Catharsis and clairvoyance: ‘If the future is to be worth anything’ at ACE Open
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After six months of COVID-related closure, Adelaide’s ACE Open reopened its doors this September with one of its most ambitious exhibitions to date: ‘If the future is to be worth anything: 2020 South Australian Artist Survey’ (until 12 December). Curator-in-Residence Rayleen Forester and Artistic Director Patrice Sharkey couldn’t have anticipated the waves of crises that would define 2020 amid their early imaginings of such an exhibition. And yet, its premise is prescient.
The survey exhibition, generally speaking, is inherently historiographic in its quest to capture a distant or more recent past for posterity. It is often a proof of record, ensuring an artist or a sociopolitical moment doesn’t slip between the paragraphs of history. ‘If the future is to be worth anything’, however, is more akin to divination. It is a call into the blank space of the future, a sounding out of new and possible artistic forms and practices – a task that feels doubly difficult amid so much political, ecological and social uncertainty, when the future looks anything but blank.
Sundari Carmody, one of the ten South Australian artists and collectives represented, performs powerfully under this kind of echolocation. Her quasi-architectural maquettes Stepwell I and Lightwell I (both 2020), each cast in light-absorbing black concrete, act as inverted monuments – anti-monuments – to a year of grief and dark energy. Their mass is counterweighted by the levity of Yusuf Ali Hayat’s Baab-al-Salaam (2020), a maze-like installation of semi-transparent and semi-reflective planes of refracting perspex. Navigating the apertures between Hayat’s surfaces (which, along with the work’s title, reference one of the gates to enter the Great Mosque of Mecca) produces an illusory experience, where reality is seen to ceaselessly transform.
A more sinister futility emanates from Kate Bohunnis’s edges of excess (2020). A large-scale, highly polished stainless-steel pendulum swings noiselessly just millimetres above a sagging strap of flesh-coloured silicone. The pendulum itself is guillotine-like, a muted blade that not only hints at notions of body horror but captures the nihilism of time. James Kurtze, of Tutti Arts, takes on a similar theme in The Kooky Time Machine (2020). Whirring analogue clocks, digital watches and a collection of defunct iPods are assembled into a cardboard cuckoo clock meets Rube Goldberg machine. Despite its happy LED lights and DIY aesthetic, Kurtze’s clock upsets the idea that time, and life more broadly, is an easy sequence of logical events.
The inclusion of senior Ngarrindjeri artist and activist Sandra Saunders ensures the future is not solely the dominion of the young. Saunders’s painting Museum of Sorrow (2020) recasts the museum collection as a record of ecological loss – a response to the Black Summer bushfires. It sits alongside Carly Tarkari Dodd’s Sticks and Stones (2020), a series of reflective photographic portraits rejecting imposed categories of Aboriginality that celebrates leading Indigenous figures in South Australia. Together, they remind us that intergenerational knowledge is fundamental to any future-forming process.
At the time of writing, South Australia has only just reopened its borders to New South Wales having spent the past six months looking geographically and economically inward. In this sense, ‘If the future is to be worth anything’ is sentient in its internal focus, in its half-question, half-statement. It offers catharsis and clairvoyance, possible pathways out of hibernation, and highlights the calibre of artists currently practising across the state.
Belinda Howden, Adelaide
The writer also contributed to the exhibition catalogue that accompanied ‘If the future is to be worth anything: 2020 South Australian Artist Survey’, which continues at Adelaide’s ACE Open until 12 December.
