Anchored by First Nations perspectives and the significance of communal modes of making, APT11 thrives in its sense of the local
Asia Pacific Triennial (APT) is a capacious and labyrinthine exhibition, encompassing 500 artworks by 70 artists and collectives. Now in its 11th iteration, the exhibition’s greatest strength is its continued avoidance of an overarching theme or premise. Or to put it another way, the region – broadly described in the exhibition publication as the ‘interwoven cultural landscapes of Australia, Asia and the Pacific’ – is the theme: its geography, histories, politics and crises, and the breadth and vibrancy of its art practices. And although APT is spearheaded by Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art’s Asia and Pacific Art team, the triennial also draws on an extensive network of curators, advisers and interlocutors from across the region, allowing the way the area is being framed and defined to feel more collaborative and dispersed.
As with previous editions, First Nations perspectives, and the significance of communal modes of making to these communities, is a key anchoring point. Kuku Yalanji/Kalkadoon artist Kim Ah Sam’s ten hanging sculptures from the series Woven identity: ‘it’s not only me’ (2024) speak to the hills, tracks, rivers and ecology of Kalkadoon Country (Mount Isa region, Queensland) and the arteries and veins of the human body. Each sculpture’s central conic shape alludes to the termite mounds found in this region, around which Kim has woven an array of whirling patterns in natural and dyed raffia and twine, from teal and navy-blue to orange and pink. Fringed with the dusky-brown feathers of an emu, the pieces also reference the traditional emu footprints of Battle Mountain (boundary markers painted or carved into trees and rocks), a place now memorialised as an 1884 massacre site. Kim’s abstract shapes are the result of her open-ended approach to weaving – beginning with no preconceived form – and it’s through this embodied and intuitive act of making that she is able to reconnect with Country.
For the women of Tu’anuku village in Vava‘u, the practice of weaving is linked to their role as custodians of Tonga’s largest freshwater ecosystem. Here, the Lepamahanga Women’s Group, led by ‘Aunofo Havea Funaki, the first Tongan woman to become a licensed sea-captain, present a mammoth, wall-hung woven ceremonial mat titled Fala Kuta e Toa Ko Tavakefai‘ana (2024). Constructed out of fresh-water kuta reeds, the mat cascades down the gallery wall and extends into the middle of the space. Such largescale constructions are often made to honour the village’s relationship to Tonga’s royal family, and this piece includes a woven pattern referencing the tavake, a chiefly bird and symbol of the Fīnau ‘Ulukālala lineage – a dynasty that ruled Vava‘u from the early 1700s to 1960 and still has a direct connection to the country’s monarchy. As with Kim’s sculptures, the physical process of making is as significant as the completion and display of the piece: bringing together neighbours and friends within the community, the collective practice of weaving offers a crucial meeting point for the sharing of local stories and knowledge.
The recurring focus on materials is a reminder of how form and method are inextricably linked to meaning-making and storytelling. Sri Lankan artist Hema Shironi’s Erasing Flag (2019), for example, is a set of six versions of the country’s flag constructed out of stitched paper. Made a decade after the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war (1983–2009), each iteration of the paper flag, whose colour represents the nation’s different cultures, becomes increasingly worn and disintegrated, so that in the final piece only the skeletal red thread remains – the quiet means of repair outlasting a symbol of nationalism so easily weaponised.
With Bombay Tilts Down (2022), Mumbai-based group CAMP repurposes surveillance technology to create a form of landscape cinema. This hypnotic seven-channel installation, co-commissioned by Kochi-Muziris Biennale and Nam June Paik Art Center, was filmed with a remote-controlled CCTV camera fixed to the 35th floor of a building in South Central Mumbai, and accompanied by two alternating soundtracks filled with sirens, clanging percussion and the words of poets and balladeers. Six of the screens begin with a distant viewpoint of the sea, before gradually zooming in on the Parel and Worli neighbourhoods, fast-developing working-class areas of Mumbai. The camera tilts down, descending past apartment balconies to gardens, shelters and street corners, lingering on steel structures, blue tarpaulins or a glimpse of an animal walking across a roof. The additional seventh screen turns on and off in the corner of the room, displaying lyrics from the soundtrack.
What might seem like single-take shots are revealed to be complex mashups of multiple timelapses; at ground level, groups of people make eye contact with the camera, aware of its presence. Bombay Tilts Down is not only a narrative of the city, recording Mumbai’s evolving metropolis and its inhabitants, but also a sophisticated commentary on social status and authority, wealth and structural hierarchies, and how networks of power are built into the stratified architectural layers of the urban landscape.
It’s this sense of the local – how each artistic project is embedded in the context of its making, whether that be the community it belongs to, or the customary practices, ecology or social and political concerns that surround it – that gives APT11 its depth and immediacy. This isn’t a zeitgeisty move in response to so-called identity politics, or the recent turn towards historical revisionism, but a multidecade endeavour: the desire, since APT’s inception in 1993, to wrest the conversation around contemporary art away from dominant Euro-American perspectives. (This remains a necessary move for settler-colonial Australia, given its history of looking to Western art ‘centres’ for guidance on what kinds of artistic practice should be deemed valuable or avant-garde or current.) APT11’s audience is instead plunged into an exhibition that represents a region that is multiple, heterogenous and polyvocal – one that allows for points of connection, while still appreciating and affirming difference.
11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, through 27 April
From the March 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
