The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT9)
I particularly enjoyed two successful Installations:
Thai artist Pannaphan Yodmanee’s, In the Aftermath, 2018, is an ambitious work about time, disintegration and possibility of Karmic connection of rebirth. As a young girl she trained in traditional Buddhist painting practices. Amidst slabs of broken concrete lie icons and fragments of paintings.
and Aditya Novali’s, ‘The Wall, Asian (Un)Real Estate Project’, on Indonesia’s housing shortage.
. . . but what affected me most was the materiality and the immateriality from two very different artists.
Mongolian artist Enkhbold Togmidshiirev is known for his large-scale, monochromatic canvases (as well as his Ger Project performances, walking inside a circular yurt frame in public) –his field paintings use materials he collects from home: horse dung, felt, vegetation, ash, rust, sheep skin and stomach.
And it was good to see another exemplar of materiality. Lorraine Connelly-Northey’s work again, a Waradgerie woman.
Shilpa Gupta’s, ‘In your tongue, I cannot fit: 100 jailed poets’, 2017 – 2018, is an immaterial piece. [Not pictured].
The installation of one-hundred microphone/speakers hanging above a page of poetry from persecuted poets staked to metal spikes. Hearing part of it voices together like mass from 50 years ago, and individual voices as intimate as from a confessional Box, yet imprisoned poets are usually voiceless and invisible. The poets are a varied bunch, historical and recent, politicians, dictators, activists and revolutionaries. Some executed like Bruno, Can poetry act against this?
One wintry dawn in the Piazza dei Fiori Bruno was staked,
damned for Copernican faith and a deviant multiverse.
He pushed away the crucifix proffered by a priest
for a melodramatic obstinate death with muzzled dogs
and uniforms on an ordinary Wednesday just waking.
Doubt is combustible inside a stubborn helmet of bone,
lungs singed, eyeballs melted down their plugs,
skull splintered bursting into flames shooting ideas
into the hospitable airwaves. Such ambition is hard to follow.
from my poem ‘Science is verifying traditional ‘Mother Earth’ mythology: David Suzuki’
There were 3 or 4 young men, videoing and photographing this couple ‘enjoying the art’ strolling through retakes. The Arts are now embedded at an angle to everyday life and everyday aesthetics.
