From Unknown to Unknown

2022/05/05 Views：245

From Unknown to Unknown

Zara Stanhope (Director of Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/ Len Lye Centre (GBAG/LLC), Taranaki, New Zealand/ Curatorial Consultant of Pan-Austro-Nesian Arts Festival)

Any exhibition can do only so much work to unfold narratives, convey neglected ideas or artists’ practices. Nevertheless, exhibition making, including the purpose, genesis and form of a project, speaks volumes about institutional and curatorial thinking. And its critical reception and internal evaluation together allow reflection with the potential for future action.

As an institution situated in the south of Taiwan concerned with the ongoing development of Taiwanese indigenous art, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (KMFA) is testing how an exhibition can offer considerations on the cultural, economic and political discourses and the art that they emerge from. The Museum history of curatorial engagement with Taiwanese indigenous artists includes researching, presenting solo and group exhibitions and establishing a collection.[1]
And it has previously placed Pacific artists, especially from Aotearoa New Zealand, within the framework of indigeneity. Several extensive projects included non-Taiwanese artists, focusing on ‘Art in the Contemporary Pacific’.[2] These exhibitions and accompanying publications utilised the Austronesian movement of peoples during the Neolithic age out of Taiwan or South China into the Pacific as the frame for the grouping of artists. A theory based on linguistic and archaeological histories proposed by archaeologists and anthropologists researching in the 1970s and 1980s, the concept has been heavily critiqued for confusing the distribution of language with the distribution of people.[3]

Recently KMFA has looked to expand the discussion into a regional rather than the ‘out of Taiwan’ Austronesian framework. Strategies to stimulate curatorial thinking on the centrality of First Nation voices in exhibition making included the 2019 symposium ‘Pan-Austronesian : Indigeneity and Contemporary Art’, inviting Taiwanese curators and producers working with Indigenous artists across the south of Taiwan, clear advocates for working with the artists in local not Western formats[4]. Following the PAN symposium was the sharing of the exhibition When Kacalisian Culture Meets the Vertical City: Contemporary Art from Greater Sandimen at the Indigenous People’s Cultural Development Centre, enabling 14 Paiwan and Rukai artists to present their work and philosophy at KMFA.

The exhibition on the concept of Pan-Austro-Nesian (PAN) art is the subsequent result of KMFA addressing the challenge of how to bring together contemporary art from a region ranging from Taiwan and East Asia and the Pacific while shifting the discourse. The initiative has the potential to shift the framework away from a partly western model of regional historical connection (based in language or ethnicity) to shared associations found in contemporary art, especially around indigeneity, colonisation, world views that do not separate land and spirituality from culture and rapid ecological change. Director Yulin Lee sees the project as the forum for enlarging the identity of the institution to reflect and encourage its connectivity with a region identified in opposition to an imperial, colonising northern hemisphere:

To recognise greater possibilities for dialogue, we have pursued a strategy to move from local to global in recent years by leveraging the museum’s long-built foundation in Austronesian arts. We aspire to contribute to the thriving “Global South” discourses. It is with this idea that I proposed Pan-Astro-Nesian Arts Festival as a new potential program under the scope of “South Plus” as the KMFA’s new position. It is my intent to re-position/ re-brand our museum from its former mission in nurturing artists from the south (of Taiwan) to connecting the museum’s geo-political condition of the south with “Global South” discourses.[5]

There are many definitions of the Global South. One of the key scholars recognised in the arts for his contribution to the theoretical Global South platform, Walter Mignolo, argued that the idea was a tool for productive ‘epistemic de-linking’ and ‘epistemic disobedience’, in essence creating alternative modes of decolonised knowledge generation beyond the imperial western view.[6] The way is open for KMFA to decentralise away from a Taiwan centric project and to create understanding how indigenous world views undo and de-link imperial modes of thought. There are also many Pacifics and many Asias in the space of KMFA engagement with multiple beliefs, perspectives and practices, at one with multiple connections to past and present. Are these ideas and realities of any use in opening a new space for aesthetic production and knowledge making?

1. Responding to now

At the beginning of a process of self-reflection, looking back and toward the future, KMFA has the potential to open a space for dialogue (between artists, audiences, communities, thinkers or all of these). In the early development in 2019 they identified projects in Asia such as Para-Site, Hong Kong, or the ongoing Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) of interest in their objectives of generating greater regional dialogue while responding to sovereignty.

Periodic biennale or triennale exhibitions have a history of aiming to be a platform for contemporary art that mirrors a point or sensibility in time. Supported variously by state, private and commercial agendas, the network of these exhibitionary events now forms a vast global art ecosystem that can’t be ignored for offering a network of potential institutional partners, international funding opportunities and networks of promotion. But have they also come to their use-by date?

The history of biennales is well mapped, generally commencing with the formative example of the Biennale de Venezia which established the ‘national pavilion model’ of participants funded by individual governments. While contemporary events distinguish themselves from this structure in order to offer curators and organisers more autonomy, nevertheless, many biennale-style events have often followed an established legacy of operating in museum or white cube spaces, relying on funding implicated in answering to indexes of tourism and local economic benefit. Nevertheless, there are useful precedents for KMFA in its objective to work with artists and discourses across southern Taiwan and offshore across the southern hemisphere in exhibitions that initially

Certain biennale models for PAN previously broke the mould in being peripheral, nomadic or dynamic in form and/or aiming to be artist centric. Mobile and discursive exhibitionary events and those prioritising public participation such as SITE Santa Fe (1995–), inSite (1991– 2005), Manifesta (European Biennale of Contemporary Art) (1996–), and Mercosur Biennial (1997–) for example, are now historic.[7] Mercosur based in Porto Alegre came into existence on the back of a number of trade alignments between Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay that created an economic region and initially utilised the model of an open call for projects, focusing on the condition of its intersecting localities.[8] Subsequently its curators have chosen more global themes and it has supported to engage education audiences in Brazil. The purpose of Manifesta, by contrast, is to engage with European social concerns through contemporary art. The event aims for a two year engagement in non-art centres in Europe that reaches beyond cultural infrastructure and creates new networks. Each iteration needs to work with different organisations in a sustained way to be locally relevant, a self-imposed condition for a self-described ‘nomadic’ biennale.[9]

In Japan, the scale, civic purpose and festival style programme of Japan’s Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial (2000–) initially distinguished it from other museum-based art biennales and triennials associated with cultural development. Relying on local municipality and community support of artists and supply of venues, the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial developed into year long arts programming across Niigata prefecture, and was the catalyst for its sister event, Art Setouchi (2010–) in the southern inland sea of Honshu.[10] Both were enabled by key patrons concerned for regional regeneration and are supported by cultural tourism and festivalisation, as an example of the breadth of the typology of the biennale ecosystem.

Also not restricted to being an exhibition, The South Project (2003–2013) was an example of an informal network encouraging discourse between artists, makers and audiences around the Global South. Initiated by a small number of arts professionals in Melbourne, Australia its purpose was to operate through and enlarge networks of multi-artform practitioners around the south by organising or facilitating partnerships or opportunities to activate occasional, cross-cultural events. These ranged from small to large scale discursive gatherings at many locations. It facilitated numerous artists’ residencies, exhibitions and intensely discursive events.[11] While an ongoing ‘umbrella’ project, like many biennales, The South Project struggled to sustain itself without an ongoing institutional backer or a regional structure with a shared purpose to assist its longevity.

KMFA has its surrounding park environment to use for festival style projects or artist collaborations. Taiwanese artists are no strangers to festival style events, Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists having participation in the Festival of Pacific Arts or Pacific Arts Festival (FESTPAC) since 2008, where island nations take turns to host national representatives and independent performers, musicians and artists in celebrations and strengthening of Pacific cultures and relationships. Artists participating in these past events remain important voices.

QAGOMA’s APT and its regional focus across the breadth of Asia and the Pacific was acknowledged by The South Project as a key precedent. KMFA’s PAN Arts Festival intersects with the geographic and cultural context of the APT. Its initial PAN event presents an opportunity to bring a point of difference should it decide to look beyond the model of APT or other formative biennales such as Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial (Fukuoka Asian Art Show, from 1989) which is an important precedent to the APT and this legacy chain.

2. Sharing knowledge

KMFA Director, Yulin Lee, had visited APT9 and was keen for her organisation to understand the history of the APT in planning how KMFA might pursue its vision to connect with Global South discourses. The APT is about to enter its 10th iteration in late 2021 and remaining true since 1993 to its aim to being an exhibition that presents artists' distinct worldviews and concerns at points in time through contemporary art, performance and related works, expanding on these with publications and public and educational programs. The critical discourse addressing the development of the APT, including discussion around the incommensurability of art from East and West, definitions of Asia and many other arguments, can be found in art magazines, journals and academic writing.[12] Commencing at a time of Australian government strategic political and economic interest in engagement with Asia under the Prime Ministership of Paul Keating, its intentions and the vision of the Director and key Queensland Art Gallery stakeholders and staff has been thoroughly interrogated, as has the early shift from a geographical to artist focus.[13]

Originally planned to be reviewed after the third exhibition, the aims of the APT remain related to increasing the understanding of Australian, Asian and Pacific contemporary art practice and the broader culture and dynamic societies of artists through major exhibitions, building continuing dialogue and professional relationships based in mutual understanding, and providing a forum for discussion of distinctive and diverse views concerning contemporary visual arts of the region.[14]

In addition, its near thirty years’ duration has enabled QAGOMA to build internal curatorial knowledge of contemporary art in many countries and areas in the region, shifting from a mix of external and internal curators originally to current QAGOMA gallery curators working with external advisors and external curators generally in co-curator roles. Additional knowledge building outcomes include establishing and maintaining deep connections with artists, curators, institutions, gallerists, collectors and other culture professionals across the region and the establishment of unique collections of contemporary art acquired from each Triennial, fostering a developing discourse between and during each event.

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Notable for PAN is the central significance of the presence of Australian Indigenous artists to the APT, making the APT a meaningful context to present and share work by First Nation or marginalised cultures from around the region. At the time of APT1 in 1993 contemporary Australian Indigenous art had established a level of national and international presence and acceptance that had moved far beyond the reception of the first participation of Australian Indigenous artists in the 1979 Sydney Biennale.[15] Australian Indigenous and Torres Strait artists have formed more than half the Australian artist participation over the nine APTs to date. In his essay for APT7, the previous QAGOMA Curator, Indigenous Art Bruce McLean, argued that a number of Australian Indigenous artists’ works in past APTs, such as Destiny Deacon’s recreation of her living room as a reflection on how the ‘other half’ lives and the Campfire Group’s All stock must go! (Dry Run) 1996, an installation of social participation situated outside the gallery seen in APT2 (1996), form part of a persistent critical discourse in their provocations of audiences and the institution.[16] Noting how Australian Indigenous artists in recent APTs have shared their unique cultures, spirituality and sensibilities with audiences as well as making present the complexities of existence since colonial arrival, McLean asserts that the concern for ancestral history and ongoing cultural presence in these artists’ works provided the conditions in APT for contemporary practices by other First Nation, Indigenous or other communities in the Asia Pacific who faced similar situations of moving between tradition and maintaining culture in the face of change.

The APT has been a platform for art participating in distinct systems of cultural knowledge that are distinct from or ‘dis-obey’ in Mignolo’s terms, colonial world views in addition to Australian and Torres Strait artists. Too many to name, examples of just work by South Asia artists alone include Sonabai from Chhattisgarh, Central India (APT3 1999), and Warli artists and artists from the Chitrakar community in West Bengal (APT8 2015). Similarly, the APT has been a context in which many, many artists from across the Pacific have wanted to present, share and document their work. As Curator, Pacific Art Ruth McDougall wrote in regard to artists and groups from across the Pacific in APT9: ‘[t]ogether, their artworks demonstrate the ways which indigenous artists, curators and communities in the Pacific use contemporary art to assert the value of their own relationship-based systems of knowledge and exchange, self-consciously incorporating, accommodating and resisting the values of a global economy.’[17] The dialogue is enriched when artists create new networks and dismantle hierarchies of existing knowledge.

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3. Crossing realities

Nirin, the 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020), curated by Australian Indigenous artist Brook Andrew, celebrated Indigenous sovereignty and diversity from Australia and the Global South. The event connected and empowered artists and asked audiences to recognise the singular connections between land and people as culture in contrast to individual, human-centric western ideas of existence. The art and Nirin’s excellent publication took the viewer on a journey through artists’ ideas of belonging and identity, including sexual, spiritual and ecological, and as with APT, artists created personal bonds being together. Artists in such projects have clearly conveyed their ideas, values and processes, the responsibilities of what can be seen and shared, necessity of respectful ceremonies and the relational nature of communities in journeys for the institutions and their audiences. The PAN festival seems similarly minded to take on the challenge of inviting neighbouring artists in to be at home with its own Indigenous creators, share histories and memories and support art in its connection with sovereignty.

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The dynamic situation of countries in the Asia Pacific means that change is ever present, for a range of geological, economic, political, social, biological and other reasons. Exhibitions (and in a different way the art market) have tracked many of these changes through the lenses of artists and curators, who regardless will traverse their own interests and cross borders of their own accord.

The PAN Art Festival is a moment pregnant with opportunities for reflection and dialogues for artists and audiences. What can an event such as the PAN Arts Festival do? Beginning at home, it is looking to where we are now, potentially bringing many local Indigenous voices inside the museum and listening to what an art institution can do for them. Offering Indigenous artists to be host inside the Museum would de-link from previous institutional concepts of welcome and be guest rather than host centric in opening to the Pacific and East Asia. The future is not the legacy of the models valued in colonial, western art centres – the sorts of biennales and triennials discussed above – but partnership with creative communities in their space and time. Inviting in and embracing the unknown as family.

[1] KFAM exhibitions included: Everything Ends! The world can wait! Beyond the Boundary: Contemporary Indigenous Art of Taiwan, 2012-2013; Boundary Narratives II, A Memory of Light by Sakuliu, 2015-2016 and Boundary Narratives: Dulan Impression, 2016 on the art of Sakuliu; The Space of Fifty Steps by Rahic Talif, 2015-2016, Heart Tree and Spiritual Rebirth: The Art World of Anli Genu, 2016 and the publication The Sound of Footsteps on the Island: Contemporary Austronesian Art Highlights in Taiwan, 2018.

[2] KFAM exhibitions included The Great Journey, In Pursuit of the Ancestral Realm, 2009-2010 and Art in the Contemporary Pacific, 2017-2018.

[3] See Peter Bellwood, James J Fox, Darrell T Tryon, The Austronesians: historical and comparative perspectives, ANU Canberra, 1995. The concept is argued to be unverifiable genetically, see Nala Huiying Lee, ‘Multidisciplinary Perspective on the Austronesian Homeland: A Critique, ‘Working Papers in Linguistics, vol 43 (4), September 2012. See Sophie McIntyre, ‘Navigating Austronesia: Contemporary Art from Taiwan and the Pacific’, Art Monthly Australia, Issue 232, 2010, p.45

[4] I participated in the symposium as a guest of the Kaohsiung Fine Art Museum.

[5] Yulin Lee, ‘Ocean Currents, Islands and the South: The Conception of the Pan-Astro-Nesian Arts Festival’, PAN Zine, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Kaohsiung , 2021, p.19.

[6] Walter D. Mignolo, ‘Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and De-Colonial Freedom, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol 26, nos. 7-8, 2009, pp. 1-23 and ‘Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option: A Manifesto, Transmodernity, (Fall 2011), pp. 44-66 amongst other texts.

[7] inSite_05 was described as a “discursive biennale” by Ferguson and Hoegsberg for encouraging durational research. Bruce W. Ferguson and Milena M. Hoegsberg, “Talking and Thinking About Biennials: The Potential of Discursivity,” in The Biennial Reader, The Bergen Biennial Conference, ed. Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal and Solveig Ovstebo (Bergen: Bergen Kunsthall and Hatje Cantz, 2009), p. 373.

[8] The Treaty of Asunción in 1991 and Protocol of Ouro Preto in 1994.

[9] Manifesta 14 is planned for 2022, see https://manifesta14.org/manifesta-14-western-balkan-project/

[10] https://setouchi-artfest.jp/en/about/

[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Project. My involvement in The South Project included as a Board member and as co-curator with Danae Mossman of Trans-Versa, comprising month-long residencies for artists from Aotearoa and Australia culminating in projects in public spaces and exhibitions in Santiago, Chile in 2006.

[12] A source for articles and academic analysis of the APT is the QAGOMA research library and archives, accessed at: https://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/learn/research/library. Founders and project directors of the APTs, such as academic Dr Caroline Turner have reflected on the event, for example: ‘The Asia Pacific Triennial: A Forum’, Art Association of Australia and New Zealand Journal ,2009; ‘Art speaking for humanity: The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Art Journal, vol 59 (2000), pp. 16-19. Amongst others: Stuart Koop, ‘The Third Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’, Frieze, 2000, https://www.frieze.com/article/third-asia-pacific-triennial-contemporary-art; Lisa Chandler, ‘Journey without maps’: unsettling curatorship in cross-cultural contexts’, Museum & Society, vol 7, no 2 (2009), pp. 74-91 and the edition Contemporary Visual Art + Culture Broadsheet, vol 41.4, December 2012.

[13] Charles Green, Beyond the Future, The Third Asia Pacific Triennial, Art Journal, vol 58, no. 54, Winter 1999, pp. 81-87.

[14] The aims of the Asia Pacific Triennial are included in Rhana Devenport, ‘The APT curatorial process: Negotiating cultural moments‘, The Third Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, QAGOMA, Brisbane, p.27.

[15] David Malangi, George Milpurrurru and Johnny Bonguwuy participated in the 1979 Sydney Biennale.

[16] Bruce McLean, ‘Sustained Intervention: Indigenous Australian Art in the Asia Pacific Triennial’, The 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery|Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, pp. 44–49.

[17] Ruth McDougall, ‘What money can’t buy: Relationships of value in the Pacific’, The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, QAGOMA, Brisbane, pp. 213.

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About the Pan-Austro-Nesian Arts Festival

From Unknown to Unknown

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