Eyeline Publishing Limited

Article Title: APT7: Highs and LowsAuthor: Andrew McNamaraIssue: 78/79Pages: 82-83Year: 2013

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APT7: HIGHS AND LOWS

underscores the tremendous antagonisms between customary and modern-ist cultures wherever contemporary art appears in new geo-political con-texts.3 It is an often uncomfortable, perhaps irresolvable, accommodation. Yet, almost as a consequence of its turbulent experiences, Sharjah is actively positioning its biennale as a mediator between east and west.

Large crowds, including many from the national and international art-world, attended the 7th Asia Pacific Triennial (APT7) opening week-end. What the fly in, fly out crowd would have missed is the extensive

scale of activities held throughout the exhibition’s duration. Despite this investment in public programs (talks, events, screenings), the overall pro-gram had a disjointed quality. This was particularly true of the talks and discussions on the opening weekend, which gave little insight into any par-ticular topic or the wider rationale of APT7.

This is the most disappointing aspect of the APT as it has developed to this point. Despite being immersed from the outset in a discursive framework (regionalism, diaspora, ethnicity and identity politics, post-colonialism, tra-dition versus contemporary culture), the APT has fallen into an anaemic, never-land in which the context for real debate and an understanding of its ambition has disappeared. This is usually blamed on the overriding emphasis on crowd numbers and the expectation that every exhibition must be stun-ningly spectacular, irrespective of the content. I am not against visual arts exhibitions being popular and well attended. Their successes help to pro-mote the richness and vibrancy of contemporary visual arts to large audi-ences. Yet, this does not mean that we have to ignore the thorny issues that generate that vibrancy. Art is largely incomprehensible without a sense of them.

A good example was the talk with Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, the President of the Sharjah Art Foundation, which was meant to discuss contemporary art of the Middle East. It was well attended, but many expressed extreme disappointment because nearly every contentious issue was evaded, espe-cially if it related to the Arab uprisings that began in late 2010 (the so-called Arab Spring or Jasmine revolution). This is hardly surprising. The Sheikha is part of the ruling elite in Sharjah. It is like asking Marie Antoinette her opin-ion of the French Revolution. Yet, this was a topic worthy of genuine discus-sion, and it should have been discussed by an independent and informed panel rather than placing the burden for such analysis on a visiting official.

The discussion is pertinent to the APT. Sharjah hosts a contemporary art biennial. Their previous biennial coincided with the Arab uprisings (hence, the interest) and, unfortunately for the Sharjah Art Foundation, it gained notoriety due to a censorship controversy when one artwork was removed and its director and curatorial team were sacked. One commentator has referred to the regime as a benevolent dictatorship ‘with a veneer of civility about it’.1 The question is why it would host a biennial and risk confronting such intertwined geo-political, aesthetic and cultural considerations? Ironi-cally, another commentator has noted that under Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi’s guidance the Sharjah Biennial largely remains indifferent to art market con-siderations and opts to flirt with ‘the deeper, more disruptive powers of contemporary cultural production’.2 If all this sounds contradictory, then it

EYELINE ASKED SEVERAL ART WORLD PARTICIPANTS TO COMMENT ON ONE

ASPECT OF THE 7TH ASIA PACIFIC TRIENNIAL THAT ENGAGED THEM AND ONE

THAT DID NOT. WE RECEIVED THE FOLLOWING RESPONSES.

from top: An-My Lê, Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam (from ‘Events Ashore’ series), 2010. Archival inkjet pigment print on 380gsm Harman Professional Inkjet paper mounted on

sintra, ed. 2/5. The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 2011 with funds from Michael Sidney Myer through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation. Collection Queensland

Art Gallery; Almagul Menlibayeva, Kurchatov 22, 2012. Still. Five-channel HD video projection, 26:00 minutes, 5.1 surround sound, colour, English subtitles. Courtesy the artist and Priska C.

Juschka Fine Art, New York.

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My favourite work in the 7th Asia Pacific Triennial is Fiona Tan’s Cloud Island (2010). This forty-seven minute single-channel video projec-tion has a lyrical, elegiac tone. The video tracks the daily lives of

the elderly inhabitants of an island in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea. The slow pace, achieved by many shots of beautifully observed details, seems to reflect the tempo of life on the island. Change is gently signalled by the construction of some kind of modern pavilion. In short, it is a poetic evocation of the end (or at least the disruption) of a certain kind of rural life. Honourable mentions to: Damien Gulkledep, Camilus Tepe and team, Daniel Boyd, Tadasu Takamine, and Yuan Goang-Ming.

There is a lot of competition for my least favourite work, but the winner is Slavs and Tartars PrayWay (2012). This work is a Persian carpet attached to a V-shaped armature. It is lit from below and can be used as a seat. Innocuous you might think, boring even, when will all this lame relational art end you might ask? But for meaningless, pretentious art babble, this description from the QAGOMA website is hard to beat: ‘PrayWay 2012, considers the electic [sic] and sacred as agents for change in the material world’.1 Do they mean ‘eclectic’ or ‘electric’, either way it is hard to see how sitting on a rug with electric lighting (which is much larger than a traditional prayer rug) signifies change in the world, material or otherwise. Susan Best

Note1. Accessed 7 January 2013. This sentence is no longer on the QAGOMA website.

Susan Best teaches art history at the University of New South Wales.

The APT, by contrast, is declining to articulate any strategy or curato-rial rationale that would currently place it at the forefront of post-colonial examination or of artworld critical attention. The first APTs threw together contemporary art with the folkloric or traditional in ways that were con-fronting and fresh, though unresolved (as if the juxtaposition was suf-ficient). Its critical credentials derived from the reflected glow of the then emerging paradigm of post-colonial theory. With APT7, the discussion program seems an afterthought, or at least poorly conceived, and the curatorial rationale is difficult to discern. It seems beholden to a warm and fuzzy embrace of diversity approach—the promotion of difference as a diffusion of equivalences, devoid of pressure points, which fails to capture the motivations behind the best works in the exhibition.

The best part of APT7 is the way individual works update the APT agenda by articulating new complex realities of the region. Modernity is an ever-present feature of everyday life, as it is in the West, but in regions still characterised by the presence of tradition (to starkly vary-ing degrees). In works as various as Inci Eviner’s popular Broken Manifes-tos (2010); Dominic Sansoni’s photographs; Sara Rahbar’s textiles; Fiona Tan’s video Cloud Island, for instance, these differing cultures pass by each other, sometimes like complete strangers in wholly separate realms, some-times like jostling commuters bumping and pushing against one another. In the work of An-My Lê, differing cultural and geo-political imperatives are inscribed over the top of one another in the political visual memory of a nation like Vietnam, but as if seen through the lens of decades of movies, TV shows about the Vietnam War, as well as through art photog-raphy. The cold, hard reality of economic development, exploitation and the alienating experience of guest workers, which is sadly one of the most common characteristics of the regions covered by the APT, is treated in tragic-comic fashion by Tintin Wulia or otherwise with poignant pathos in Chia-En Jao’s REM/Sleep (2011). One of the most evocative themes of current reality in the region is that of nature as a diminishing memory, or as thoroughly ravaged, if not surreally tragic: this is seen in Almagul Menlibayeva’s brilliant Kurchatov 22 (2012); Ho Tzu Nyen’s film The Cloud of Unknowing (2011); Nguyen Manh Hung’s Living Together in Paradise (2009); Yuan Goang-Ming’s fascinatingly enchanting Disappearing Land-scape–Passing II (2011); as well as Tadasu Takamine’s Fukushima Esperanto (2012), which showed what a viable and highly evocative medium instal-lation can be.

If the APT was provoked by its great art, it would extend the definition of ‘successful’ to making each APT an occasion to reposition itself at the forefront of biennial and triennial exhibitions around the world. It would also promote free and frank exchange about why its curatorial ideas and ambitions matter. Andrew McNamara

Notes1. Hanan Toukan, ‘Boat Rocking in the Art Islands: Politics, Plots and Dismiss-als in Sharjah’s Tenth Biennial’, Jadaliyya, May 02, 2011. http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1389/boat-rocking-in-the-art-islands_politics-plots-and2. Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, ‘Spring Break: The Opening of the 11th Sharjah Bien-nial’, Artforum, 22 March 2013. http://artforum.com/diary/id=399493. It is worth noting that in Tunisia—the country where the first Arab uprisings occurred—that fringe, ultra-conservative Salafists have held violent protests against contemporary art exhibitions as part of their concerted attack on influ-ences of modernity (as well as Sufi shrines). See ‘The Rise of Violent Salafism’, The Guardian Weekly, 15-21 February 2013, pp.1, 4-5. Over 100 people were arrested and 16 were imprisoned for a month in January 2013 as a result of the ‘art’ protests. See ‘Tunisia jails 16 Islamists over art riots’, Arts Hub, 25 January 2013. http://au.artshub.com/au/news-article/news/arts/tunisia-jails-16-islamists-over-art-riots-193796

Andrew McNamara lectures in art history and theory at the Queensland University of Technology.

from top: Fiona Tan, Cloud Island, 2010. Stills. Single-channel HD video projection, 47:00 minutes (looped), 5.1 surround sound, colour. Images courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London, and Wako Works of Art, Tokyo; Slavs and Tatars, PrayWay, 2012. Silk and wool carpet, MDF, steel, neon. Courtesy the artists, The Third Line, Dubai and Kraupa-Tuskany, Berlin. © The artist. Photograph Mark Sherwood.