everchanging landscape of Naarm/Melbourne.

Walking down Little La Trobe Street, I worried that I would miss the entrance to the gallery. Founded by artist Tommaso Nervegna-Reed and architect Andre Bonnice in early 2024, Cache resides on the top floor of the old offices of Edmond & Corrigan, the architectural firm behind many prominent Melbourne buildings, including the VCA Theatre building in Southbank, Building 8 of RMIT and Niagara Galleries in Richmond.

I entered Cache full of assumptions. Previous iterations of Jordan-Lang’s work that I have encountered were meticulously refined geometric forms that came together in response to their geography. What I did not expect was to see a collection of photographs emblematising the visual style of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner 2049.

At first glance, the five photographs comprising the exhibition were incomprehensible—akin to the experience of seeing an impressionist painting. I was convinced that the work had been altered in some way: Photoshop, AI or collage. However, on closer inspection (and receiving clarification from the artist himself) the crackling neon pictures revealed themselves to be unedited photographs of existing images.

The original pictures in question were stock photographs for La Do Vietnamese and Thai, a now defunct restaurant located on the corner of Boundary Road and Canning Street in North Melbourne. Once marketing spring rolls, Peking duck and miscellaneous alcoholic drinks, a decade of wind, sun and rain exposure has morphed the once commonplace into the sumptuously absurd.

Riddled with nostalgia, Jordan-Lang’s work buzzes with the grit and vibrancy of a late-night dining spot, the kind that is bathed in a pool of neon light and where the edges of your vision blur. Images of martini glasses and pints dripping with anticipation scratch against a decade’s worth of exposure to UV radiation. There is no colour from nature in this series—if they were food, they would probably give you cancer—but the effect is a cybernetic display of extravagance. 

Nestled among the gridded black rails that guard the old Edmond & Corrigan library, the five photographic artworks take on the characteristics of a lab-grown gemstone. Ink-jet print on particle board, the photographs jilted against the utilitarian space, their vibrancy a sonogram of the bustling city outside.

In many ways ‘Attention Interest Action’ is an extension of the site specific, minimalist work that Jordan-Lang has previously produced. In this iteration, however, rather than engaging with found objects as a reference to location, Jordan-Lang makes traces of Melbourne’s lost geography visible through the pictorial plane. The oblique marks imprinted in the photographs footnote the years of development under city life. Each indication of grit and weathering forms a register of years passed.

The particle board backing of the pictures mimicked the floor of Cache to create a synergy between art and place. The photographs also matched the space in a different way: while the subject of the images captures the effect of time, the gallery, which operates on a month-to-month basis while waiting for renovation plans, is an example of time passing itself.

Resplendent is a terrible word. Truly it is terrible, it imparts a high-school-naivety onto beautiful things and in doing so transmutes them into a gaudy caricature. However, despite my reservations towards the term, when I entered the tight gallery and saw Jordan-Lang’s exhibition, it was the first word that came to mind.

The photographs speak to the ever-changing topography of Melbourne and offer a glimpse of stagnation within a rapidly developing landscape. Jordan-Lang’s ‘Attention Interest Action’ is the relief print of the city’s past and a spectre of the people and places who have come before us.

Lily Beamish, Naarm/Melbourne

‘Attention Interest Action’ by Jasper Jordan-Lang was exhibited at Cache in Naarm/Melbourne for a single weekend, August 24–25 2024.

Artists Gail Mabo and Nikau Hindin introduce their project for the Sydney Opera House

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Every night until 15 December 2024, Badu Gili: Celestial, a digital animation featuring works by Meriam artist Gail Mabo and Te Rarawa/Ngapuhi artist Nikau Hindin is being projected on to the Bennelong sails of the Sydney Opera House. The work is a joint commission by the Sydney Opera House, the Biennale of Sydney and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain.

Although they’re separated by a stretch of ocean, Mabo and Hindin share the same commitment to sharing First Nations stories and histories that are held in the stars through their art. Both Mabo’s bamboo and star-sand maps, and Nikau’s bark cloth kites and maps, carry traditional knowledge, which is now being showcased in a new way through animation. Celestial is an instalment of ‘Badu Gili’, the Opera House’s free, nightly light display of work by Indigenous artists.

“Tubowgule, where the Sydney Opera House stands today, has long been a meeting place for celebration, culture and community,” explains Michael Hutchings, Head of First Nations Programming at the Opera House. “‘Badu Gili’ continues this legacy, sharing both living and ancient stories told through vibrant animations projected onto one of the 20th century’s most iconic buildings. The ‘Badu Gili’ project, meaning ‘water light’ in the language of the traditional owners of the site, was initiated by our inaugural Head of First Nations Programming, Rhoda Roberts. Rhoda’s passionate advocacy and curation was instrumental in the project’s beginnings in 2017. Now in its fourth edition, Badu Gili is a pillar of the Opera House’s year-round First Nations program, demonstrating our commitment to fostering and celebrating the rich history and vibrancy of First Nations people and culture.”

Here, in conversation with Billie Phillips, Assistant Curator of the Biennale of Sydney, Gail Mabo and Nikau Hindin discuss how Badu Gili: Celestial came to life.

 Billie Phillips (BP): Both your works deal with constellations. How did each of you learn about the stars and the stories that are depicted in your works?

 Gail Mabo (GM): The star maps came from stories that my dad told me, which are the stories told throughout the Torres Straits, of Tagai. Tagai was our main God that we use to navigate across the Straits. And when you’re looking at Tagai, you’re looking at the whole sky. From the tip of Queensland, Australia to Papua New Guinea, that’s that small bracket of sky that we look at, and that’s where Tagai lies.

 I also put in an acknowledgement to my children and their Koori heritage through the Emu Dreaming story, along with the Lamir Kuskir, or the Seven Sisters story, which you have from the Central Desert, but also in the Torres Straits. Lamir Kuskir refers to the wives of this old man who he banished to the sky. They sit above him, laughing, due to the things that he did wrong to them. ‘Poor fella, he still lives by himself. Look at him down there!’ they say. It’s been translated through dance and now I’ve translated it through a star story.

Nikau Hindin (NH): I first learnt about the stars when I was living in Hawai’i. I was learning about bark cloth practice at the same time I was learning about celestial navigation. The star maps that I create are a way for me to memorise our stars, our specific names for those stars, and where they rise on the horizon. The stars become markers for direction, so that we can locate ourselves in time and space. Then, when I returned to Aotearoa, the process of making star maps became even more important because I had to then translate the Hawaiian and English names into our Maori names and learn our Maori stories.

Since learning about celestial navigation, I’ve discovered more about the way that our stars change during different times of the year and how our stars have been used to record time. Indigenous peoples have observed stars throughout generations and possess an inherent understanding or knowing about time and an understanding that a single generation is brief and that the knowledge that I know about stars now is many, many generations old.

BP:  Both of your works draw upon such a deep well of community and cultural knowledge. I know that in the making of this work you both engaged in a series of collaborations. What was it like for you when you saw your works being transformed from one medium into another?

 GM: In the initial conversation I was trying to wrap my head around the idea of projecting onto the Sydney Opera House. I thought: ‘How are they going to animate the maps?’ When they first showed me the early animation of pulling it apart and putting it back together, I was amazed, I had this whole fascination with ‘What else can you do? What are you going to do with my stars?’

 Later, when I was sleeping, I could hear ‘Requiem for Eli’, which is a sound piece by Nigel Westlake. There was a bit of music in there that just kept standing out. And it was grand, it was bigger, it could be big as a sky. So, when I awoke, I went to Nigel and I said, ‘There's a piece of work that you have’ and he knew exactly what it was and that it needed to be used for this. He went to his studio for a moment and through the speakers came the sound I wanted. We also needed the vocals of a male chant, so we approached David Bridie. I’ve worked with him on different things, he’s a writer and composer from Melbourne who works with people from Papua New Guinea.

 NH: Having my kind of works on the Sydney Opera House is such a massive shift in scale, but also in material. My work is very physical and labour intensive and the materials are from our environment, whereas an animation is transient or intangible. So I really had to trust the animation process because I’m not an expert in making patterns move, so I enjoyed that exchange. In some aspects, I was quite specific with how I wanted the movement to happen because of the way that I interpret or understand how the stars move, and how I would like the maps to be read.

BP: What aspect of each other’s work resonates with you the most?

NH:  I was left speechless at the way that the stories of our stars are told through Gail’s artwork and the conceptualisation of this vast space. How she creates something that’s tangible to interpret this vast, vast knowledge system.

 And also, the stars. There are so many little things about scale in your work, which is really interesting. You’ve kind of gone from tiny to big, all from a tiny grain of sand. So, there’s this beautiful thread of scale that is really profound. I love that, Gail, you hold the stories of your people. You’re a Kaitiaki, or a guardian of those stories that are so old and so important.

GM: Thank you, Nikau. My mind is blown at what you’ve done. It’s absolutely beautiful. The first thing that gets me with your work is that sound. When I close my eyes, I drift to where you come from. I can see your kites flying around in my head. Then, I see your work unfolding: the beating of the cloth, to the beautiful patterns they become, to the kites that fly through the sky. Your work gives me a reason to go investigate a little bit more into your culture.  One day I will come across to New Zealand and you can show me.  

NH: You know it!

This is an edited extract from a longer conversation that was published in Art Monthly Australasia’s special edition about the 24th Biennale of Sydney. Buy a copy of that issue here.

Please note macrons in the Te Reo Maori terms do not appear on this webpage.

Claudia Nicholson: ‘If The Mountain Is Burning, Let It Burn’ at UTS Gallery

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Rearranging, recollecting and recovering: these are the actions that define Claudia Nicholson as she reaches back into her archive. ‘If The Mountain Is Burning, Let It Burn' is a sombre, blurry and glittering exhibition, and the latest output of the University of Technology Sydney’s (UTS) Artist in Residence program. Positioned within the Ultimo campus, UTS Gallery is dimly lit, as if you were searching for photographic clarity through a smouldering haze. Nicholson’s spotlit photographs remind me of how museums tend to illuminate disparate artefacts to increase their dramatic effect. The subject matter and the memories evoked are vast, heavy and sentimental.

In developing the exhibition, Nicholson excavated her personal archive to glean and reorganise a portrait of Colombia, with images taken from family photographs, negatives discovered at flea markets, as well as her own photographs and videos. The artist is one of thousands of children adopted from Colombia to Australia since the 1970s, a subject Nicholson has explored at different points throughout her practice.

Many of the histories conveyed in the exhibition are small and personal, like the images of Nicholson and her sister. Butterfly Sanctuary (2024) presents a sweetly inquisitive little girl, her gaze fixed on a butterfly as it hovers towards her heart; imagery that could feature in the music video for a pop song contemplating the evanescence of girlhood. Equally wistful is The Deep Rivers Say it Slowly (2023), the video installation at the heart of the exhibition. The lulling and slightly unnerving music by Monica Brooks accompanies images of protest, violence and more butterflies. The video is projected upon a surface covered in a delicate and fine glitter, cohering the story of war and amnesty, girls and butterflies in nostalgia. Images fade into one another, as if doubly exposed, to evoke memories interposed with the dreams of an observer.

Many of the photographs in the exhibition have been captured by Nicholson, several by her father, and others collected on a 2008 trip to Bogota. The narrative connecting these images asks: what if memory was outsourced? If we stole historical memories as personal ones? If we inserted personal memories into archives? Who does the memory belong to? 

Nicholson describes the project as coming “after a pause in making.” The residency program has provided Nicholson with a recess to arrange her personal archive, and working with Cherine Fahd and Dr Marivic Wyndham has encouraged the artist to reconsider her past portraits of Colombia by applying a newly developed visual language. Nicholson’s vibrant Alfombra de aserrín (sawdust carpets) that have previously been made into installations and performance works stand in stark contrast to what we see here. Usually, their form has allowed them to be destroyed in some kind of performance spectacle. If they were neon, they pulsated with gradients and gothic fonts associated with the played out ‘Tumblr aesthetics’ of the mid 2010s. Nicholson’s exhibition at UTS Gallery is much more opaque.

‘If The Mountain Is Burning, Let It Burn' offers further evidence of the important role played by artist research initiatives such as the UTS Artist in Residence program. These opportunities provide artists with the resources to experiment and conduct research into innovative modes of making and, in this case, has allowed Nicholson the access to facilities and expertise to explore new outcomes in her practice. The negatives from old family albums and found photographs are transformed by Nicholson’s processes and treatments. The photographs begin to escape the precision of the institution, and sometimes even eschew the camera entirely. They suggest hidden iterations, progressions that were once crystalline to atrophying copies and prints. The technology of image making reshapes what was captured into a narrative, creating a new texture for the artist’s history and her relationship to Colombia. And the texture is sometimes a glittered projection surface.

Laura Luciana, Warrang/Sydney

‘If The Mountain Is Burning, Let It Burn’ is on display at UTS Gallery until 20 October 2024.

Tony Albert, Erin Vink and Kimberley Moulton discuss curating First Nations art across borders

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In his role as the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain First Nations Curatorial Fellow for the 24th Biennale of Sydney, Tony Albert commissioned works from Indigenous artists both in Australia and around the world. In the following conversation, he discusses opportunities for international collaboration between First Nations artists, curators and communities with Kimberley Moulton (Yorta Yorta), Senior Curator of Rising festival and Adjunct Curator, Indigenous Art at Tate Modern; and Erin Vink (Ngiyampaa), Curator of First Nations Art (local and global) at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) and Chair, Art Monthly Australasia.

Tony Albert (TA): Erin, your role has recently changed from Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art to Curator, First Nations Art (local and global). Why is that an important transition within the title and within the institutional framework of caring for and acknowledging global Indigenous art?

Erin Vink (EV): My position shifted to include a global Indigenous remit about 12 months ago. It stemmed from a long, warm conversation I had with our shared colleague, Léuli Eshrāghi [Seumanutafa/Tautua], who undertook a three-month research review of the AGNSW in early 2020. Léuli prepared a report for the gallery on how to grow a collection, which also included other elements such as exhibition programming, positions and the like. I have taken Léuli’s initial proposal and reformatted it to become something that is achievable within the existing structures of the institutional model. I believe it is important that we have an outward-facing curatorial position demonstrating that we care for all Indigenous kin. Grounded in local First Nations art, we can adopt best practices for how to work with our global Indigenous artists, how to support community and how to respect language and cultural groups, for example.

TA: How would a work by an international First Nations artist be entered into the institution’s collection?

EV: At the AGNSW, prior to my role, artists would come into the collection through the international collection stream: into the Pacific collection, for example, if they were Indigenous from the Great Ocean, or Indigenous artists from Asia would go into the Asian art collection. Maybe their language group would be recorded on their catalogue record but, more often than not, none of the information that we, as Australian First Nations people record, would be assigned to their artwork. Now that I care for the global Indigenous collection, we treat international First Nations art as we would Australian First Nations work.

TA: Kimberley, you have previously done a fellowship at Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection at the University of Virginia with a focus on Indigenous Australian art.  

Kimberley Moulton (KM): I was the recipient of the inaugural curatorial fellowship at the Kluge-Ruhe with the National Gallery of Australia and Wesfarmers Indigenous Arts Leadership Program in 2015 and have done several programs with other Indigenous curators to connect with mob internationally. I’ve been to Sápmi country, Norway, Sweden and Finland, North America and South Asia connecting to peers and kin. These opportunities were such a crucial time for me in thinking around how we communicate our culture, our art and what we’re doing in the world in connecting with other mob. These moments opened my world, connecting me with international Indigenous practice. It’s about building solid relationships based on relationality, and not necessarily just about exhibition and extraction, which often is the focus in the art world and museum spaces. This time of connecting led me to develop my practice and to consider how to create space for Indigenous artists and communities and build our own determined spaces.

TA: The dialogue amongst artists has gained international traction over the past few years, particularly with the aabaakwad (it clears after a storm), a series of Indigenous-led conversations founded in 2018 by Wanda Nanibush [Anishinaabe]. I am often surprised at how Australia is viewed internationally with regards to its First Nation dialogue: we as Indigenous Australians are seen as having infiltrated institutions, sometimes through force, to have our voices heard. I’m wondering if you could talk about the history attached to Indigenous curatorial practice and its contemporary presence on the global stage.

EV: There have been amazing movers and shakers that have carved out this space for us. If you put your finger on the pulse right now, what I find the most interesting is institutional curators who are all working to the idea of Indigenisation rather than decolonisation. We’re working in a way of adding culture to our institutions, and it doesn’t always have to be in the same way. We have the flexibility of experimentation due to the core work that our Indigenous curatorial leaders have done in overcoming roadblocks that they themselves experienced in curatorial positions in the 1990s and early 2000s.

TA: It is an interesting comment because we hear about decolonisation so much, and I’ve always been a fan of Indigenising space rather than decolonising space. We (as people) need to be in the institution and have autonomy to add to it.

KM: A lot of my early international research was connecting with and reserching our Ancestral Belongings in places like the British Museum. These places hold our material, but I was also trying to understand the ways in which artists, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, connect within that space and with ‘museum’ objects. I learnt that we are always within this Oceanic grouping of people and came to understand and critically evaluate the legacy of homogenisation, ethnographic collecting and the effect of that on the way in which our contemporary art and practices are understood by non-Indigenous curators and anthropologists. My research has also led me to work deeply in the ways in which First Peoples artists can restore the spirit of collections and history through practice. More recently I have focused on more of a contemporary framework, working at the Tate Modern. However, I challenge the binary of historic and contemporary in my practice—it is all connected and relevant.

I believe having more Indigenous curators and artists engaging internationally and having roles with autonomy and responsibility that are engaged properly with institutions and their collections is important. There’s still work to be done, but the growing realisation within international art spaces and museums is that they need to work with Indigenous people, and that we need to have the position of leadership in terms of our contemporary art and determine the way our cultures are represented in these spaces. We need to also critically challenge the absence of our presence in art history in these places, which connects directly to current discourse in Indigenous-led research into theories of race, relationality and anti-colonial practice.

Whenever you work for any institution, there’s always this immense responsibility that you have to community and ancestors. It’s too much for one person to carry. I’ve worked in institutions for a long time now, and I’ve come to the realisation that you can care, and you can take that responsibility seriously, but you can’t carry the entire load of the history of Indigenous art and colonial ethnographic collecting to try and change or decolonise these spaces. I think my strategy going in, especially into my new role, was, okay, I can’t decolonise these big institutions, whatever that means. I don’t even believe in that anymore. Instead, it’s thinking that, if I’m here for however many years and I understand the current policies of acquisition, of exhibition, of the institution, then there can be a progression in the representation of First Nations people and a stronger focus on Indigenous art—and I can help the institution address that there has been a very large absence of that to date. Ultimately, I ask myself: how can I make the most impact for First Peoples artists and community in whatever I do?

This is an edited extract from a longer conversation that was published in Art Monthly Australasia’s special edition about the 24th Biennale of Sydney. Buy a copy of that issue here.

Tim Hardy: ‘Decor’ at Treadler

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Tim Hardy’s ‘Decor’ is sneaky, like the best conceptual art. Cunning like the conceit of things hidden in drawers, actually. Although coldly oblique at first, the contents of each of Hardy’s photographic panels is eventually revealed, similarly to how Marguerite Duras rummages through her own chest of drawers in Practicalities (1987), a collection of autobiographical essays, excerpts of which are distributed at the show as a bundle of dishevelled paper scraps—again, just like you might find tucked away in the ramshackle neglect of an ‘everything drawer’. Which is to say, like Duras in her essays, Hardy is interested in the baroque, the romantic and the mysterious, and in marrying these things to the everyday, to the domestic. What’s in a chest of drawers? Depending on the drawers you might have old secrets gathering dust (or shame), unpaid bills, love letters, or any amount of useless bric-à-brac which at one time might’ve seemed important. But things fade. Or conversely, they wax in importance, even in their neglect, to be resurrected at a later date. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes by chance.

The photographs within Hardy’s panels (read: drawers) are imagistic mementos, floating out of context much like the notes we embalm as memory, the very bedrock of recall. Nothing is recalled whole; our sense of history (personal, national) is a haphazard bundle of fragments, the more sensory the better. Here we have: images of someone’s intimate effects, Act One: Domestic Scene (2024); feminine legs surrounded by luggage, Act Two: Compact Mirror (2024); and a violin, Act Three: The Lament (2024). Drowning in negative space and utterly void of explication, Hardy’s invitation here is to confabulate, to dream connective tissue where there is none. Such is the mystery of old drawers, or an old bureau. The kind your grandparents have, which probably isn’t haunted but emanates the vibration of the past; a banal kind of hauntology, the eerie thickness of layered residues. The confounding silence of the trace. If these images are inaccessible, it is the inaccessibility of someone else’s life which we can only read in glimpses. Every history that isn’t ours is an alien ruin.

Between the disarray of a ransacked drawer set and the alluring legs of a woman in transit (presumably), the idea of a traveller is evoked in Hardy’s work. Perhaps these are ghostly or sad images because they’re all that’s left of a person that’s gone. Not dead necessarily, which makes the situation arguably even more crushing than a bereavement, because they have vanished due to circumstances or (worse) choice. Perhaps then the violin emits a dirge of unspeakable loss. That we are here, while the traveller is out there collecting more experiences, more memories, more artefacts for her own drawers, which she can then curate in the museum of old age. To speculate further, perhaps the sense of grief found in ‘Decor’ is laced with the bitter realisation that no person can ever be contained within a drawer, that a living breathing person is always more than the ritual objects we use to conjure them. Flesh violently trumps symbolism.

‘Decor’ is a promising albeit quiet vision from a young visual artist perhaps poised to do something bolder down the line. Though in caveat the stillness of the works is probably the point; that memory is dead, that its artefacts are dead, that hoarding the past in dusty totems can never be the séance we perhaps want it to be. And it can certainly never be resurrected in the ways we’d like. Still, the romance here is (so much like Duras) one of longing, born of quiet. Quiet between momentous action where we wobble, or doubt, or look back out of fear of what’s ahead; defensively craving the past as something completely and utterly known which in itself is a delusion. If there’s one thing that can’t be trusted, it’s our memories of the past. They’re curated like anything else, selected or denied according to criteria in the present, subject to so much occult revision. Which, by this essential tragedy, is probably why we hunt and collect so many tchotchkes related to versions of ourselves we can never receive again except as ghostly hallucinations, by the turn of the planchette. Kept, of course, in an old chest of drawers.

Samuel Te Kani (Ngapuhi), Tamaki Makaurau/Auckland

‘Decor’ is on display at Treadler until 15 August 2024.

Please note macrons in the Te Reo Maori terms do not appear on this webpage.

How Mangala Bai Maravi is preserving the Baiga art of tattooing

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Mangala Bai Maravi was born in Lalpur, a small village in the Dindori district of Madhya Pradesh, India. The daughter of Shanti Bai Maravi, a well-known Baiga tattoo artist from Lalpur, Mangala has developed an interesting way to revive and preserve Baiga tattoo culture by translating tribal tattoo designs on to paper and canvas. This has not been done before. Historically, the designs were passed down through oral tradition, or worked on from memory. Mangala’s innovative works on papers and canvas are keeping her Baiga tradition alive and have drawn international attention to the distinctive tattoos and culture of the Baiga people, while also providing a dependable source of income for her family.

At just seven years old, Mangala took an oath to learn everything she could about her own traditions and culture from her mother. By the time she was twelve, Mangala’s sole dream was that it would be her, out of all her brothers and sisters, who would carry on the Godna tradition of tattooing.

Throughout her life, Mangala has always been interested to discover more about the stories behind every symbol and motif of her ritual patterns. She perfected the tattooing technique after many years of training with and learning from her mother, who passed everything she knew down to Mangala. In the Baiga tribe, only women can carry this tradition ahead. When travelling with her mother, Mangala started to learn how to paint on canvas and paper. She then fused this knowledge with her tattooing technique.

The motifs of Baiga tattoos are primarily inspired by the natural world. Patterns of triangular lines depict mountains, while the circular motif of the sun is often a central feature. Symmetrical lines, which vary in thickness, and dots and crosses are the other major shapes that recur in Baiga tattoos.

Baiga women often have elaborate tattoos on multiple body parts, including on their forehead, arms, legs, back, neck and breasts. Different parts of the body are adorned to mark different milestones in life. The forehead tattoo is done around puberty to mark entry into adulthood. Arms and legs are completed by the time a woman is considered of an age appropriate for marriage. These tattoos are linked with ideas of beauty, healing and history. They are also believed to be carried into the afterlife because the ink integrates with the body itself.

Mangala is doing everything possible to keep this tradition of India alive. I believe Mangala has the courage and strength to make the Baiga people’s Godna tradition approachable for everyone around the world who is interested in learning about this art form and willing to approach it with love and respect.

Amit Arjel-Sharma

Amit Arjel-Sharma is an artist assistant to Baiga artist Mangala Bai Maravi. Both were recently in residence at the University of Sydney, where they worked on a series of paintings that were displayed at the Chau Chak Wing Museum and White Bay Power Station as part of the 24th Biennale of Sydney. Amit is both a close friend of and a translator for Mangala, having spent years working with and learning the ways of the Baiga. Amit shares Mangala’s story here with her input and permission.

This article was originally published in Art Monthly Australasia’s special edition about the 24th Biennale of Sydney. Purchase a copy here.

'Robert Fielding: NYARU’ at Canberra Glassworks

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Robert Fielding’s exhibition ‘NYARU’ at the Canberra Glassworks is a powerful showcase of culture, innovation and reclamation. Fielding is a celebrated multi-disciplinary artist of Pakistani, Afghan, Western Arrernte and Yankunytjatjara heritage and lives in the Mimili Community in the remote Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in South Australia.

Fielding has used glass, metal and mirrors to create this new body of work, which he developed as part of a residency at Canberra Glassworks in 2023. ‘NYARU’ begins with a cluster of discarded and reclaimed car doors, their metal or glass windows painted and sandblasted to create words, or cultural or landscape designs. His work Kultuni (spear right through) (2024), a single car door, sits at the centre of the room facing the entrance. It greets audiences with a glass spear penetrating the body of the door, emerging on the other side. Although glass is fragile by nature, this thick spear represents strength, power and culture, as does any traditional wooden spear.

A recurring subject in Fielding’s practice since 2016, the mutuka katalypa (car wrecks) tell overlooked or forgotten stories, particularly from his Mimili Community. Each door offers an insight into Community life and into Fielding’s innovative vision to recycle, upcycle, repurpose and reclaim discarded vehicle parts to create engaging and beautiful artworks. The artist wants audiences to consider the importance of the car, the stories they hold and their persistent abandoned presence out on Country. These doors also honour the important role cars have in enabling families living in remote Communities to attend ceremonies and visit Country.

In the connecting corridor between the exhibition’s two rooms, Fielding’s work Puruni (to press against) (2024) features impressions of objects with minor ochre detailing, embossed into white paper, providing a visual break. The corridor leads audiences to Fielding’s final work, his pièce de résistance, Kapi iili (steady rain) (2024), a large-scale installation featuring dozens of transparent spears hovering over a mirrored floor. The reflective effect of the artwork creates an optical illusion of movement, as if spears are raining down upon the viewer. A singular spear also sits central to the mirrored floor and stabs into it, creating tension as the shattered fragments of mirror distort all reflections. The overall effect is mesmerising.

Fielding’s use of words in conjunction with his physical artworks is another device he uses to articulate and share his thoughts, cultural knowledge or histories. He is a natural wordsmith, offering both poems and contextual information to provide a sense of balance to the artworks occupying the space.

‘NYARU’ demonstrates Fielding’s embrace of glass as medium to create stunning, engaging and strong cultural contemporary artworks. Together they embody life, identity, culture, history and experience. Fielding’s father, Bruce Fielding, was a member of the Stolen Generation, which Fielding references in much of his work. In this exhibition, he also subtly responds to the momentous 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice Referendum and the subsequent ‘No’ vote through his exploration of unity, equality, past and present, and fragility and resilience.

The power glass gives to Fielding’s practice cannot be overstated. Despite being an inherently fragile medium, glass actively portrays the artist’s deep cultural practice and strong natural ability. The artist residency at the Canberra Glassworks has provided many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists with the opportunity to experiment, innovate and learn new skills working with the medium.

Fielding’s works in ‘NYARU’ are breathtaking. His natural ability, keen vision, thoughtful intellect and innate creativity have culminated in a stunning and powerful representation of culture and contemporary Community life. The exhibition is truly inspirational.

Tina Baum, Gulumirrgin (Larrakia)/Wardaman/Karajarri, Senior Curator, First Nations Art at the National Gallery of Australia

Co-curated by Erin Vink (Ngiyampaa) and Aimee Frodsham, ‘Robert Fielding: NYARU’is on display at the Canberra Glassworks in partnership with Mimili Maku Arts until 21 July 2024.

Erin Vink is Chair of Art Monthly Australasia.

The importance of narrative sovereignty

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‘Indigenous peoples are the First Peoples of this country. We have a right to be shown.’
– Gail Mabo

First and foremost, I am the sum of my ancestors, hailing from ancient lineages of the Gurindji/Malngin, Pertame Arrernte and Worimi nations of the continent of Australia and the Baloch people of the Middle East. My skin name is Mpetyane. This is my identity among my people, one I share with all other Mpetyane. It determines my relationship with Altyerre, our creation story, and with everyone and everything around me. I state this here because my cultural heritage and identity are crucial to my work as a filmmaker.

I am the co-founder and creative director of GARUWA, a wholly Aboriginal-owned creative agency dedicated to sharing First Nations culture and stories in the right way, with community at the fore. The films that I produce follow protocols around cultural safety that draw on ancient traditions of respect, relationality and reciprocity that are embedded in my diverse lineage—and in many First Nations cultures. I feel a deep responsibility when translating First Nations art and culture to the screen. Indigenous peoples have been stereotyped and subject to bias, misrepresentation and cruelty in media going back centuries. The media has played a huge role in shaping narratives that have championed colonial perspectives, and justified violence and dispossession. But running counter to this dark history is another story: the long tradition of Indigenous artists and storytellers pushing back against colonial narratives and setting the record straight, in their own words. 

Both our own people and wider audiences need to understand and experience First Nations perspectives and worldviews. Narrative sovereignty—having the power to tell our own story on our own terms—is integral to this. There is no one better placed to tell our stories than us. Without a deep understanding of the nuances of Indigenous cultures, there is a risk that stories about First Nations peoples will fall into the trap of being clichéd, extractive and exploitative—as much media representation of Indigenous peoples has been throughout history.

I am currently working on a series of 14 short documentaries, one about each of the First Nations artists who were commissioned by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain to make new work for the 24th Biennale of Sydney. The opportunity to document the incredible work of these artists from across the globe is exciting, but it is also nerve-wracking, as I have a duty of care to each of these individuals and their unique creative practices. Telling an artist’s story through film is no easy task. An artist’s work is the ultimate representation of their identity, their creative response to their experience of the world around them. One of the big questions facing me with this project is: how can I translate these artists’ creative talents to the screen?

Another question I had was: how can I accurately and respectfully capture and communicate each of the artists’ cultural traditions? The artists come from around the world. Among them are Cristina Flores Pescorán, whose work is inspired by Peru’s Indigenous Chancay culture; Baiga artist Mangala Bai Maravi, who is based in central India; and Dylan Mooney, a Yuwi, Torres Strait and Australian South Sea Islander man, to give some idea of the diversity of First Nations cultures represented. Going into the project, I had knowledge of some of the artists’ traditions, but not all—yet it was my responsibility to capture them all on film.  

With that in mind, I began the process of making these films with intentional relationship building. I exchanged details of positionality, personal stories, cultural tales and more with the artists, allowing our relationships to evolve naturally and organically. A good yarn creates an opportunity for connection before the cameras start rolling, which results in the sharing of more meaningful stories. The making of these films has reaffirmed my belief that, while our contexts are not the same, there exists a deep camaraderie between Indigenous peoples around the globe. There are commonalities between us, including shared experiences of resistance, a commitment to the revitalisation of our cultures and a belief in the power of storytelling to improve the plight of our peoples. It has been a privilege to learn about these artists’ perspectives and artistic processes from a position of intercultural understanding. I feel honoured that they have all placed such great trust in me to tell their stories.

This anthology of documentaries we are producing is a co-production between GARUWA and our friends at Entropico, an international production company. The films are being made by a diverse team of creatives, including one of Australia’s best cinematographers, Tyson Perkins (Eastern Arrernte/Kalkadoon). Tyson and I chose to shoot in various formats—Super8, 16mm and digital—to create a visual language that spoke to the artists’ diverse voices, as well as the myriad histories and traditions upon which they draw. We have involved the artists in the creative process from the beginning to ensure that they have ownership of their stories. This collaborative process has resulted in a wonderful series of films. I cannot wait to share them with the world.

Kieran Mpetyane Satour (Gurindji/Pertame/Worimi)

Kieran Mpetyane Satour’s documentaries about the First Nations artists commissioned by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain to make work for the 24th Biennale of Sydney will be released later this year.

This article was originally published in Art Monthly Australasia’s special edition about the 24th Biennale of Sydney. Purchase a copy here.

What is ‘Wilderness Ideology’ and why is it problematic?

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Wilderness Ideology has emerged from the fields of land management and conservation, but its effects are seen and felt in the arts. In short, it’s the idea that true wildernesses are untouched by people and should largely remain so. In the context of conservation organisations, this does not seem like a bad thing. However, it can lead to an overemphasis on landscapes being vacant, effectively removing people—especially First Nations people, who have lived on and cared for Country for millennia—from the picture, even if we are still present. It’s a contemporary expression of terra nullius.

In 2012, Professor Marcia Langton addressed the subject at length in ‘The Conceit of Wilderness Ideology’, a talk she delivered as part of the Boyer Lectures series. Langton explained: ‘Aboriginal land is targeted both by mining companies and conservation campaigners precisely because it is Aboriginal land. These vast areas owned by Aboriginal people are the repository of Australia’s mega-diversity of flora, fauna and ecosystems because of the ancient Aboriginal system of management, and because Aboriginal people fought to protect their territories from white incursion. They are not wilderness areas—they are Aboriginal homelands, shaped over millennia by Aboriginal people.’

In the art world, Wilderness Ideology can be seen in the contemporary art market’s positioning of Country as something of a “Dreamtime” place. Today, there is the expectation that Indigenous artists will portray Country, but there is not always a proper understanding of the reality that First Nations artists actually live on Country and are intrinsically connected to it. These misconceptions of First Nations peoples’ relationships with their homelands are rooted in the history of the forced displacement of Australia’s Indigenous people from their Country and on to missions, reserves and stations.

Coming from Mapoon, and being a Teppathiggi and Tjungundji man from the Western Cape of Cape York, my own lived experience as an artist has shown me the immense importance that Country and on-Country practices bear in our daily lives. Today, a number of Cape York-based First Nations artists are challenging the art market’s framing of Indigenous peoples—especially artists—as spectators of Country, rather than part of it. They are doing so the way our people always have: by remaining, and by showing we remain.

The late and great Granny Mavis Ngallametta (a cousin of my Grandmother, Jean Little OAM) led the charge. She—and at a similar time, Naomi Hobson—established a visual tradition depicting Country precisely, while also incorporating elements of purposeful “abstraction” to disguise the sacredness and hidden knowledge linked with a place. Over time, the more truly abstract and minimalist works of artists from the Lockhart River Art Gang came to the fore, as did the Hope Vale painters’ depictions of their township. What Granny Mavis and these other artists did—and what some are still doing—was to showcase their Country itself as well as their deep and inexplicable connections to their lands. Visual art is the medium through which these artists and Lorekeepers prove First Nations peoples’ place on and within Country, which is an important response to Wilderness Ideology’s attempt to divorce people from place.

Informed by a—perhaps subconscious—Wilderness Ideology, players in the art market still cater to the non-Indigenous thirst for First Nations artworks that maintain the image of an untouched, sunburnt land. Kowanyama artist Tania Major, a proud Kokoberra woman, has spoken to me in the past of the noticeable absence of Blak peoples in First Nations artists’ own works—especially those from remote and regional areas. In answer to this, Tania and her fellow Kowanyama artists have frequently shown portraits in many forms at the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair.

Tania herself is a decorated artist, having won the CIAF Innovation Art Award in 2022 for her painting Dragon Flys Everywhere: Coming Into The Dry Season (2022). Structurally, Tania’s dragonfly painting is innovative and offers a psychedelic view of Country, as though viewing the tangible and sustaining land through the spirit world. When looking at Tania’s work, the paintings of Uncle Syd Bruce Shortjoe (who is a proud Wik-Iiyanh man of the Wik Mynah people) from Pormpuraaw also spring to mind. To me, his works typify a unique school of landscape painting, which seems to only come from the Western Cape of Cape York Peninsula. There’s a multidimensional quality to his paintings and his works on paper: they appear as if you are looking simultaneously at, floating above and sitting within any given landscape. Granny Nita Yunkaporta from Aurukun (a Wik-Mungkan Elder) is another superb artist with a similar approach. In fact, this emerging school likely came from the women artists of Aurukun, including Granny Mavis Ngallametta.

The key factor in the landscape works of cousin Tania, Uncle Sid and Granny Nita is that they often feature their/our own peoples (or at least glimpses of them/us) living and working on the land—as do works by Wanda Gibson, Gertie Deeral, Daisy Hamlot and Dr Bernard Singleton. All these artists’ works are culturally authoritative and position First Nations people as part and parcel of Country, which is a riposte to Wilderness Ideology. The works of these great artists remind audiences of our eternal presence on our homelands, across our Country, while also celebrating the beauty and vibrancy of the bush.

Jack Wilkie-Jans (Teppathiggi/Tjungundji), Gimuy/Cairns

Jack Wilkie-Jans is a multi-disciplinary artist, arts worker, writer and an Aboriginal affairs advocate.

Inside Archie Moore’s ‘kith and kin’—the exhibition that won the Golden Lion at the 60th Venice Biennale

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I step into the dark, quiet space and find myself surrounded by thousands of Ancestors, their names written in white chalk on blackboard paint covering the walls and ceiling, all of them engulfing me in a giant family tree. The names look down on me like stars in the deep night sky.

In front of me is what first looks like a model of the cityscape, but upon closer inspection is revealed to be piles of documents, reports of the deaths in custody of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia. I pause and look deep into the pool of reflection at the foot of this table of documents. I stand there and contemplate this immense exhibition, ‘kith and kin,’ by Kamilaroi and Bigambul artist Archie Moore, which has been curated by Ellie Buttrose for the Australia Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale.

I walk around the walls, reading each name, tracing each connection. Nestled in this First Nations family tree, I find moments where missing people’s histories have been erased, the chalk rubbed out and faded, or deep black holes where no information exists at all. Some boxes feature crude names that were used in the past to incorrectly label and identify Indigenous people. I recognise one – ‘half-caste’ – a term that was placed upon me as a child, and one I firmly reject.

Some boxes are simply not filled – these people’s names are absent, yet their absence speaks loudly. I reach the centre of the room and the box marked “me.”  The story of Archie begins here. On one side, there is the neatly arranged family tree of his father’s British and Scottish heritage. On the other, his mother’s Kamilaroi and Bigambul family forms a beautiful flowing current of names, lines and interconnected kinship relationships. This Indigenous family tree grows and spreads throughout the exhibition space, reaching the heights of the ceiling and fading into its dark abyss.

Evidence of Archie’s research into his genealogy is incredibly impressive. Through his years of investigation, he has accumulated more information than many institutions hold. I tried to imagine Archie’s journey with this work, from obtaining information about his maternal great-grandmother, Jane Clevin, from the anthropologist Norman Tindale, to venturing into the depths of state and federal archives. The journey to obtain the information and also to hold it, in his heart and spirit, must have been incredibly heavy.

My gaze falls from the dark ceiling down to the bright white piles of documents, some stamped with the seal of the crown, many of which feature ‘just’ another name on a piece of paper, another Indigenous death in custody, another family member lost – an all too familiar story for First Nations people. The documents hover above the dark pool of reflection. It is as though they sit above the tears of all those families and Ancestors that surround me. Some of the names are from my community. I feel a deep sense of loss.

As I mourn, sparkles of light catch my eye. They dance on the walls through a small, floor-level window that lets the sparkling reflection from the waters of Venetian canals in, connecting this sacred space to the waters outside, and onwards to the waters of home. I find comfort that those waters are reflected in this space. I feel hopeful that through the power of art and Archie’s remarkable work, our stories are now being shared beyond Australia, and are connecting us with other Indigenous peoples around the world.

This is my second visit to the space. The first was jarring because I entered during the launch of the exhibition. It was filled with people yarning and laughing, doing what we have come to expect from an exhibition opening. However, this was not your typical exhibition. I stood at the top of the display, solemn as I considered the juxtaposition of the endless names of Indigenous people who have died, set against the packed space of people celebrating. It did not feel right to me. However, that is the machinery of an exhibition launch. I understand why these events happen – and there was much to celebrate.

What is evident throughout the exhibition is the collaborative nature in which the work was brought together, with the support of Elder Bandjalung creative Djon Mundine; the considered exhibition design of Kaurareg and Meriam architect Kevin O’Brien; and the backing of Creative Australia, which commissioned the work. Ellie, from the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, has curated the exhibition with care and sensitivity. The complementary and collaborative nature of these relationships manifest themselves in this exceptionally thoughtful, heart-swelling exhibition.

‘kith and kin’ won the biennale’s prestigious Golden Lion award for Best National Participation. This is the first time in history an Australian artist has received this accolade. Congratulations to Archie, Ellie and the Creative Australia team on this deeply moving exhibition.

Peggy Kasabad Lane (Saibai Koedal Awagadhalayg), Venice

Peggy Kasabad Lane is the First Nations Curator at Court House Gallery and Tanks Arts Centre, Cairns, and attended the Venice Biennale as part of the (re)situateBiennale Delegates program run by Creative Australia.

Curated by Ellie Buttrose, ‘kith and kin’ by Archie Moore continues at the Australia Pavilion, Venice until 24 November 2024.

Justine Youssef: ‘Somewhat Eternal’ at the Institute of Modern Art

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A parsley stem is placed over a Samsung mobile phone displaying an image of a pillow resting on a bed; detached from location and absent of body, the ritual endures.

This poetic action and hauntingly absent frame, captured in Darug/Sydney based artist Justine Youssef’s three-channel video work exhibited as part of the multi-sensory installation Somewhat Eternal (2023) at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) in Meanjin/Brisbane, is a stark and timely echo of the ongoing impacts of colonialism. Somewhat Eternal grapples with questions concerning the displacement and attempted erasure of distinct global communities and the lasting effects this can have on diaspora peoples’ connections to their homelands.

Filmed in Lebanon, a multi-channel video work formulates the central focus of Somewhat Eternal. The video follows Youssef’s aunt performing R’sasa, an alchemic practice intended to ward off the evil eye in the pursuit of healing and repair from ailments and misfortunes. Due to their embodied knowledge of local ecologies, R’sasa has been practiced and sustained by generations of Youssef’s family, despite famine and military occupation. Reprised here, a mobile phone and WhatsApp video call become mediators of hybridity, enabling the ritual with parsley, water, lead and body to be shared, despite being fragmented and altered so as to traverse geographies. An uncannily familiar interaction for many migrant, refugee and Indigenous families who have formed an immediacy with the virtual to chart cartographies of the self despite, and within, the complexities of colonisation, globalisation and localisation. The persistence and resilience of Indigenous cultures to adapt to this networked connection stands in contestation to the changing cultural landscape and continues to press toward the decomposition of colonial power.

Filigree and embroidered text border the walls and suspended rose blankets rest in both gallery spaces. As our movement reveals the haunting histories contained in this text, we learn that the lead in R’sasa is reclaimed from the ammunition remains of AK-47 guns supplied by Australian weapons exports to Israel during their invasion of Lebanon between 1982 to 2000. A horrifying, yet unsurprising, parallel of our nation’s complicit action in upholding and promoting Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land and genocidal practices against Indigenous communities both in Palestine and on our own soil, with police brutality and increasing black deaths in custody an enduring source of national shame.

Truth-telling is embodied in Youssef's exhibition, framed by object, relation and ritual, to supersede the reductive and bias accounts of history found in western archives. A subtle perfume distilled from blessed milk thistle, burnet rose, Damask rose and Lebanese cedar permeates from the blanket textiles located throughout the gallery. This complex blend of aromatics is brought together by histories of land subjugation and occupation, while balancing aspirations for renewal through resilience. The scent acts as a surrogate body, reflecting adaptations to conduit bodies as dates feed displaced Palestinian babies instead of their mother’s milk.

The cardinal coloured and hydrosols steeped gallery offers a space in which to build solidarity in this time of crisis. Through Youssef’s work of cultural persistence and resistance, we are urged to sustain each other in our collective education, protest and demand for the end of the siege on Gaza, and annihilating attacks on Rafah.

As the photograph of Youssef’s pillow is laid on the bed with the parsley stem, we see in the video that her aunt ensures the phone is placed on charge as it rests overnight. This common gesture becomes a poignant commitment towards cultural endurance and forges it as somewhat eternal. These virtual formations facilitate and transform the possibilities for diaspora affiliation and aversion to colonial regimes. Affirming an inherent belonging with their homelands across oceans, land and networks. Somewhat Eternal asks us to consider how we might sustain solidarity and actively seek alternative futures that break our acquiescence to the creation of displacement.

Georgia Hayward, Meanjin/Brisbane

Curated by Stella Rosa McDonald, Tulleah Pearce and Patrice Sharkey, ‘Somewhat Eternal’ is on display at the Institute of Modern Art until 7 April 2024.

Inside and out: Notions of interiority at the NGV Triennial

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The third NGV Triennial showcases international and local art, featuring new pieces alongside the National Gallery of Victoria’s permanent collection. Stemming from the curatorial prompt of ‘Magic, Matter and Memory’, the third NGV Triennial features more than 100 artists and interacts skillfully with the National Gallery of Victoria’s permanent collection.

The NGV Triennial features a range of international and local artists whose work spans installations, sculpture and portraiture, highlighting the interior and exterior elements of the human experience as well as the gallery’s architecture. Crucially, in an exhibition featuring the likes of Tracy Emin and Yoko Ono, the voices of local female artists are no less strong and no less resonant, and provide a piercing snapshot of the inner lives of the artist and the subject in time, space and dreams.

Prudence Flint’s series ‘Hunting and Fishing’ (2023) depicts the Melbourne artist’s feminist interiors. Interestingly, the curators positioned the meditative portraits in Flint’s signature pastel tones amidst the ruminative portraits of the Dutch Masters, thought to symbolise the birth of the individual subject in modern European life. It’s a juxtaposition Flint finds apt, as well as flattering. ‘I had no idea how it was going to look,’ remembers Flint. ‘They came to me about three years ago and told me I was going to be put in the Dutch Master’s section. The carpet hadn’t been put down and I really loved it. I thought the paintings looked beautiful there.’

Flint cites portraits like A Fine Romance (2005) which depicts a female painter sitting in front of an easel, as having the mirror-like effect of individual self-discovering, speaking not only of the self’s invention but what she calls ‘a sense of underplayed violence and implied threat.’

In the work of Kosovan artist Petrit Halilaj, the process of invention involves transforming war to whimsy. ‘The catalyst of Very volcanic over this green feather (2021),’ explains Halilaj, ‘was a series of drawings I made while I was living in a refugee camp during the Kosovo War (1989–99). I wasn’t able to go back to them until 2021, when I created the exhibition for Tate St Ives. So, this project emerged as an intimate response to particular events such as war and displacement. It was a reaction, not a discovery. Through time, I found art to be a potent tool for empowering through memory. Art gives me a sense of being able to alter the course of my personal history, and by consequence, that of collective ones.’ Indeed, the NGV Triennial can be seen as a historical document of how art practice contributes to collective histories.

Halilaj’s drawings are blown-up in size and hung in the centre of the gallery. The installation leaves a series of gaps and open spaces where people can walk amongst and interact with the images of birds, trees and people; depictions that reflect a distressing period in Halilaj’s war-torn childhood. ‘How do you translate your experiences once you lose a sense of home and then you have to invent your way of being in the world?’ Halilaj asks rhetorically as I speak to him one evening. ‘I made this series of drawings when I was 13, when an Italian psychologist arrived at the camps and asked us kids to express our memories and experiences with felt-tip pens. I have always drawn a lot, but in that context, drawing became a tool for survival. I drew the images that were sculpted in my mind. Most of them depicted scenes from the war I had witnessed or heard of. Others were my way to escape that situation, like a bird. I watched these flying beings and imagined doing the same, someday. The birds in my drawings are usually very colorful, extravagant creatures. They represent memory and the possibility for a better future.’

From the psychological interiors of the female experience to the creative rendering of one child’s experiences of war, the NGV Triennial represents a range of landscapes and dreamscapes, which turn matter, memory and subjects inside and out. Nowhere is this question of interiority and exteriority grappled with more thoroughly than in Sheila Hicks’s sculpture Nowhere to go (2022). A doyenne of modern feminist sculpture, Hick’s masterfully alludes to the ways in which textile arts can be a metaphor for lived experience; threads woven through and strengthened to speak of resilience, invention and the spaces inside and between us. Nowhere to go could be a landscape or a dreamscape and you can imagine yourself inside it as well as around it, an experience Hicks credits to the immersive nature of her practice.

Hicks sees her subject in bold terms as ‘building the future.’ She describes how ‘when people walk into the room, they lift their eyes and their chin and look upwards and then they scan and build colour and form. There’s so much going on in the world today that drags us downwards, so I like to keep looking upwards. My sculpture is additive, not subtractive. When I get to the top I keep going up. Each person has the privilege of seeing it in their personal way. But I’m adding to the history of art as I see it and I’m trying to be uplifting.’

The third NGV Triennial is rich with the possibilities of uplift. From feminist subjectivity to refugee stories extending hospitality in an existing museum space, the pieces featured in this exhibition show how art can take you everywhere, from places inside yourself to parts of the world where you’ve never travelled. These three artists prove that with bold colours, new perspectives and interesting compositions, the past and the present, memory and magic can interact symphonically and enrich our understanding of why art matters.

Vanessa Francesca, Naarm/Melbourne

The ‘NGV Triennial’ is on display at the National Gallery of Victoria until 7 April 2024.

Non-fungible movements: ‘Contact High’ at Gertrude Contemporary

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We’re told to shuffle backwards to allow more space for the performance. We hardly fit. Bunched up, curving along the back wall of the gallery, this is different from what usually occurs here; it matters more acutely when and where we are in the room. 

Piloted in 2022 by Performance Review and Gertrude Contemporary, Dance, dance is the final iteration of ‘Contact High’, a performance series that places the body transparently at the centre of practice. Of course, this always is the case in life and art, but other artforms such as object-based practice, film and writing can often obscure this fact by positioning the live body in the past. There is something brave about performance in the way it is created anew each time, making the possibility of failure feel raw. We’re quiet and we watch closely. 

We’re also more implicated in the process, attested to by the anticipatory flutter in many stomachs during Cold Tooth (2024) as Harrison Ritchie-Jones plucks an audience member from the crowd, who he continues to intimately roll on top of, cradle like a baby and whack against the wall. As Ritchie-Jones drags dirt around the space, spits wine dramatically against the wall and smears it with fake blood, I wonder whether I can start to eat the burrito hidden in my bag now the gallery decorum has been upended.  

In Mara Galagher’s piece with Andrea Illés and Nelly Clifton, titled unnamed work (2024), we are witness to bodies resting beneath an engine-ready van; a dangerous act heightened as cars move right next to the performers. A flock of birds fly behind Illés’s shoulder as she perches unflinchingly on top of the van looking down High Street, and I’m more aware than before of Gertrude Contemporary’s location and surroundings. Moving and moving outside opens the space of relation, extending audiences and negating the supposed neutrality of our art spaces. The context of the neighbourhood pours in and the smell of cooking lamb wafts out.

The night ends with Sarah Aiken’s Body Corp (iteration no.4) (2024), continuing her exploration of the fractured, incomplete selves we project through our screens. Objects are hidden, revealed, and mismatched as Sarah’s live body momentarily synchronises again and again with her body on the screen. What you see coming into alignment is dependent on your spatial relationship to the performance; a reminder of the multiple truths alongside the absolute; a complicated paradox often obscured in the era of self-branding, reshares and infographics on platforms owned and governed by increasingly wealthy billionaires.

Rather than relegating it to the sadly denigrated-in-the-eyes-of-the-institution public program, ‘Contact High’ progressively positions dance and performance as the main event. Walsh’s curatorial approach provides a deeper contrast to the traditional activities of the gallery and allows for a questioning of what usually occurs here. Dance and performance make the presumed mechanics of the gallery clearer and provide different, compelling, mirror neuron activating options. Instead of facing out to the walls, our bodies look at their bodies and there is something refreshing in the directness. It makes you think, could we have more of these cultural conversations without the collectable objects? 

Dance and performance have a harder time being purchased as an investment (or for lowering taxes) and are inherently more difficult to possess as production cannot be easily divorced from its maker. It is limited by the body which complicates unbounded trade and growth. This particularity of the form challenges pervading economic structures which repeatedly fail to recognise limits of people and ecosystems. The reflection of organic reality feels important as more of life becomes alienated, transactional, and objectified for the ungrounded notion of profit and status. It’s hard to put dance on a wall and it doesn’t easily match the curtains.

Despite a lack of support for dance and performance art, ‘Contact High’ sits as a testament to its popularity and critical function, and grounds the necessity for institutions to provide it with increased support. As we pay more, work more, and see each other less, live art and the gathering it precipitates feels potent. Changing, breathing bodies in the process of entrainment, possible only together and not to be owned or reproduced ad infinitum. 

Lana Nguyen, Naarm/Melbourne

Piloted in 2022, ‘Contact High’ is a three-year partnership between Gertrude Contemporary and Performance Review that interrogates the transference that occurs between performers and audiences, primarily within the gallery space. ‘Contact High’ is curated by Anador Walsh, Director of Performance Review.

The body that holds us: Jordan Wolfson’s ‘Body Sculpture’ at the National Gallery of Australia

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Deep within the brutalist confines of the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), an anticipated new artwork is unveiled. Commissioned in 2019 for the NGA’s permanent collection, Body Sculpture (2023) is an animatronic sculpture by prolific American artist Jordan Wolfson. Branded an enfant terrible early on in his career, Wolfson, now 43 years old, has seemingly entered a new phase, one defined less by transgression and more by abstraction.  

Body Sculpture blends person and object, minimalism and figuration, art and technology, and compels viewers to experience their own bodies and the consciousness it houses. The third in Wolfson’s series of animatronic sculptures after Female Figure (2014) and Colored Sculpture (2016), Body Sculpture is formally innovative and tonally distinct, squarely engaging with human practices such as introspection, spirituality, and, at times, agonizing cogitation. Not since Callum Morton’s Reception (2016), a sculptural installation featuring a robotic facsimile of Melbourne art dealer Anna Schwartz, has an animatronic artwork exhibited in Australia generated such interest. Like Morton’s work, Body Sculpture is capable of eliciting decidedly human responses including sadness, elation, and dread.

The NGA provides an atypical context for Body Sculpture’s inauguration. Despite being somewhat removed from the global contemporary art hubs of New York and London, Kamberri/Canberra and the NGA can provide the space, time, and resources for Wolfson’s ambitious sculpture to be realised, experienced, and maintained. The issue of cost has been the subject of debate since the commission was first announced, with some suggesting it was unwise for the NGA to make the reported $6.67 million investment, despite the potential upside. The debut of Female Figure for instance, saw people queuing for hours outside David Zwirner in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighbourhood. It will be interesting to see whether any snaking lines start to form within the Parliamentary Triangle.

As is typical of Wolfson’s work, meaning is undefined and is constructed by numerous formal elements and signifiers. Stripped of the pop-cultural associations of Female Figure and Colored Sculpture (including references to Alfred E. Neuman, Lady Gaga and Huckleberry Finn), Body Sculpture is ostensibly minimal by comparison. Despite the sculpture encompassing several mechanisms, a central 36-square-inch metal cube assumes the role of protagonist; its consciousness conjured by two jutting arms. Over approximately 25 minutes, the Judd-like cube and its extremities are manipulated by an additional robotic appendage wielding a leaden chain. Framed by an immense steel gantry, the cube performs a sequence of precise movements across three acts. Underpinned by a firm rhythmic quality, tender signs of prayer, meditation and self-care give way to motions conveying sensuality and playfulness, which evolve into a series of intensely sexual gestures before cutting to a stark expression of unfathomable shame. Body Sculpture culminates in simulations of violence, ferocity, and intractable rage as the sculpture thrashes wildly until, finally, it prepares to stage a suicidal action. The artwork is abundantly beautiful and incredibly sad.    

The technological sophistication of Body Sculpture facilitates the profound emotional capacity of what is, in essence, a faceless aluminium cube. It is important to highlight the rigorous collaborative processes that underpin Body Sculpture and allow for the artwork’s conscious faculty to be realised. Roboticist, artist, and software engineer Mark Setrakian, known for his work on films including How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000), Hellboy (2004), and Men in Black (1997), is Wolfson’s longstanding principle collaborator. Other notable consultants on Body Sculpture include composer and percussionist Eli Keszler, clown expert Stefan Haves, and choreographers including Adam Linder, Daphne Fernberger, and Irme and Marne van Opstal.

Whether or not Body Sculpture acts as a proxy for its audience, the elusive beauty of its scraped surfaces engages with broader notions of erosion and decay, acknowledging the constant abrasion of the body that holds us. Wolfson allows Body Sculpture to be scarred by the detritus of life, inviting audiences to hold communion with the affected artwork and, in turn, with themselves. 

Yarran Gatsby, Kamberri/Canberra

Curated by Russell Storer, ‘Jordan Wolfson: Body Sculpture’ is on display at the National Gallery of Australia until 28 April 2024. Jordan Wolfson lives in Los Angeles and is represented by David Zwirner, Gagosian, and Sadie Coles HQ.  

If the heart has an eye: Hoda Afshar at the Art Gallery of New South Wales

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It’s 1824 and we’re in the Caribbean, on the island of Trinidad to be precise. Marie-Ursule, queen of a secret society of slaves, is plotting a mass murder-suicide in an act of strategic revolt. Her plan unfolds but with one small hitch. Marie-Ursule can’t kill her daughter Bola; Bola refuses to die. And it so happens that when Bola escapes her mother’s murderous clutches, a new world opens. Bola’s descendants spill out across the Caribbean, North America, and out into the world. They wander inside a lyrical exile as their compasses point towards displacement.

Their journey is full of twists, turns and chance encounters. It’s a journey Dionne Brand renders in her novel At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999) with all the skills at her disposal. Brand’s novel is a cacophony of shifting moods, rhythms, and formal structures. Likewise, Hoda Afshar uses all the skills at her artistic disposal to cover similar terrain. Yearning, exile, estrangement, fleeting acts of freedom – this is the wellspring from which Afshar assembles her aesthetic sensibility. And if you didn’t know any better, you could easily mistake her for one of Bola’s wandering descendants.

In some respects, Afshar fits the bill. Born in Iran, she migrated to Australia in 2007. Like Bola’s descendants, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune have delivered her to a place of liminality. An outsider of sorts in her native Iran, she occupies a similar status in Australia. Afshar’s work leans into this displacement. The results of such a disposition, palpably evident in ‘A Curve is a Broken Line’ at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, allows for a glimpse inside a body of work saddled with noble ambition. As viewers, we’re invited to lurk inside a compelling displacement.

Art is at its most stimulating when unhinged. When it communicates wildly, in directions that institutions, despite concerted efforts, can never fully control. ‘A Curve is a Broken Line’ is testament to this truth. Here, the work does the talking. It’s lucid, possessed with compositional discipline. It’s at times opaque, oddly askew. It’s also a pleasure to visually behold.

I came to the exhibition with curiosity piqued. I had encountered Afshar’s work from afar, but never in person. From behind a computer screen, she appeared to be tapping into something I had long suspected – that reality is too surreal to comprehend without the aid of a poetic touch.

Walking into In the Exodus, I Love You More (2014–) my suspicions were reconfirmed. As portraits of Iran, this series can best be described as detours, digressions, open-ended gestures. They are the result of a trip Afshar made to her homeland after seven years abroad. There’s no allowance for restoration, for closure. In Shadow (2018), an impenetrable figure, clad in black, sits turned away from your gaze, centred in a naturally lit, tiled setting. Their only company is their shadow. You don’t know who they are, where they are coming from, or where they are going. Likewise in Surface (2014), another impenetrable figure stands facing a brick wall. You struggle to place them within a context. The landscape, both built and natural, is similarly imponderable. In Vault (2018), an octagon of blue-sky cuts into an obscure backdrop. Save for a pocket of light that reveals a stony surface, you don’t know what sits inside the capacious blackness. Under Afshar’s guidance there’s much you don’t see, and likely never will, when it comes to Iran. You can only see the fragments of a homeland, not the whole, variations of theme and form that spark connection and disconnection.

Variations of theme and form continued as I progressed inside the exhibition. In Turn (2023) presents a series of meticulous works of stately simplicity. Taken together, they evoke a delicate pas de deux between the seen and unseen, the revealed and concealed. Obfuscation emerges as a clear pictorial motif. Iranian women, dressed in black and, like Afshar, based in Melbourne, console, touch, and support one another. Through judicious cropping, their individual identities are concealed. Their faces, for the most part, exist out of frame, as if rejecting any effort to engage, to possess, to be seen. In a way, this makes perfect sense. The women are united in a collective grief, mourning, from afar, the death of Masha Amini at the hands of the Guidance Patrol. You can forgive them for not wanting prying eyes to pierce their sacred bubble.

In Remain (2019), a motley crew of displaced men languishing on Manus Island take centre stage. The previously stressed obfuscation is eased up a little. There are certain things you need to see in life. Afshar grants her subjects agency, inviting them to become collaborators. The resulting portraits, positioned across a towering wall, invite a studied viewing. You want to lean into them but can’t. The looking here must be accompanied by listening – stirring falsettos, desperate testimonies, and existential cries spill from videos of some of the same men projected onto two enlarged, slanted walls behind you. It was almost unbearable, their wounded kinship that carried the memory, at least within me, of an ineradicable and collective pain, a stark sense of something profoundly out of joint.  

The rest of the exhibition sees Afshar wandering with characteristic discipline across a disparate field, touching on the secretive desires of gay men in Iran, the dolorous agony of Australian whistle-blowers, and the otherworldly lives of Afro-Iranians in the Strait of Hormuz. The themes are not identical but linked by visual parallels, striking symmetries, and rhyming forms. A seeing guided by an inner attitude is encouraged. Afshar demands, in a most gentle way, audiences to meet and challenge her work on its own terms. It’s a welcome pleasure to be burdened so.

Brian Obiri-Asare, Warrang/Sydney

Curated by Isobel Parker-Philip, ‘A Curve is a Broken Line’ continues at the Art Gallery of New South Wales until 21 January 2024.

To rise and appear: Tarnanthi at AGSA

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In the language of the Kaurna people, the traditional owners of the area now known as the Tarntanya/Adelaide Plains, Tarnanthi means ‘to rise, come forth, spring up, or appear’. This is certainly true of the spirit of Tarnanthi 2023 as surmised by Western Arrernte/Yankunytjatjara artist Robert Fielding, who delivered a commanding keynote address at Tarnanthi’s official opening event. Robert declared that it was with grace and power that with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples had come together to celebrate Blak excellence in the immediate wake of Australians voting against First Nations people being recognised in the nation’s constitution. The message was clear: We’ve survived the adverse effects of the colony with grace before, and we will continue to do so again.

One of the great strengths of Tarnanthi is the group exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), and it opened with an extraordinary body of work by Djakaŋu Yunupiŋu (Gumatj), including paintings on found board, larrakitj, and bark. It’s no surprise that curator Nici Cumpston (Barkindji) installed the works here, as these are the first you encounter as you make your descent into the exhibition space. They are Djakaŋu’s sublime and unique renditions of the Djulpan story and the Seven Sisters, yet they retain subtle flourishes which acknowledge the creative and cultural influences that have impressed upon her, from her distinguished family of artists to other leading senior practitioners working out of Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka, Yirrkala’s art centre.

I had the great pleasure of travelling across the Pilbara with Nici in July of 2022, and while visiting Martumili Artists, I watched the art centre staff lay out a roll of unstretched canvas paintings by Martu artist Bugai Whyoulter. Nici was considering paintings for inclusion in this iteration of Tarnanthi, so it was a personal delight to encounter Bugai’s installation, seeing her works go from the art centre floor to the walls of AGSA. The selection of works is dreamy. Bugai is a master of gesture, constructing a soft palette of colours and laying down energetic marks to record the Country she belongs to. Bugai is focused on reinvention, of telling us about her relationship with the land in her terms. She should very much be credited as helping usher in a new phase of abstraction within the field of Western Desert painting, as evidenced by this exceptional body of work.

The following gallery space has a fun, playful installation of works that speak to and with each other, evidenced in a suite of beautiful bird paintings by Walmajarri artist Nyangulya Katie Nalgood, ceramics by Western Aranda potter Judith Pungarta Inkamala, and paintings, soft sculpture and video work by several artists who make through Tangentyere and Yarrenyty Arltere Artists. Judith’s ceramics, in the typical style of the Hermannsburg Potters, are joyful and capture her lived experience around Ntaria/Hermannsburg, but also reflect her knowledge of life experiences and her working as a potter. A detail of one work features artists from the studio firing their ceramics the ‘old ways’, over a fire, before they had a kiln. Across the works, Judith’s humour is evident, and she has a great style of painting that gives each work a sense of energy and drama.

The coveted solo exhibition at AGSA in this year’s Tarnanthi goes to the well-deserving Western Aranda artist Vincent Namatjira. This is Vincent’s first major survey exhibition in a state gallery and it’s incredibly varied. There are the important paintings one would recognise, such as Vincent’s winning work from the 2020 Archibald Prize, Stand strong for who you are, and Close Contact which won the 2019 Ramsay Art Prize. But to me, the best are also the new works made by Vincent with his friends, including a collaborative painting with Gundungurra-based artist Ben Quilty, the pair having painted themselves and their studio dogs, and a series of delicately playful pop-out books by Vincent and Kuku Yalanji/Girramay artist Tony Albert, that continue Vincent’s commentary on the Royal Tour.

The satellite shows for Tarnanthi are varied in medium and levels of success. The real triumph is the solo exhibition of Pitjantjatjara artist Timo Hogan, ‘Kumpilpa Ngaranyi – Unseen’ at Light Square Gallery. These are gorgeous large-scale works all depicting Lake Barker. In speaking to the sentience of his Country, Timo’s experimentation and the slight opening up of his palette is clever, helping his works take on an ethereal quality. They are epic works that requires one to stand in front of each canvas for some time. Even so, you will go away only just beginning to understand the unknown and unseen forces at play, which Timo knows intimately well and has attempted to reveal.

Tarnanthi continues until 21 January 2024 so there is plenty of time to visit Tarntanya to see the group and solo exhibitions at AGSA, but also some of the independent shows across the city.

Erin Vink, Tarntanya/Adelaide

What do you mean: James Nguyen’s ‘Open Glossary’ at ACCA

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James Nguyen’s ‘Open Glossary’ currently on display at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) provides a dazzling opportunity to think about which words are key to our lived experiences and to interpret those words for ourselves. Especially for those of us who grew up in households where dictionaries were sacred objects, able to transport an individual whose psychological life was confined to a small village, into a multicultural city and the opportunities and independence that entails.

For Nguyen, words have real power, and possess the capacity to dance in and out of their languages of origin and challenge the powers that keep them in their sway. Nguyen’s practice playfully integrates languages and artistic disciplines, and serves a social function by supporting marginalised voices, rich with insight about the nature of belonging in a pluralist society.

When viewing Nguyen’s work, I was reminded of Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1885-1975) work on the notion of heteroglossia, or the idea that different languages can be juxtaposed, contrasted, collaged, and contrasted to convey that a language is also a perspective. Nguyen’s work touches on these concepts while insisting on pluralities, underscored by the contribution of several guest artists in ‘Open Glossary’.

This plurality is evident from the initial gallery, where a tapestry of interlinked white shirts, sourced from all over Australia, are sewn together to form a kind of Praetorian Guard. The installation reminds viewers of the deregulation of the garment trade and the independence of women working in the industry. An audio collaboration between Nguyen and Budi Sudarto provides multilingual interviews reflecting on the provenance of the shirts. For this reviewer, whose Italian grandmother worked as a pieceworker, it’s a familiar and beautifully spot lit story.

The next gallery speaks most strongly to the concept of ‘open glossaries’ at the heart of Nguyen’s presentation. A series of angel costumes, a mainstay of queer rights protests since the Stonewall riots, have been embroidered with the words for ‘queer’ in different languages. Projected onto a screen, A Queer Glossary shows the evolving nature of sexuality and its languages, as a colorful spinning wheel belies a permanent stasis between struggle and change.

The adjacent gallery showcases a collaboration between Nguyen and Tamsen Hopkinson (Ngati Kahungunu, Ngati Pahauwera). The space offers an embodiment of the ‘Hui’ which is a word for ‘meeting space’ shared between Indo-Pacific and Moana Polynesian cultures. This meeting space is fringed with prayer mats, and shoes must be taken off to enter. It serves to reflect the value of community spaces that can provide a platform for cross-cultural encounters.

The final gallery was developed collaboratively by Nguyen and Kate ten Buuren (Taungurung) as a space where young folk can consider their relationship with Aboriginal and Torres Strait people in contemporary Australia. The interactive space contains a variety of hats styled after native animals, dioramas and materials to create drawings, as well as zines and the story of Lerty the Possum who just wants to sing, and to find and share her voice.

‘Open Glossary’ is an arresting exhibition that gives voice to a range of important perspectives and brings them together in a rich and euphonious chorus.

Vanessa Francesca, Naarm/Melbourne

‘Open Glossary’ is supported by the Copyright Agency Partnerships Commission and is on display at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) until 19 November 2023.

Please note macrons in the Te Reo Maori terms do not appear on this webpage.

Women’s work

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What is promised by exhibitions and books devoted exclusively to women practitioners? That work and artists that have previously been ignored or neglected will be acknowledged and celebrated? That the reasons for this neglect will be highlighted and condemned? That something specific to the gender of the makers will be identified in the stories of their careers, or even in their work? That the history of art being offered will be distinctively different from those without this particular focus? Through Shaded Glass, Lissa Mitchell’s assiduously researched and beautifully illustrated new book about women photographers in Aotearoa/New Zealand, carefully negotiates all these implied promises. Her project is described by the author as ‘revealing a multifaceted community of photographic production that shows who the women were, how they were involved and what factors enabled, prevented and limited them.’ This revelation is ably fulfilled. 

The book begins in the 1860s, when professional studios became firmly established in New Zealand, and finishes a century later, just before photography blossomed into a fine art in which many women were prominent. Mitchell organises her research into a series of chapters that proceed both chronologically and according to genres of practice, so that we learn about the role of women in professional studios but also in the world of amateur photography and clubs and societies. Much emphasis is placed on the business of photography, and for good reason: in the first few decades, far more women worked as mounters, retouchers or printers than as photographers. These are the women who have hitherto remained an invisible presence in histories of photography. Mitchell briefly traces the modernist version of that history, which she concludes has led to the privileging of male artistic figures and unmanipulated photographs. She argues that: ‘the skills employed in retouching, colouring, printing and mounting photographs became characterised as feminine roles associated with other activities done by hand, such as needlework, and [as a result were] increasingly devalued.’ This kind of denigration is revisited in later chapters. As Mitchell tells us, genres like portraiture, photojournalism and architectural pictures, the ones ‘in which most women involved in the medium work’, are ‘precisely those that have been marginalised in the histories of photography in Aotearoa’. Sexism is thereby shown to be systemic, not just a matter of personal prejudice.

To discover New Zealand’s women photographers and their stories, Mitchell has scoured a wide range of sources, including electoral rolls, classified advertisements, legal documents, street directories and newspaper stories. A similar degree of diligence was required to find the photographs that illustrate this book. They come from regional and private collections, as well as from Te Papa’s own capacious archive. But some of these illustrations are digital positives from surviving negatives, or are reproductions of images known only from their publication in vintage magazines or newspapers. As a consequence, we are provided with an illuminating array of hitherto unfamiliar pictures, from hand-coloured and embroidered photographs to album pages filled with still-life compositions to a variety of professional portraits or landscape views. Vernacular examples dominate but women also produced some notable artworks. A particularly striking image is a pictorialist work by Beatrice Mabel Gibson titled Winter Night and dated to about 1920. The photograph was exhibited widely, in both New Zealand and Australia, and much praised in the photographic press of the time. However, only one print has survived to the present, a gift by the photographer to a woman peer. Another example of pictorialism is the hand-coloured silver gelatin print titled Fire, made by Elin ‘Elfie’ Ralph in about 1929, and primarily comprised of a red-tinted haze of threatening smoke. These exceptional examples of photographic artistry are joined by a multitude of less innovative portraits and landscapes, proving that women practitioners were just as capable of bread-and-butter commercial work as their male counterparts.

In Through Shaded Glass, photographs tend to be described rather than interpreted. This is in keeping with the heavy emphasis the book places on the social context provided by biography and anecdote. We are told, for example, about an explosion that occurred in Dunedin on 17 May 1886 that resulted in rocks falling through the ceiling of the London Portrait Rooms, killing sisters Julia Finch and Louisa Irwin, who both worked there. Or we learn about the sexual harassment experienced by Minnie Hooper and Mary Ann Allison in 1888 while they worked at a factory that manufactured dry-plate glass negatives in Christchurch. The employment of all these women in the photography industry would be lost to history but for the legal traces left by their travails. Even more revealing are the stories of Austrian and German refugees from Nazism who arrived in New Zealand in the 1930s, some of them accomplished photographers. Irene Koppel, for example, settled in Wellington in 1937, at first working as a printer, before getting a job using her Leica to make candid portraits in the street. As a German Jew and therefore a suspicious foreign national, Koppel was, from October 1940, prohibited from possessing any camera without special police permission. Her marriage in February 1943 was considered sufficient reason to have that permission withdrawn (as, it was argued, she no longer needed to support herself). Mitchell recounts a number of similar stories about such women, a reminder of the obstacles that had to be overcome for these displaced harbingers of European modernism to practise their craft in Aotearoa.

Mitchell’s research makes it plain that women have always played a central role in New Zealand photography, as workers, photographers and clients (the book is enhanced by numerous photographs of women, including several self-portraits that showcase the skill of those taking them). By focusing on the lives of these women, Through Shaded Glass in effect offers a social history of the country in which they worked, at least as one half of the population experienced it. In the process, the book also documents a cavalcade of photographic practices usually ignored by other historians, including those conducted in the darkroom or the office rather than just behind a camera. The end result is an essential supplement to more conventional, more masculine, histories of photography, wherever they have been produced.

Geoffrey Batchen

Through Shaded Glass: Women and photography in Aotearoa New Zealand 1860–1960 by Lissa Mitchell: Te Papa Press, Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Wellington, 2023, 368 pages, NZ$75; Geoffrey Batchen is Professor of History of Art at the University of Oxford.

Crushed by waves: Reuben Holt in conversation with Marco Fusinato

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Marco Fusinato is an artist whose practice moves between performance and installation, photography and recording. Last weekend he premiered a live version of his ongoing project DESASTRES at Atonal, Berlin’s annual festival for sonic and visual art in a former thermal power station. Taking place within the venue’s 100-metre-long turbine hall, it’s an evolution of the monumental work Fusinato presented over 200 days at the Venice Biennale’s Australian Pavilion in 2022.

Reuben Holt (RH): How would you describe your work to someone who's never experienced it before?

Marco Fusinato (MF): I work as a contemporary artist and a noise musician, as an artist I work across a range of projects. Each project may be different but there's a sensibility that runs across all of them. Many of them focus on my interests around the tensions in opposing forces, for example, the underground versus the institution, noise versus silence, minimalism versus maximalism, purity versus contamination and so on. As a musician I use the electric guitar and mass amplification to create a physical experience for the audience.

DESASTRES is a culmination of many of my interests and previous projects - from noise improvisation, drone, down-tuned ‘corrupted’ chord progressions through to mass image archiving. DESASTRES uses the force of the sound and the power of the images to create impact on the audience - whether it's in the gallery or a festival situation.

RH: Marathon guitar performances have been a recurring feature in your work, from the Spectral Arrows series staged in various galleries around the world, to the 200 days of eight hour guitar sets at the Venice Biennale. What aesthetic role do they play?

MF: There’s a big difference exhibiting in a gallery compared to performing improvised music. The main one being time. An exhibition can last weeks, months, years, whereas a performance in a club or festival is usually under an hour. Over a decade ago I became frustrated with touring (travel time, hotels, transfers, waiting at the venue), only to be on stage for under an hour. Spectral Arrows began out of this frustration. I thought, well if I’m going to turn up, I’m going to stay all day. I perform for the entire opening hours of the space (gallery, museum, theatre, venue) which is usually between six to eight hours. It’s an occupation, a job. I set up facing the wall with a line of amplifiers facing out into the space. I have my back to the audience, so I’m not distracted by who is in the room. It allows me to concentrate on the sound and removes any desire to ‘entertain’. I let the physicality of the sound take me in directions that are unexpected. I’m constantly soaked in an overload of harmonics and clashing frequencies. I lose sense of time. It's like standing in the ocean all day being crushed by waves. The audience is free to experience the work from anywhere in the space, for as long as they want, although it’s impossible to grasp the whole due to the duration of the performance.

RH: What kind of impact is audience behaviour having on the evolution of your work?

MF: In Venice (at the Biennale) I could feel them. On average there were around two thousand people every day, on some days 5,000 – that’s around 400,000 in total. The installation comprised three elements - me, the amplification, and an LED screen. These elements are usually on the stage but now the audience is in amongst it all, they are active participants which leads to all sorts of unexpected encounters and friction. People wanted to engage, and express their opinions. At times that would affect what I would do, for example if it got too much for me, I’d clear the room with the harshest noise I could make. Berlin Atonal was more like a traditional concert setup, with a large stage, PA system and massive video projection screen. A separation from the audience.

RH: In DESASTRES, your guitar is connected to an interface that allows you to manipulate the duration of images projected on the video screen. But not necessarily the order or content of the images themselves. What is the significance of chance in your work?

MF: For DESASTRES the sound is always improvised, and the images are randomized. I never know what image will appear on the screen. The control unit decides whether to bring up an image as I've chosen it - or it can choose to bring an image up in negative, cropped, or as a double exposure. It’s a constant surprise for me to see what image comes up next. The chance element confuses meaning, what one person makes of a series of images is different to the person standing next to them. There are many ways to interpret the performance. Keep in mind it is difficult to have a conversation while the images are cascading due to the volume so it’s fascinating to hear what sounds and images stayed with people.

RH: My understanding is that you collected most of the images during the Melbourne COVID lockdowns and yet some of them seem prescient of political events that were yet to unfold, for example, the war in Ukraine. I wondered what impact unfolding political events have on the evolution of the work.

MF: The images I select are very particular as they must be open enough for multiple interpretations by a wide number of people with diverse backgrounds. I want the images to have resonance no matter where the work is experienced. For example, when I choose images of conflict, they tend to be cropped in a way that doesn’t specifically show the location. So, whether it’s an image from art history or the war in Ukraine there’s a consistency.

I don’t choose images of politicians, celebrities, and so on. I try to eliminate the personality. I went through a phase of photographing newsreaders’ ties and what their hands were doing. They look the same the world over. That kind of stuff is more interesting to me.

DESASTRES relies on hallucinations in disorientation and an exhaustion from confusion.

Death and forever: Daniel Mudie Cunningham at Wollongong Art Gallery

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From a position on the left-hand side of the gallery space, the soft glow of a neon sign is reflected in reverse on the glass surface of an archival frame, momentarily obscuring a poster citing funeral songs.

I travelled from Warrang/Sydney to Woolyungah/Wollongong to see ‘Are You There?’, Daniel Mudie Cunningham’s first career survey. Tenderly curated by James Gatt, the exhibition spans three decades of Cunningham’s practice and evidences a lifetime of performance and documentation.

Informed by the dove-tailing experiences of growing up in a conservative religious household and as a gay man in the 1990s, Cunningham’s cyclical artistic gestures respond in part to the promises of eternal damnation and death. A family photograph of the artist's younger brother, buried to the neck in sand, conjures David Wonarowicz's self-portrait Untitled (Face in Dirt) (1991), and reads here as a reflection on mortality. In Lonesome Cowboy (1993) an 18-year-old Cunningham riffs on the homoerotic imagery of Andy Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys (1968), marking the sensuous debut of his queerness via referential identification. In defiance of death and damnation, queer genealogies of art and the technologies of film and photography offer salvation.

Salvation can be reclaimed by eschewing heterosexual chronopolitics in favour of queer temporalities, including the aesthetic tropes of drag. ‘Are You There?’ is filled with anachronistic performance, lip-syncing, cheap wigs, and diva worship. In Licycle (1995), a flickering Cunningham performs as Liza Minnelli at the iconic cLUB bENT. In addition to Minnelli, Cunningham has appeared as intimations of Cyndi Lauper, Tina Turner, Bette Midler, and others throughout his career. In Gender is a Drag (1993/2013), a split screen shows Cunningham applying makeup, while also shaving his shoulder-length hair to the scalp, staging a kind of gender autopoiesis through the act of becoming and unbecoming.

Reenactment is critical to Cunningham’s oeuvre. In a nod to Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Technological Dependency (1998) comprises audio taken from the artist’s answering machine, set to a slideshow of friends in varying degrees of drag speaking on the phone. This approach is later revisited in Repeats (2000), in which Cunningham references iconic scenes in cinema history, including Pillow Talk (1959) and Scream (1956), employing the same answering machine and slide-show arrangement.

Drawing from a 1995 entry in Cunningham’s art school journal, On a Queer Day You Can See Forever (2023) could easily read as idealism, particularly at a time when the politics of queerness feel watered down in semantic satiation. Reimagined and rendered as a neon signage artwork 30 years into the artist’s career, the text reads instead as an ode to the unique insights and understandings of youth.

Cunningham’s threads of reenactment, self-documentation, diva worship and the spectres of death come together in his seminal work Proud Mary (2007, 2012, 2017, 2022). Now incorporating its fourth iteration, Proud Mary sees Cunningham perform a lip-sync to his own funeral song, Tina Turner’s titular 1971 cover of ‘Proud Mary’ by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Informed in part by the loss of Cunningham’s brother in 2001, Proud Mary sits beside a poster listing funeral songs, inviting reflection on the ways we remember the dead and the ways we anticipate ourselves being remembered. The iterations will continue until, of course, they stop. ‘Are You There?’ reminds us to forge our own visions of forever.

Blake Lawrence, Warrang/Sydney

Curated by James Gatt, ‘Are You There?’ continues at Wollongong Art Gallery until 10 September 2023.