AUSTRALIEN
Canberra Contemporary Art Space Board and Staff respectfully acknowledge the traditional custodians of the Canberra and the ACT region, the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples on whose unceded lands our galleries are located; their Ancestors, Elders past and present; and recognise their ongoing connections to Culture and Country. We also respectfully acknowledge all traditional custodians throughout Australia whose art we have exhibited over the past 38 years, and upon whose unceded lands the Board and Staff travel.
Front cover: ELEFTERIA VLAVIANOS Renewal - Grid #2 2020, Acrylic and pencil on canvas, 152 x 137cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie
AUSTRALIEN LARA CHAMAS MARIANA DEL CASTILLO CAROLINE GARCIA SHIVANJANI LAL SANCINTYA MOHINI SIMPSON ANDY MULLENS ELEFTERIA VLAVIANOS CURATED BY DAN TOUA
MARIANA DEL CASTILLO PAUSE (detail) 2021, Recycled wool blankets, wood, metal, paper, cotton, tyre detritus, plastic, dimensions variable, Photo by Brenton McGeachie
AUSTRALIEN This exhibition has been brewing for a long time. Growing up in Australia as a person who was born overseas and is the child of parents from India and Papua New Guinea / Fiji, I’ve had to maintain a delicate balance between being part of ’the group’ and maintaining connections with my heritage. I’ll often hear ‘where are you from?’. It seems like a simple, innocuous question but it wracks me with anxiety every time I hear it, especially as I delve more into my own identity politics. Does the person asking the question want to know my ethnicity? My address? Where I was born? Do I have to carry around my Australian Citizenship Certificate to prove that I belong here? Or should I launch into an intentionally obstructionist rant and question why this is even being asked of me? This little loaded question is just one of the challenges migrant families face everyday: we also have different lunches packed for school, different languages at homes, different religions, different clothes, different skin. Through Australien I wanted to explore how others like me, other first- and second-generation female artists deal with, and reconcile, the complexities of becoming accepted in their new home, while honouring the importance of their family’s history and culture. Marianna del Castillo was born in the city of Ambato, located in the central Andean valley of Ecuador. In 1972, del Castillo and her family immigrated to Sydney under the Whitlam Government’s dismantling of the ‘White Australia’ policy that had gripped Australia since Federation in 1901. After 40 years away from her country of birth, the artist returned to Ecuador in 2016 and was able to explore her first nations heritage and the history of her family, which del Castillo says “previously had existed only in my childhood memories and through the dark glass of my mother’s displacement.” The pilgrimage was both revelatory and instrumental in reaffirming the artist’s work: del Castillo’s practice has always utilised recycled materials, and the stark contrast between the throwaway consumerism of Australian society and her Ecuadorian upbringing centred around reusing and recycling confirmed the importance of her making methods. Two sculptural works entitled I have scarcely left you 2 and Wet eyes of Winter have been made in signature del Castillo style: constructed from reclaimed grey woolen blankets and covered with delicate, deliberate stitches of blue and red. The smaller of the two works, Wet Eyes of Winter, is a large 2D head and torso slotted into a plinth made of recycled wood - like an iceberg, the ‘torso’ dips below the surface of the plinth. Standing close by is I have scarcely left you 2, reminiscent of a lonely billboard out in the desert, advertising perhaps a long-forgotten city. On both works is a recurring motif of thick red stitched lines evocative of a road map, travelling over the ‘face’ and repeated in thick lines resembling townhouses huddles together on the ‘billboard’.
MARIANA DEL CASTILLO PAUSE (detail) 2021, Recycled wool blankets, wood, metal, paper, cotton, tyre detritus, plastic, dimensions variable, Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Speaking of the artist’s mother and her journey of immigrating to Australia, del Castillo investigates the idea that ‘home’ is housed within the resilient individual who can travel and survive migration and displacement. Part personal, part universal; these works speak to universal issues of identity, connectivity, survival, as well as issues of urbanisation. As a first-generation Australian, Andy Mullens has an interest in the narratives of children of the diaspora, and the tension between assimilation and keeping the culture of one’s homeland alive, and how survival and pride play out. Tombs for the Reborn consists of three small mounds of rice that have layered Perspex portraits of the artist’s mother, grandmother and great grandmother resting on top. There is also one brightly glowing light bulb carefully placed on each mound, highlighting the face of each of the artists’ ancestors. This installation acts as a shrine to the legacy of Mullens’ family in Vietnam, and references the sacrifice of her ancestors journeying to Australia to escape the war. The act of layering of the portraits in this installation imitates traditional Vietnamese tombs found in family farming properties, in the rice paddy. On Mullens’ first trip back to her native Vietnam, while driving through the countryside, the artist was struck by the groups of tombs she saw scattered throughout family farming properties: a raised grave among a sea of rice. In creating these works, Mullens honours the death of the life her family had in Vietnam, while also celebrating their new life in Australia. Her installation also speaks to the important role of the matriarch in Vietnamese culture and the shining light on each portrait is symbolic of the spirit of the Nguyen family, that continues today. Boundless plains to share (Australian Flag), is an artwork crafted from thermal shock blankets which has the Australian Flag embroidered into it in red thread. The shimmering silver work is so lightweight that as people walk past it flutters in their wake. The thin red thread is only just visible in the work, forcing the viewer to get up close to view the Australian flag reimagined. This artwork draws from the origins of the artist’s family history as refugees. Fragile and delicate, this piece has been repetitively punctured by the red stitches that both mark-make, hold together and threaten the structural integrity. The material also speaks to the culture shock that Mullens’ family - along with other migrants - must face leaving their homes for new lives in Australia. Through her work, Mullens examines dislocation and connection; and the different stages of affirming ownership of culture, in observing how one’s relationship to culture can shift and evolve.
Previous page: MARIANA DEL CASTILLO I have scarcely left you 2 2021, Recycled wool blankets, wood, cotton, 75 x 41.5 x 21cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie
ANDY MULLENS Tombs for the Reborn 2014, Inkjet prints on 10mm clear perspex, rice, light bulb, cord, dimensions variable, Photo by Brenton McGeachie
ANDY MULLENS Tombs for the Reborn (detail) 2014, Inkjet prints on 10mm clear perspex, rice, light bulb, cord, dimensions variable, Photo by Brenton McGeachie
ANDY MULLENS Boundless plains to share (Australian Flag) 2017, Thermal shock blankets, thread and tape, 92.5 x 185cm, Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Dhūãna akase mararai is part of Sancintya Mohini Simpson’s ongoing investigation of her familial history as a descendant of labourers from India to South Africa, where indenture took place from the 1860s until the 1920s. Her ancestors worked on sugar plantations in Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa); during this period around 1.5 million Indians were taken by force or through false promises across the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific oceans, to work as indentured labourers on sugar plantations. As a descendant of indentured labourers, Mohini Simpson’s practice navigates the complexities of migration, memory and trauma through addressing gaps and silences within the colonial archive. Dhūãna akase mararai is made up of 32 archival pigment prints, and displayed in two rows of 16 photographs. Each photograph depicts a plantation landscape in varying scenes: the navy-blue sky, a flock of birds, a figure draped in white walking through tall sugar cane, crops ablaze against a black sky as well as dappled sunlight. Scattered in amongst the photographs are 10 plain, white linen coloured cards, with words quietly printed in black. Each of these cards has three words each, and they are in a combination of Hindi and English. There are words such as ‘spit / howl / shriek’ and ‘whisper / tāpū / rasp’ and ‘sour / molasses / drip’ and ‘slit / kūlī-kare / slash’: a reference to the work the artists’ ancestors undertook on colonial sugar plantations. This series of photographs questions the colonial archive that has stood to represent Mohini Simpson’s family and this history of sugar and exploitation – reframing this lens. Acknowledging the archive of images and research from this period, the images that exist take form as commercial postcards, hand-coloured and selling the industry and agriculture of the region, depicting people as commodities and landscapes. The artist reimagines this archive and the silences present through reframing the ownership of this history of missing stories and histories, ghosts of forgotten women, sent out across those dark waters.
SANCINTYA MOHINI SIMPSON drawings Dhūãna akase 2020, ROBBIE KARMEL Untitled (detail)mararai, 2020 - 2021, 32 archival pigment each and 14 x220gsm 8.5 cm cartridge paper, 42 x 60cm Graphite and coloured pencil prints, on 110gsm Photo byMcGeachie Brenton McGeachie Photo by Brenton
SANCINTYA MOHINI SIMPSON Dhūãna akase mararai (detail) 2020, 32 archival pigment prints, each 14 x 8.5 cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Lara Chamas is a second-generation Lebanese-Australian artist whose practice investigates postcolonial and migrant narratives using both humorous and poetic notions. Through her practice Chamas explores cultural comparatives, which have provided relativity and perspective into contemporary Australian culture as experienced by the artist. Installed side by side is Chamas’ single channel video Ninety Nine Names and a handmade set of glass prayer beads entitled Backbone of Australia. Hung upon a lead-coloured fabric the 33 bead Masbaha (Islamic rosary beads) are used to perform dhikr, a devotional act in which prayers or phrases are repeated. Chamas has made the Masbaha with ethically sourced, hand crushed kangaroo bone, which she has then cast in glass, creating a set of brilliant opalescent beads. This merging of culture (Islam) and national symbol (the kangaroo), now provide a deeper connection between the land we stand upon and the heavens above. The video features the artist’s father using her hand made Masbaha to recite the names of God - in Islam God is believed to have 99 names including The Healer, The Loving, and The Truth - and these are heard in Chamas’ father’s deep rumbling voice as his right hand uses the Masbaha to count the 99 names. Chamas’ work focuses on an exploration of transformation and adoption, highlighting the transitional states of being and belonging through life and faith, with both the medium and practice of the work alluding to ritualistic or mystic processes. What started as a bold assertion of subversion - ‘Islamifying’ an Australian icon, such as the kangaroo - to confront conservatives and alarmist narratives expressed in Australia, has become a peaceful merging of seemingly opposed cultures.
LARA CHAMAS Ninety Nine Names, 2019, Single channel video and audio, 4’19’’ duration, looped Backbone of Australia, 2019, Macroo Os Glass, thread, metal, 30 x 10 x 5cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie
CAROLINE GARCIA Queen of the Carabao (detail), 2018, Two-channel video, colour, sound scape, 30’00’’ duration, looped Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Caroline Garcia is an interdisciplinary artist working across live performance and video. Garcia’s practice investigates alterity (the state of being different / other), and in her work she adopts the role of shape shifter - sliding into the gaps between cultures and experiences of otherness. Queen of the Carabao is a 2-channel digital video depicting the artist barefoot, astride a water buffalo, wearing jeans and a gold off the shoulder blouse. Her long black hair is slicked away from her face, and she stares at the drone’s camera while she makes a slow, considered, journey through rural farmland. There is also poetry, displayed akin to subtitles, in garish blues and yellows on a black screen while the other video continues to play Garcia traversing a well-worn path through corn fields. The poetry in the video uses both Tagalog and English and is laden with references to the artist being caught in between two worlds (her ancestral heritage and contemporary Western society): Mabuhay maiden seeks diasporic longing IRL for an adobo embrace. She is left to marinate, steeped in vinegar, soaked in coconut cream, swaddled in banana fronds, simmering slowly on coloured people’s time. In this, Garcia is confronting the idea of homecoming, displacement and cultural memory: she deliberately uses the two languages to create a persona that is at ease with duality, but is also fully aware of the costs that migration and colonisation has had on her and her ancestors. She speaks of being dislocated from her homeland and longing for Filipino delicacies that remind her of her home; and stewing - in both senses of the word - as racial inequality and migrant identity finally become topics of popular discourse. The video also takes the aesthetics of slow motion as a tool to explore absence, trauma and racial melancholia. As Garcia moves through the corn fields, she is alone moving steadily and purposefully through crops that are brown and failing in one video, while they look lush and vibrant in the other, perhaps referencing homecoming and affirmation of culture, as well as the loss and decay of culture. This video work was filmed in Garcia’s father’s ancestral lands, in Pampanga (Philippines) and takes inspiration from Lav Diaz, a Filipino filmmaker and key member of the slow cinema movement. The video also comments on karaoke culture - an extremely popular pastime in the Philippines – with the inclusion of a high-pitched Kapampangan pop song. Garcia collaborated with musician Joshua Icban, who created a soundscape using the pop song as well as field recordings from his parents’ home in Pampanga.
CAROLINE GARCIA Queen of the Carabao, 2018, Two-channel video, colour, sound scape, 30’00’’ duration, looped Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Like Mohini Simpson, Shivanjani Lal is a member of the indentured labourer diaspora from the Indian and Pacific oceans. Lal is a twice-removed Fijian-Indian-Australian artist and curator tied to a long history of familial movement and her practice uses personal grief to account for ancestral loss and healing. Palwaar (meaning ‘family’ in Fijian Indian) is her monumental 13-piece ‘watercolour’ on Masi , a fibrous pounded wood native to Fiji. Individual lengths of Masi, ninety centimeters wide and three metres long, cascade from the gallery walls unfurling onto the polished wooden floor below. The pieces have been dyed with varying amounts of Haldi (turmeric), creating a gradient of colour that becomes an elegy for leaving and holding on. Each piece is dedicated to a member of Lal’s immediate family, to her Aaji (aunty) and Nanni (grandmother) who have passed away. The work uses a watercolour technique developed in an Indian Art School called Shantinketan wherein dyed Masi is pulled through water. In this work the stained water becomes a metaphor for the Kala Pani (black water), a taboo which considers the crossing of oceans to foreign lands diminish one’s social standing. Such dislocation also leads to the spoilage of one’s cultural character, as the offence of crossing meant the migrant would be unable to carry out the daily rituals of traditional Hindu life. The voyage also signaled the breaking of family and social ties. In Palwaar, Kala Pani references the removal of indentured labourers and their inability to return to India, but also suggests that the sea is a site that is both a place of removal and renewal. A fundamental concern in the work is how art develops and represents culture as it transitions between contexts, while also probing the experiences of women in these situations of flux.
SHIVANJANI LAL Palwaar (detail), 2019, Haldi watercolour on Masi, dimensions variable: each approximately 90 x 300cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie
SHIVANJANI LAL Palwaar, 2019, Haldi watercolour on Masi, dimensions variable: each approximately 90 x 300cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Equally commanding are four works by Elefteria Vlavianos. In signature Vlavianos style Memory of the Square #1 has been created by applying layers of paint: deep emerald greens and sapphire blues emerge from the dark, shadowy voids. The painting is hypnotic, its verdant glow at the painting’s centre draws the viewer in, so that up close delicate and deliberate pencil marks can be seen. Renewal – Grid #2, Renewal – Grid #1 and Other Days of Memory #2 combine striking blues and greens that have been generously, yet carefully, applied in layers of acrylic paint. Other Days of Memory #2 compliments the two other green-based canvasses, harmonising cobalt and royal blue tones. All three share the artist’s characteristic stamp of tiny circles meticulously drawn in pencil to create intricate grids over the paintings. The end result of the application of paint is textural, leading the audience into believe that the canvas may be thick, textured material (like calico or Aida cloth used for cross-stitching). The expertly blended colours also could be mistaken from a distance to look like a digital display or print, and the mark-making binary coding. Vlavianos’ paintings were created as a result of the artist’s ‘ongoing investigation into the process of abstraction, its conventions, materiality and language as it translates key conceptual issues such as time, vibration, echo, and resonance’. She examines how abstract painting can facilitate the retrieval and renewal of a displaced cultural aesthetic from one context into another. She also examines loss and cultural memory, looking through the lens of the Armenian Genocide coupled with her own personal loss as a product of diaspora. Vlavianos questions what impact such loss has on culture, and how culture can be reclaimed through contemporary visual art practice. By drawing upon and deconstructing ancient Armenian manuscripts, research and her grandmother’s memories, the artist finds that colour, line and structure (these frameworks translate across time, space and identity) are able to provide a means of visual retrieval in her contemporary art practice. Each of the artists in this exhibition have built their practice on investigating their own identity politics as first- and second-generation Australians. Each work explores culture, examines authenticity, confronts stigma and challenges audiences to connect with otherness. Ultimately Australien showcases the three stages of coming to terms with living in Australia with a migrant history: 1) realising you are different (and it’s often only when your otherness is pointed out to you that you realise you’re different), 2) trying to cover or erase your history in order to assimilate, and finally, 3) reaffirming your otherness, exploring your identity politics, navigating your diaspora and understanding that your relationship to your culture can evolve.
ELEFTERIA VLAVIANOS Other Days of Memory #2, 2020, Acrylic and pencil on canvas, 152 x 137cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Australien installation view, 2021, Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Australien installation view, 2021, Photo by Brenton McGeachie
AUSTRALIEN LARA CHAMAS MARIANA DEL CASTILLO CAROLINE GARCIA ANDY MULLENS SANCINTYA MOHINI SIMPSON SHIVANJANI LAL ELEFTERIA VLAVIANOS CURATED BY DAN TOUA 14 TH MAY - 11 TH JULY 2021
CANBERRA CONTEMPORARY ART SPACE 44 QUEEN ELIZABETH TERRACE, PARKES, CANBERRA ACT 2602 TUESDAY - SUNDAY, 11am - 5pm
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