spaced 2: future recall

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A recurring international event of context-responsive art


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LEFT Archana Hande, The Golden Feral Trail, 2014, digital print on archival paper.

Contents 7 Foreword Essays 10 Marco Marcon 32 Joanna Sandell Projects 48 Michael Bullock | Bangalore, India 54 Erin Coates & Anna Nazzari | Albany 60 Archana Hande | Laverton 66 Lily Hibberd | Western Desert communities 74 Jay Koh | Cervantes 78 Pia Lanzinger | Geraldton 84 Maddie Leach | Mandurah 88 Daphne Major | Karratha 92 Tea Mäkipää | Esperance 98 John Mateer | Cocos-Keeling Islands/Katanning 102 Daniel Peltz | Tom Price 108 Ruben Santiago | Derby 116 Biographies 124 List of Works 134 Thanks


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Marco Marcon

Foreword

Spaced 2: future recall is the second iteration of the spaced program, an artistic venture launched by the International Art Space (IAS) in 2009. The idea behind spaced is to commission contemporary artists to reside for extended periods of time in small communities, mostly small towns in regional Western Australia, to create new works through engaging with the local social, environmental and historical contexts. Projects are managed in partnership with regional art organisations, community associations, local governments and individuals based in the host towns. This decentred organisational structure is intended to encourage community participation and ensure that projects are responsive to local issues and realities. Spaced 2: future recall took place during 2013–15, some residencies lasting up to six months. Fourteen artists from 9 countries collaborated with 12 host communities, 11 of which were in regional Western Australia and one in Bangalore, India. All works created were first presented in the host communities; subsequently they were gathered in a large group exhibition held at the Western Australian Museum, Perth, as part as the 2015 Perth International Arts Festival. Our curatorial approach supports the development of artworks that are more than objects of aesthetic contemplation or means of individual self-expression, although such

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traditional artistic values still play an important role in our program. While this approach is representative of important aspects of the contemporary international art scene, it also reflects an artistic philosophy the IAS has been developing since it started operation in 1998. Our organisation emerged from collaborating farmers and art professionals who shared an interest in exploring the relationship between global and local dimensions of cultural identity through art. The key idea behind spaced 2: future recall is that historical, cultural and natural heritage are the contested grounds on which different, and sometimes conflicting, interpretations of community identity engage each other. These disputations about the meaning of the past are important because they provide communities with the means of making sense of the present and envisaging possible futures. spaced 2: future recall demonstrates that artists can play a positive role in this process by engaging in a dialogue with social groups and by using their talents, imagination and professionalism to shed unexpected light on shared memories and histories. This guiding notion explains why we decided to develop and present spaced 2: future recall in collaboration with the Western Australian Museum, a major cultural organisation that is dedicated to researching, preserving and presenting cultural and natural heritage. It has been a great privilege to work with many of the museum’s highly professional staff and we are grateful to Alec Coles, the museum’s CEO, for participating in this project. Of course, the main partners in any spaced program are the many communities that have hosted the artists and helped us manage their projects. The logistical challenges of placing artists for long periods of time in often-isolated

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communities across the whole of Western Australia are enormous, especially for a small organisation such as ours, and our program would not exist if it weren’t for the generosity and enthusiasm of our community hosts. Furthermore, regional partners provide essential insights into their own communities and engage in an ongoing dialogue with visiting artists, ensuring that the resulting artworks have a meaningful relationship with the place in which they were developed. Small arts organisations like IAS would not survive without government and private sector funding. We are supported by the Western Australian Government through the Department of Culture and the Arts, the Australia Council for the Arts, Lotterywest, Visions of Australia, the Gordon Darling Foundation, the City of Perth, and the Foundation for Rural & Regional Renewal. I am also personally grateful to the artists, who have often worked in very challenging conditions; our wonderful board of directors, especially Hannah Mathews, whose dedication and generosity are always extraordinary; and my amazing co-workers, Victor Gentile, Eric Sankey and the indefatigable and unflappable Katherine Wilkinson. I would also like to take this opportunity to remember the late Mr Bubble, a cocker spaniel who was very well known and loved by everyone who has visited our office over the last 15 years.


ESSAYS

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Marco Marcon

RIGHT spaced 2: future recall, Western Australian Museum Perth, installation view of Ruben Santiago’s Not What It’s Cracked Up to Be, 2015. Photo: Darren Smith, Acorn Photo.

A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/ someone looks at something.... 1

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The title quotes the eponymous body of work by Australian artist Peter Tyndall. The essay aims to reflect on the projects in spaced 2: future recall in the context of current theoretical debate on the nature of post-studio art, especially participatory, context-responsive and socially engaged practice. In addition to the new works produced for spaced 2, the final group exhibition included one previous work by each artist. These were selected to provide visitors with broader insights into the artistic personality of each participant. Those additional works are not discussed here.

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For a discussion of this see George Baker, ‘Round Table: The Present Conditions of Art Criticism’, October, 100, 2002, pp. 200–28.

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Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, Trish Cashen, Hazel Gardiner (eds), Digital Art History: A Subject in Transition, Intellect, Bristol, 2005.

A difficulty hinders the seemingly straightforward aim of this essay, which is to offer a critical response to the works created by the artists participating in spaced 2: future recall. The problem is that there is no consensus among art critics and theorists on how to evaluate ‘poststudio’ art practice, such as the context-responsive projects that characterise all spaced events.2 What should be expected from these types of work: aesthetic excellence? Political critique? Entertainment? Conceptual games? Self-expression? Insights into history or the human condition? Measurable social benefits? Education? Therapy? Economic benefit? Facilitation of international relations? Or should it be all of the above, or something else altogether? Things have not always been so uncertain. There existed, once, a very self-confident form of art criticism. Here is how it worked: The story goes that the great modernist critic Clement Greenberg had a rather special ritual when looking at a new artwork. He would stand in a darkened room with his eyes closed, turning his back to assistants hanging a picture on the wall and adjusting the light. When ready, Greenberg would turn around saying, ‘hit me’. 3 Greenberg’s amusing little routine epitomises the modernist belief that the artwork announces itself to our consciousness as a sudden 10


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Clement Greenberg argued for the need to return the arts to their respective specific domains in ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, Partisan Review, 7, July–August 1940, pp. 296–310.

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Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Bloomsbury Academic, London, 1997, p. 332. It is interesting to note that the instantaneousness so highly prized by Adorno and other modernist authors was regarded as a hindrance by pre-modern painters and sculptors. This is because their works were meant to tell a story in a medium limited by the lack of a temporal dimension. (For modernist visual artists this was not an issue as they typically rejected narrative content in their works.) Medieval artists dealt with this challenge by either turning the walls of churches and palaces into the equivalents of ‘graphic novels’, or by compressing different events within the frame of the same work (for example, depicting an earlier part of the story smaller and locating it in a more peripheral area of the image). From the Renaissance on, these techniques became increasingly untenable. The invention of perspective and the renewed influence of rediscovered ‘Aristotelian unities’ in art (unity of time, space and action) forbade medieval liberties and they ‘disciplined’ pictorial space by unifying and rationalising the principles of artistic representation. Renaissance and postRenaissance pictorial, or sculptural, storytelling had to rely on what could be called — to borrow a term usually applied to photography — the ‘decisive moment’. That is, the artwork focused on a single, crucial event that encapsulated a much larger story. In the English speaking world this is known as ‘history painting’.

sensory jolt, almost a trauma. Since instantaneousness is a prerogative of the visual arts — literature, music, the performing arts and cinema cannot affect us at one stroke — many modernist theorists considered this ‘shock of the view’ as one of the traits defining the nature of visual art (but especially painting). This suited their purist aesthetic program, which was to reduce each art form to its essential core.4 But how can the depth and complexity we expect from an artwork be compressed in an instant? Is the visual artwork a kind of perceptual black hole, a space-time vortex utterly incompatible with everyday life that ceaselessly draws in meaning to concentrate it in an eternal instant of infinite semantic and affective density? Many leading modernist theorists thought so. Michael Fried, for example, described the essential quality of the modernist artwork as ‘absorption’, by which he meant that the artwork is ‘indifferent’ to the onlooker to whom it does not address itself, remaining instead contained within a radical otherness that separates it from the space-time of everyday life. For Theodor Adorno, who is arguably the most important and influential modernist theorist, the sensorial shock is what marks the spectator’s transition from ordinary space-time into the ‘absorbed’ otherness of the artwork: The shock is the moment in which recipients forget themselves and disappear into the work; it is the moment of being shaken. The recipients lose their footing; the possibility of truth, embodied in the aesthetic image, becomes possible. This immediacy of relation, in the fullest sense, to artworks … takes shape in the fraction of an instant. 5 Modernism’s hostility to narrative, symbolic or conceptual content in the visual arts meant that the meaning and affect compressed in the ‘blink of an eye’ is reduced to the process of perceptually apprehending the visual appearance of the work. Our consciousness needs time to gradually absorb, unravel and unpack what has been compressed in an instant. This process is ‘aesthetic’ in the original, philosophical sense of the word; that is to say, it pertains to the way in which we emotionally and cognitively respond to sense experience. 12


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For a discussion of this decline of the aesthetic idea of art see Hal Foster’s seminal text, The Anti-Aesthetic, which epitomises this attitude, from its very title. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, Bay Press, Seattle, 1983.

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Peter Osborne has recently argued that the fundamental and distinctive nature of contemporary art is a function of its relationship to the legacy of conceptualism. Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, Verso Books, London, 2013.

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As well as ‘participatory’, this type of art is also often described as ‘relational’, ‘dialogical’, ‘context-responsive’, ‘socially engaged’ and by many other more or less felicitous monikers. Of course a case can be made, and has been made, that these terms identify different, albeit related, ways of making art.

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This very generic characterisation does not tell us the fundamental differences between, say, ‘connective aesthetics’ and ‘dialogical art’, or ‘collaboration’ and ‘participation’, or ‘community engagement’ and ‘activist art’. Some of key participants in this discussion are Claire Bishop, Nicholas Bourriaud, Claire Doherty, Mary Jane Jacob, Grant Kester, Miwon Kwon, Suzanne Lacy, Maria Lind, Lars Bang Larsen, Lucy Lippard, Ted Purves, Jacques Rancière, Toni Ross and Nato Thompson.

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Powerful, influential and widespread as it may be, this modernist idea of the relationship between the artwork and the onlooker faces a formidable challenge: ‘aesthetic art’ has been on the decline since the early 1960s.6 Many strands of post–World War II art have turned their backs, at least in part, to visual experience. Marcel Duchamp’s complaint that ‘stupid painters’ are obsessed with ‘retinal art’ — as well as addicted to the fumes of paints and solvents, he declared — was the initial salvo in an ongoing war against a concept of art as aesthetics and an early manifestation of what is often referred to as the ‘conceptual’ turn. 7 The decline of the modernist paradigm and its essentialist view of medium specificity opened contemporary art to an apparently limitless range of new possibilities. But it made things more difficult for art writing. Contemporary visual artworks can be based on approaches so diverse that interpretive criteria need constant review and adaptation; criteria need to be almost tailor-made to suit each individual artist. The modes of artistic practice in spaced 2: future recall are a case in point. Broadly speaking, these projects exemplify a revival of interest in participatory art that has been spreading internationally for the last two decades.8 These practices typically aim to intervene in or engage with everyday social relations, and are therefore developed outside the studio and through a dialogue with ‘ordinary’ people.9 The debate surrounding these questions is intense, and I briefly refer to it, when appropriate, in commenting on the spaced 2 projects through this essay.10 Jay Koh’s Cervantes’ Tales, for example, constitutes a radically uncompromising interpretation of participation in art; Koh sees his role as that of catalyst for collective creativity. He spent several months in the small coastal town of Cervantes consulting with local organisations and individuals. His aim was to bring to the fore local ideas and aspirations through various means: meetings, calls for submissions, workshops, research, interviews, personal interactions and shared meals (which he often cooked). The result was the decision to create a public art trail that links works mostly created by local residents. (This project is ongoing.) 13


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Grant Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context, Duke University Press, Durham, 2011.

Koh’s approach is very effective in small communities and when projects develop over lengthy periods of time (several months or more). Local residents develop a personal rapport with the visiting artist, and this familiarity facilitates trust and encourages participation: ‘contemporary art’, that sometimes mysterious and remote entity, becomes more familiar and a part of everyday life. Koh’s approach and practice is highly regarded by key theorists in the area, including Grant Kester and Suzanne Lacy, who have endorsed his work. Kester, for example, argues that artists such as Koh have developed a form of dialogical aesthetics in which the process of personal interaction counts more than the final work.11 Others, however, vigorously challenge this position, contending that creativity and art are not the same thing and should not be conflated. Art is a discipline with a specific history and a tradition; it is a collective body of knowledge that artists need to understand and engage with if they aspire to make a valuable contribution to it. Daphne Major’s approach is the exact opposite of Jay Koh’s. While Koh endeavoured to contain his authorial role in order to make room for the contributions of his community collaborators, in Major’s work the voices of her community interlocutors are subsumed within hers and ultimately indistinguishable. Titled And It Is Here I Learnt to Float, the work consists of high-definition video footage of the ancient landscape of the Pilbara in northern Western Australia. Images are accompanied by a voiceover commentary of randomly distributed verbal fragments developed from local oral history documents. Paradoxically, for a project included in an event focusing on contemporary reinterpretations of community heritage, the text is, to use the artist’s words, an ‘exploration of the first of things’; it is as if the human experience of the landscape were perpetually reborn, so it could not be accumulated and preserved as collective memory. Memory is, of course, a key theme in spaced 2: future recall. The event was dedicated to exploring the ways in which meanings and values of a shared past are reinterpreted to fit communities’ changing perceptions 14


of their present and future challenges. The idea that we reinterpret our past in order to understand our present and envisage our future underpins John Mateer’s investigation of Cocos Malay history. Titled The Quiet Slave: A history in eight episodes, Mateer’s project delves into the history of the Malay diaspora in both the Cocos-Keeling Islands and in Katanning, a rural town in the Western Australian Wheatbelt. Through its several components — a book, a radio play and an installation — the work explores aspects of Western Australian history in the context of colonialism, mass migration and cultural displacement. Despite the obvious differences of media and subject matter, Mateer’s work resembles Major’s in that it is based on what could be called, to borrow a Hegelian term, a sublation of community narratives, meaning the authorial voice of the artist both preserves and transcends the voices of the community, which provide the raw material for the work. One of the key curatorial principles of spaced 2 was that artists need not silence their individual creative voices nor renounce producing ambitious and professionally accomplished artworks in an effort to engage non-specialist audiences. Archana Hande’s project shows comprehensively that this goal is achievable. Like Koh, Hande spent many months in a very small town, Laverton, during which she produced her startling work, The Golden Feral Trail. This is an installation comprising a video animation projected on a ‘sky’ made of glass gravel, which she produced by manually crushing old bottles she collected at various abandoned mine sites on the outskirts of Laverton. The work is a playful and imaginative evocation of the historical relationships between the Goldfields region, in which Laverton is located, and South Asia. References to the role Afghan cameleers played in the region and to the trade of calico textiles, originating in the southern Indian town of Kozhikode (called ‘Calicut’ by the British), are humorously interspersed with autobiographical allusions. The projected animation radiates an enchanted aura as the small glass fragments, which the artist manually arranged to match elements of the video animation, reflect light and colour. It is as if history were seen through

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a kaleidoscope in which narrative fragments interact, reflect and echo one another in ever-changing ways. Armed with engaging forwardness, personal warmth, generosity and a sense of humour, Hande rallied a remarkable amount of support from a very generous local community and its elected representatives. It was moving to see how many local residents, including prominent Indigenous elders, flew from Laverton to Perth to attend the exhibition opening at the Western Australian Museum. Their role was not that of co-authors but of very active and committed participants in a dialogue that provided the basis for an artwork concerned with issues of great relevance to their community. Hande’s project was part of an artist exchange between India and Australia organised in partnership with Asialink and 1.Shanthiroad, a leading contemporary art centre in the southern Indian city of Bangalore. Also part of the exchange, Michael Bullock was the Australian artist who travelled to Bangalore. As one can imagine, engaging local residents in a city of more than 8 million inhabitants is not the same as interacting with a community of less than 300, such as Laverton. Yet Hande’s and Bullock’s projects share a thematic focus in the long-established trade routes that connect Western Australia to South Asia. Bullock is interested in sandalwood, a commodity with deep symbolic and cultural resonances in Indian culture. According to legend, the first statue of the Buddha introduced in China was made of sandalwood. Titled Smoke Sculptures, Bullock’s works are bronze casts of everyday objects such as soaps and ropes. Following his arrival, the artist gave sandalwood-scented soaps to people he met, requesting they used them and returned them to him before he left India. The cast soaps show different levels of wear and speak of the passing of time in a way that is both intimately personal and anonymously collective. The second series of objects originates from the ropes that Indian couriers use to fasten parcels to their bikes. Arranged in what appear to be chance

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Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma., 2002.

patterns, they rise vertically, as if by magic. By casting these humble, ubiquitous objects in bronze, Bullock rescues them from their transient everydayness and grants them a quasi-monumental, supra-temporal aura. Bullock uses bronze to ennoble the traces of the passing of time, transforming the detritus of the everyday into memento mori. Looking at these works one is almost reminded of the way in which Joseph Beuys used to turn the battered remains of personal or historical events into reliquiae displayed in glass-panelled cases. This analogy is significant in the context of spaced 2 because Beuys was one of the most prominent advocates of the social dimension of art — he notably labelled his works ‘social sculptures’. Yet despite famously declaring that ‘everyone is an artist’, Beuys by no means relinquished his status as a celebrated modern master. On the contrary, his public persona and life story — the latter, it has been argued, often creatively ‘enhanced’ by Beuys — were central to his work. Many have compared him to a shaman endowed with the power to channel invisible forces that shape the historical destiny of a community. So, in his case, one could talk of a ritualistic kind of sublation, in which an individual artist-medium channels collective voices. Miwon Kwon questions the modus operandi of artists like Beuys, claiming that socially engaged artists who work outside mainstream institutions rely heavily on the prestige of their status as artists and because of this undermine the professed ‘democratic’ ethos of their work.12 Kwon’s point is that when participatory art projects take place outside designated institutional sites, the artist is the only guarantor of the artistic nature of the activities they undertake in the community. This is especially evident, Kwon contends, when artists work nomadically, intervening in various social, cultural and geographical contexts. It is as if they carry the burden of the institution as an invisible shell that frames their activities as ‘art’. But our empirical experience as an organisation specialising in art projects with a strong social angle does not support Kwon’s thesis.

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The reasons for this can be very banal; for example, when the individual who initiated the project leaves town and no-one else is available to pick up the threads of the interrupted relationship.

The authority and power of artists working in communities are very limited, so much so that even high-ranking artists, used to being lionised by curators and collectors, lose most of their aura once they step outside the art world. Artists working in communities are often, like beggars, powerless strangers with no inherent authority, but longing to be accepted. This powerlessness is, however, a strength, as it enables the development of authentic, disinterested personal relationships with local residents. These projects are driven by ideas, human relationships and generosity – not authority. The making of Daniel Peltz’s remarkable When we dig, things come up is a fitting example of such a ‘mendicant’ situation, which was exacerbated when the community partner hosting the project, the Shire of Ashburton, became unresponsive and uninterested once the residency started.13 Left to his own devices, Peltz had to rely on the help of residents he met during his stay and on the limited logistical support we could provide from our distant Perth office. Peltz’s project is based on an equivalence between art-making and ore mining. He ‘dug out’ local raw materials — events in the history of Tom Price — and ‘exported’ them to Taiwan for ‘processing’ and ‘value adding’, that is to say, to be transformed into an artwork. The final ‘product’ was a traditional Beijing-style opera performed by Taiwanese amateurs, focusing on US entrepreneur Tom Price, who founded and named the town. The video of the performance was then ‘imported’ to Australia and presented in conjunction with three traditional-style Chinese paintings that a contemporary Taiwanese master created following guidelines provided by Peltz. In this, Peltz ‘outsourced’ the material production of the work and confined his role to creating the work’s narratives — the plot of the opera and subject matter of the paintings — and the conceptual blueprint of the project. Peltz himself is part of this narrative, as the work draws a parallel between him as an American outsider and Tom Price, also an American, but one endowed with great power, wealth and influence.

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Despite this disagreement, the City of Mandurah provided generous financial and logistical support to the project.

The strength of the work results not only from the visual appearance of its individual components but also from the poetic resonance of the conceptual and narrative threads linking all its elements. Peltz was not the only artist to encounter difficulties with the local host. In Mandurah, the relationship between artist Maddie Leach and the City of Mandurah deteriorated after she decided to focus on issues surrounding the memorialisation of the Pinjarra massacre, a bloody local clash between European settlers and the Indigenous custodians of the land in 1834.14 The City of Mandurah’s objection was that the site of the massacre is located in the nearby Shire of Murray and not in Mandurah itself. The artist, however, believed this was not sufficient reason to reject the project, as the division between the neighbouring municipalities is irrelevant when considering an historic event of such significance. The initial inspiration for Leach’s work was a local argument about how to remember the event: was it a ‘battle’ or a ‘massacre’? A commemorative plaque on a boulder identifying the site had been stolen and replaced several times, possibly, one suspects, by people unhappy to be reminded of the tragic past of this now prosperous community. Even though the controversy over the plaque is a minor event, it represents a key issue in Australian history: how to assess the ethical legitimacy of European occupation of Australia. Was it ‘invasion’ or ‘settlement’? The political and historical discussion around this issue, often referred to as the ‘history wars’, has been especially intense in the last two decades. This is a war of words, pitting conservative commentators, who criticise the so-called ‘black armband’ view of history – that is to say what they consider an exaggerated assessment of the harm caused by European settlement – against progressive voices, for whom the destructive impact of European invasion on the Indigenous population has been, if anything, underestimated. Leach’s work, titled 28th October 2834, centres on a administrative document in the archives of the Shire of Murray; the title of the work

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RIGHT Tea Mäkipää, Business Hotspot, 2014, Cape Le Grand National Park Esperance. Photo: Robert Frith, Acorn Photo.

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Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October, 110, 2004, pp. 51–79.

quotes a typo in the document that places the date of the massacre in the distant future, an involuntary example of ‘future recall’. With the help of several collaborators, she turned the document into a lithograph and videoed the process of its production. She also paid Mandurah’s largest newspaper to include a copy of the print in thousands of papers. The video has a meditative quality that emphasises the slow process through which the image is alternately obliterated and reinstated during the various stages of printmaking; it is as if the lithograph were a palimpsest on which historical memories are continually inscribed, erased and reinscribed. The difficulties encountered by Leach highlight a recurrent question in our program; is it appropriate that visiting artists delve into issues that are either hotly contested within a community or which could appear critical of local practices? Influential authors such as Claire Bishop have strongly defended artists’ right to be adversarial or, to use her words, ‘antagonistic’.15 However, it could also be argued that artists in residence are fundamentally outsiders who should respect their hosts by refraining from intervening polemically in the community’s internal conflicts. But isn’t this respect of local sensitivities a disavowal of the right to freedom of speech that is so important to artists? Peltz’s and Leach’s projects show that it is difficult to anticipate how interactions between artists and community hosts will develop. Tea Mäkipää’s project in Esperance generated a surprisingly large amount of local support. The artist had planned to create a site-specific project, Business Hotspot, comprising a fully functioning wi-fi hotspot incongruously placed in Cape Le Grand National Park (the work alluded to the fact that nature, not just economic activity, is our ‘business’). It was a logistically challenging project that Mäkipää was unable to complete before the end of her stay in Esperance. The work saw the light of day mainly because of the commitment of local artist Monika Thomas, who befriended Mäkipää and recruited the help of several local residents and organisations. Because of Thomas’s dedication and

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persistence, the work was successfully completed weeks after Mäkipää left. It was a remarkable example of what can be achieved when an individual harnesses the generosity and co-operative ethos of a regional community. It should be noted that these local collaborators did not see themselves as co-authors and that everything was done according to Mäkipää’s plan. The fact that their generosity stemmed mainly from personal loyalty to Thomas and Mäkipää does not diminish the essentially collective nature of the undertaking. As with Business Hotspot, the work Mäkipää created for the final exhibition reflect the artist’s deep interest in environmental issues. Titled Battle of Australia, it consists of merchandise such a bags, T-shirts, posters and postcards celebrating the beauty of some of Australia’s most threatened species and advocating for the implementation of more effective measures to ensure their survival. Mäkipää’s approach to these issues is original; for example, she believes that one way to save species risking extinction is to allow people to adopt them as pets. In general, her stance seems to reflect the idea that human and animal spheres are not rigidly separate but can be brought together in creative and non-exploitative ways. This is, of course, an anathema to the more ideologically intransigent strands of the environmental and animal liberation movements, but Mäkipää rejects the rigid abstractions of these ideologies to create works that engage audiences with their warmth, humour and passion. The kind of strong personal rapport that developed between Mäkipää and Thomas is typical of many of our projects. It is often the case that one or two key local residents mediate the relationship between a visiting artist and host community. The ‘bond’ enables key residents to become, through their local knowledge, guide, interpreter and advocate for the artist. Sometimes, however, especially energetic and persistent artists can mobilise a range of local collaborators. This was the case with Pia Lanzinger, whose project, Geraldton goes Wajarri: A city revitalises its endangered Aboriginal language, was enthusiastically supported by an unusually large number of local residents and organisations. 22


Lanzinger’s idea was to turn local residents into public advocates for the survival of Wajarri, an Indigenous language once widely spoken in the area but now at risk of extinction. Participants were invited to ‘adopt’ a Wajarri word and promote it in the community by wearing a printed T-shirt displaying the original term and its English translation. The work is, as in Mäkipää’s case, an awareness-raising campaign supported by merchandise, but the distinctiveness of Lanzinger’s project lies in its wide social reach. The energy of this extended and varied interaction underpins the many facets of the project, which, in addition to the work presented in the final group show, included a series of public events and a dedicated website. It is clear that a project such as this, like many others we have commissioned over the years, defies modernist notions of what an artwork is or should be. Closing your eyes and turning your back to the work, à la Greenberg, won’t help maximise the ‘shock of the view’. This is because there is far more to these types of works than their immediate sensorial impact. Geraldton goes Wajarri is a composite of visual, conceptual, performative, narrative and social elements. These different facets are not all available to an audience in the same place or at the same time, but are distributed through time and space. This is not so much a work as a network, a component of which is presented in an exhibition context. The exhibited component is a kind of synecdoche, a part standing in for the whole. A typical exhibit in a non-art museum is also a synecdoche; a preserved animal stands for a whole ecosystem, an historical artefact takes us back to a different time and a network of interrelated significant events. This is why non-art museums can be fitting venues for contextresponsive and socially engaged artworks. Visitors to these institutions delight in and marvel at the beauty of what is in front of them, but they also realise that to appreciate the full significance of what is displayed in a museum vitrine one needs to also consider the supporting documentation, interpretive displays and conceptual analyses. Likewise,

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For a discussion of this issue see Paul O’Neill (ed.), Curating Subjects, Open Editions, London, 2007.

the works included in the spaced 2: future recall exhibition cannot be fully understood without also consulting our website, the online artists’ blogs, the documentaries on each project, the symposium and this publication. Geraldton goes Wajarri, like other projects commissioned for spaced 2: future recall, will continue to develop independently of us, driven by the strength of the relationships initiated by our program. Conversely, in the case of Lily Hibberd’s project, the collaborative rapport pre-existed our intervention. Her work consists of a series of video conversations with Curtis Taylor, Tyson Mowarin, Fiona Walsh and Glen Stasiuk, documentary makers and photographers who have collaborated with Hibberd in the past and whose works explore the rich cultural heritage of Western Desert communities from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives. To emphasise the collective nature of her project, Hibberd includes in her installation samples of works produced by her interviewees. The artist’s decision to present this mini-exhibition within a larger show is not as unusual as it may appear, as one of the marks of ‘poststudio’ practice is that the roles of artist and curator can be blurred or interchangeable.16 This type of professional approach undermines the simplistic notion that artists are the ‘primary producers’ while curators, art writers and art historians are relegated the subsidiary role of ‘mediators’. Contrary to this outdated view of the division of labour within the art sector, curators, theorists and critics are important agents of change, as is demonstrated, for example, by the huge impact of figures such Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Greenberg or Harald Szeemann on art practice. Artistic development always emerges from a multi-voiced dialogue between all participants in the art world. Not all spaced 2 projects have a ‘networked’ structure, nor do they always rely on a performative blueprint. Ruben Santiago’s striking series of carved Boab nuts in Not What It’s Cracked Up to Be impresses at first blush, and yet there is more to the work than meets the eye.

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This situation and its pitfalls is discussed by Hal Foster in ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’, an influential and much quoted essays included in his The Return of the Real, MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma., 1996.

The 60 nuts are daily journal entries — one for each day the artist spent in the town of Derby — that comment on both personal experiences of the community and broader political issues. Nut carving is a local craft that Indigenous inhabitants of the Kimberley region developed following European settlement. It is a practice that demonstrates Indigenous culture’s ability to innovate and adapt traditional skills to changed historical, economic and material circumstances. To create the work, Santiago collaborated with local Indigenous residents from whom he learned the technique and the history of this craft. He then reinterpreted this through the perspective of a European artist steeped in the post-conceptual milieu that characterises so much international contemporary art. The narrative character of Santiago’s work echoes, probably unintentionally, the widespread use of storytelling in Indigenous art. The subjective point of view of Santiago’s carvings does not put them at odds, as some would assume, with their Indigenous counterparts because individual re-writing of traditional narrative themes and tropes is common practice among Indigenous artists, even those working in semitraditional, non-urban contexts. The diary-like structure is also typical of many artworks created during residencies, and it usually stems from the displacement experienced by artists plunged into a cultural context that is alien to them. Cultural shock often drives artists to question their own views and values, a sign that identity is always a function of a person’s embeddedness in specific social and cultural contexts.17 Anna Nazzari and Erin Coates, like Santiago, focus on a vernacular craft technique, which in their case is the tradition of scrimshaw engravings on whale teeth, a craft practised by whalers during the period of inactivity in between hunting seasons. Although whaling ceased in Australia in the late 1970s, the practice survives due to the abundance of teeth and bones in places such as Albany, a Western Australian coastal town that used to host a large whaling station. The scrimshaw works created by Nazzari for spaced 2 have darkly surreal undertones, a stylistic register that reflects both the artist’s sensibility and the 25


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LEFT Tyson Mowarin, All That I See, 365 Project, Day 75 (Underneath that cloud wave), 2014.

gothic nature of whalers’ tales and legends. Nazzari’s scrimshaw teeth are beautiful and technically accomplished (scrimshawing is a painstakingly slow technique). Like Santiago’s nut carvings, these works are visually engaging but have a conceptual sting in the tail, their eerie, dream-like narratives linking to the history of human exploitation of other species. It is a work born from the meeting of psychological and historical nightmares. Nazzari collaborated with Erin Coates, a Western Australian artist and curator whose family roots are in Albany. In partnership with Nazzari and several other collaborators, Coates created Cetaphobia, a video work that complements Nazzari’s scrimshaw pieces to form a single, unified installation. Cetaphobia uses narrative tropes from horror cinema to recount the tale of a whale’s ghost, which comes back to haunt a former whaling community and the submerged wreck of a whale chaser. In addition to being very affecting, Nazzari and Coates’ video is handsomely shot and technically accomplished. This is a remarkable logistical and artistic achievement considering the small budget for its production. Nazzari and Coates’ work also incorporates traditional scrimshaw from the Western Australian Museum’s collection. The fact that this work was the only one to take advantage of the museum’s collection was disappointing. One of our aims in establishing a partnership with the Western Australian Museum was to encourage collaboration between artists, communities and museum staff, such as curators and researchers. The curatorial rationale for spaced 2: future recall was to explore how historical, natural and cultural heritage can be creatively reinterpreted to develop original insights into a community’s sense of local identity. We thought this could be done in an interdisciplinary framework, combining art, anthropology, natural science and social history, as well as, of course, community perspectives. We underestimated the organisational difficulties of this ambitious program, and while communities responded well, as they often do, the collaboration between artists and the museum’s curators and researchers fell short of our, perhaps overly optimistic, expectations. 27


Exhibitions of architecture and town planning face similar issues in that what is presented in an exhibition context is always just one aspect of a broader project that is not immediately available to the visitor in its material totality.

18

The decision to collaborate with a non-art museum was, however, motivated by more than a shared interest in heritage. Another important reason is what I earlier characterised as the ‘networked’ nature of the projects we commission and their dependence on supplementary documentation and interpretive display. It is often argued that these types of context-responsive and participatory projects are out of place in art galleries and that their public presentation should be confined to the places and communities in which they are developed. There exists a long tradition of participatory and socially engaged art that has developed since the 1960s, the specific purpose of which has been to bypass the mediatory role of mainstream institutions to take art directly to communities. But seen from a 21st century perspective, this division between site specificity and gallery presentation is, for several reasons, less persuasive than it once was. First, it is an idea based on an outdated, rigid separation between what is inside or outside the institutional framework. Second, it absolves art museums and galleries from their public duty to represent all forms of art practice, not just studio-based work. Third, it perpetuates the notion that artworks shown in galleries must conform to the model exemplified by Greenberg’s viewing ritual outlined earlier, in which artworks can be experienced in their completeness by looking at them, rather than artworks being a node in a network that is never available to the viewer in its entirety. Finally, it also unconsciously reinforces the typical modernist injunction to keep art forms — in our case, studio-based work on one side and context-responsive projects on the other — confined to their specialist domains to prevent them from ‘contaminating’ each other. In reality, there is no reason why art galleries should not follow the example of non-art museums and be prepared to exhibit works that cannot be fully appreciated without reference to an absent context of origin.18 My discussion of the spaced 2 projects has, I believe, identified some still-unresolved issues surrounding post-studio practice in general and participatory or socially engaged art in particular. The ‘conceptual turn’ that affects so much contemporary art demands thet audiences are 28


See, for example, Beth Hinderliter, et al., Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics, Duke University Press, Durham, 2009; Suzanne Perling, ‘Beauty and the Status of Contemporary Criticism’, October, 104, 2003, pp. 115–30; Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2009; Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2009.

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See, for example, Beth Hinderliter, et al., Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics, Duke University Press, Durham, 2009; Suzanne Perling, ‘Beauty and the Status of Contemporary Criticism’, October, 104, 2003, pp. 115–30; Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2009; Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2009.

20

See Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author, in Image, Music, Text in S. Heath (ed.), The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 37, p. 220; Michael Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, Penguin Books, London, 1991, pp. 101–20.

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receptive not only to the immediacy of the work’s instantaneous visual impact but also to the mediated conceptual and narrative elements that lie behind the ‘shock of the view’. This is, of course, nothing new, as centuries before modernist formalism became hegemonic no-one expected art to be devoid of religious, political, mythological or historical meaning. Yet the question of the relationship between the aesthetic and conceptual aspects of the work remains one of the most debated by contemporary authors.19 But what I have called the ‘networked’ nature of some of these works asks audiences to think beyond aesthetics and beauty.20 It should be noted that, seeing as the notion of the decline of aesthetics has not spread to the general public, artists working in communities often have to deal with misplaced expectations of their role. The second much-debated issue concerns changing notions of authorship. At a theoretical level, the so-called ‘death of the author’ was announced many decades ago and emerged from structuralist and post-structuralist perspectives that saw art as an ‘authorless’ field of intertextual play.21 The current emphasis on relationality, dialogue, collaboration and participation in art has reopened questions surrounding the nature of authorship right at a time when the expansion of the art market has resurrected the cult of the artist to use as a marketing strategy. Yet, I have tried to suggest that it is too easy to dismiss the idea of author only to replace it with notions of creative interpersonal dialogue that does away with the task of creating a lasting statement that meaningfully engages with the ever-evolving cluster of disciplines and traditions we call ‘art’. Finally, the broader spaced program raises the problem of the changing role of art institutions. The historical avant-gardes of the early 20th century rebelled against museums, which at that time epitomised the bourgeoisie’s resistance to the expansion of the modernity it had originally created. When, after World War II, museums and the market embraced contemporary art, progressive artists reacted by either moving out of the institutional framework or developing sophisticated 29


techniques for deconstructing it through their works. This, for example, was the aim of Daniel Buren, Michael Asher and other artists associated with the so-called ‘Institutional Movement’. Today, simplistic antiinstitutionalism has had its time. The issue now is how to reform art museums so that they become more receptive to the changes that have affected contemporary art practice. This also entails not implicitly encouraging audiences to follow Greenberg’s approach to artworks that were not created to be experienced in that way. Art is more than spectacle; artists are better than celebrities. Among other things, spaced is a way of dealing with this issue, not through abstract theorisations but by constantly reviewing and experimenting with the structure of our program. More than anything else, we focus fairly and squarely on the changing role of art in society. This is crucial, because while communities can do without art, although they are certainly poorer without it, art cannot survive if it insulates itself from the forces, conflicts and energies that shape the society in which it is embedded. Marco Marcon is the Artistic Director and Co-founder of International Art Space.

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Joanna Sandell

From Resistance to Inclusion: a fable about artistic strategies In two areas of the world considered remote by some, two contextspecific residencies have recently been held. One, named spaced, was located in various communities across Western Australia, an area as vast and sizeable as Western Europe; the other, Residence Botkyrka, in a small art space in the southern suburbs of a northern capital city, more precisely Stockholm, in the outstretched and quite sparsely populated country of Sweden. In a fable about artistic residencies across the world these might be the first sentences. On the surface one might wonder what they could have in common — what challenges and possibilities are similar for artistic practices that follow key topics such as mobility, process-oriented art practice, international achievement, locality and community engagement. I would like to guide you through a number of projects by artists involved with Residence Botkyrka that in different ways mirror aspects of the spaced program. On a schematic level there are several similarities between spaced and Residence Botkyrka. Both residencies encourage artists to come for more than one period — at least one research visit and a longer stay, with a production phase included as part of the program. Both residency programs emphasise presenting the artistic project to not one audience but to many diverse audiences.

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The artworks are gathered into local exhibitions and thereafter circulated to a wider audience. Let me start with an introduction to Botkyrka konsthall and its residency program, for if spaced stretches over a huge land area and many different communities, the situation for Residence Botkyrka is very different. Botkyrka is a municipality in the southern part of Stockholm. It is at the end of the red subway line, which passes the city’s most expensive neighbourhoods, often ranked among the world’s trendiest, some 30 minutes later arriving at housing complexes. From the day the complexes opened in 1974, they were called a complete failure Fittja is a condensed, may I even say beautiful, example of the homes created during Sweden’s ‘million-program’ era of housing, between 1965 and 1974. One million affordable homes were built under Swedish Social Democratic Party stewardship in response to a growing population; the housing situation was poor and industrialisation called for a move from agrarian living to a more modern lifestyle around the country’s biggest cities. However, the master plan for creating a perfect modern lifestyle — with everything from neatly planned kitchens eliminating excess work for women, and providing access to nature for children by placing these satellite suburbs far from the city centres — proved less successful than the government had hoped. The architecture of neighbourhoods such as Fittja were, and continue to be, blamed for many of society’s problems, ranging from holding women back from professional life to encouraging Islamic extremism, the buildings feared as places where extremism could take a hold and grow. The Swedish working class that these neighbourhoods were originally built for immediately rejected them, Fittja included. At about the same time, Sweden experienced an influx of residents through increased migration, from Chilean refugees fleeing the Pinochet regime in the 1970s to migrants leaving troubled areas of the Middle East, former Yugoslavia, Somalia and beyond, finding a new safe haven in the rental units of Fittja and similar neighbourhoods. Besides Sweden’s generous

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Swedish Radio, ‘OECD: Ekonomiska klyftor växer mest i Sverige (OECD: Economic gaps grow most rapidly in Sweden), broadcast 15 May 2013.

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http://botkyrkakonsthall.se/wp-content/ uploads/2013/09/FittjaOpen2013_program.pdf.

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migration program, its asylum policies of the past 40 years and the fact that a real inter-cultural society without structural racism has yet to be achieved, Sweden has become the OECD country with the fastest growing economic segregation, a reality mirrored in the lives and struggles of the inhabitants of Fittja.1 Architect Tor Lindstrand, researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Technology’s Architecture School, Sweden, and I, founder of the New Biennial for Art and Architecture in Botkyrka, propose that neighbourhoods such as Fittja offer real potential in re-evaluating public space and its use. They could even offer a possibility for a more equal and progressive society. Much planned public space of the 1970s was left for the public to program and shape through the prevailing political vision of the Social Democratic Party, which believed citizens’ engagement would develop public space. Lindstrand also points out there was a shared yearning among Europe’s intellectuals to develop public space and the field of architecture, stating that architecture must make sure fascism shall never take hold in Europe again. Today, areas such as Fittja receive less renovation and development than inner-city areas, due to a lack of economic resources. Yet, from a more positive point of view, these million-program areas can also offer new views for ways of living; while most newly built neighbourhoods in Stockholm seldom include cultural centres, such as libraries and art spaces, in the planning documents (as art is not considered a model for economic growth), communities such as Fittja still have undeveloped land that could be allocated for public use. The complexity of Fittja, being a home to about 7000 people from 161 of the world’s 194 nations, also offers the possibility of looking at how space can be shared and reformulated by a very diverse population, perhaps best formulated by London architecture duo DK-CM in its Residence Botkyrka project, Fittja Centra.2 In collaboration with the Architecture School, Botkyrka konsthall offers regular open lectures in Fittja, and a new program of the residency invites architects and urbanists on research stays through Residence Botkyrka. 34


Jean-Luc Nancy, cited in Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another, MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma., 2004, p. 153.

3

So in what ways does Residence Botkyrka mirror spaced, in Western Australia, in terms of how artists work on location? Let’s look at the core value of the programs, namely the wish to support artistic development and new, challenging artistic practices, including science, technology, social activism, design and architecture. Further, let’s consider some methods residency artists use while working on and away from a specific location. I will do this by looking at choice of medium and themes, methodology and work processes, and the strategies chosen by artists. I will also discuss a few different approaches of relating to ‘community’, a term that must be continually looked at critically, as pointed out by art historian Miwon Kwon in One Place After Another. Kwon quotes French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy: ‘there is no communion, there is no common being, but there is in common … the question should be the community of being and not being of community’.3 So what role can an artist play at a specific location? Can we say that a location influences artistic practices, and if so, how? And what types of art institutions are needed to truly support the healthy development of contemporary arts? The artistic program of Botkyrka konsthall was influenced from the very beginning by artistic residencies. Artist Pia Sandström joined Botkyrka konsthall for a two-year in-house residency to formulate a number of artistic strategies as the program gained international momentum. A year later, Botkyrka konsthall had its own artist-book publishing house, Labyrint Press, and Sandström had created a reference library to accompany each new exhibition — a response to the brief to encourage the audience to spend more time with the ideas brought forth in exhibitions. The Labyrint Press archive soon held 400 artist books in a multitude of languages, a fact that allowed art enthusiasts from different countries to find their favourite kind of artist book, and allowing newcomers to Botkyrka to feel welcomed by the ‘librarian’, whose task is to find an artist book that might resonate with the visitor. Text and various forms of printed matter, ranging from artist books to

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LEFT Anna Nazzari, The Séance, 2014, scrimshaw on whale tooth, 19 × 7 × 3 cm.

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media-related projects, remain core formats of Botkyrka konsthall, a mode d’emploi on how to circulate ideas, text and printed matter. This is a strong and often inexpensive way to reach a wide audience. Botkyrka konsthall’s residency program, Residence Botkyrka, was established to offer a stable research environment for international artists to create rich production possibilities, as well as offer the inhabitants of Fittja the opportunity to engage with a broad variety of art projects relevant to the area. Text remained a strong aspect of the program. The first resident artist, Matthijs de Bruijne, worked with ‘paperless’ workers that he came into contact with through sociologists at the Multicultural Centre in Fittja. (I had originally chosen the location of the residency program because Fittja already hosted a national centre for migration research and because of its publicly slandered yet exciting architecture, typical of the late million-program era. It thus created a platform for cultural practitioners interested in sociology and architecture as important facets of their work.) De Bruijne’s residency project became a large-scale, outdoor open-book installation that recounts the nightmares of moving to Europe, indeed nightly dreams that de Bruijne recorded and transcribed. De Bruijne’s use of text as the medium for his residency project in Botkyrka — a medium in many of the works of the spaced artists — can most easily be identified in the work of writer John Mateer. His The Quiet Slave is a book that examines language, memory and migration through a gesture that is both political and poetic. Spaced resident artist Mateer refrains from intervening directly in the ‘community’ of Katanning/Cocos-Keeling Islands. Rather he uses text as a gift to the community of Katanning, adding to the historical and cultural narrative of the Cocos-Keeling Islands, for which very few historical accounts can be found, especially in Jawi, the Islamic script of the Malay language. Mateer’s novel is a history in eight episodes, told by the slave Rosie in first-person and presented both in Jawi and in English, creating a multi-faceted gem of a book. Mateer’s work also

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relates to many other projects by Residence Botkyrka artists, in much deeper ways than the use of text. The theme of migration is perhaps the strongest and most obvious choice for artists in a location where a large portion of the population changes every five years. Residence Botkyrka artist Ruth Erhardt, a writer from Cape Town, South Africa, and a distant descendant of Malay communities that John Mateer writes about in The Quiet Slave, was invited to an unusual residency visit through Residence Botkyrka. Her writing explores issues of identity in relation to the four generations of her family, which, as a result of the South African apartheid system, was branded first as ‘Cape coloured’ and later as ‘white’, due to personal connections that gave the family opportunities through the random and erratic politics of apartheid South Africa. (Later still, Ruth’s mother reclassified as ‘coloured’ as an act of political protest.) Erhardt chose to present her residency writing through readings and lectures given far from Botkyrka, at a rural farm belonging to the artist collective Kultivator. Kultivator met Erhardt in Cape Town when they were involved with South Africa through architect Tor Lindstrands, The Mirror Institution, a model of an arts institution that in many ways reflects Botkyrka konsthall in emphasising process rather than form, expressed in one of its residency strands by the path of barnyard swallows’ 10,000-kilometre journey between Stockholm and Cape Town. Today, a small organisation called Red Hill Literacy Project has chosen to mirror parts of the Botkyrka konsthall program in a small informal settlement in the Cape Peninsula, inviting artists, journalists and architects to conduct residencies in Red Hill. For Kultivator, having done a series of residencies both in Fittja and Cape Town, the methodology of its artistic practice is a key factor in successful residency projects. The Kulivator collective consists of farmers and artists, who work together on their farm on a Swedish island, a six-hour drive from Fittja and Stockholm, and on locations to which the collective is invited to

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conduct a residency or art project. Real conversations and engagement around common practices such as farming, composting, animalkeeping and food preparation is the key the group uses to form a useful project on a new location. In Fittja, a large part of the population comes from a rural background, making Kultivator’s construction of a chicken coop adjacent to the residency apartment a much-appreciated Residence Botkyrka project. The same tool of engagement was used during the residency in Red Hill, where Kultivator conducted workshops around fantasy animals for a planned conservation park some distance from Red Hill. The children might not be able to travel easily, but through art-making they could slowly build literacy in regards to storytelling and understanding, which is personally uplifting no matter where one is in the world. Another spaced artist working with language and literacy is German artist Pia Lanzinger, a resident artist in the community of Geraldton. Lanzinger brilliantly addresses the danger of languages becoming extinct, a sad fact in Australia, where Aboriginal languages have diminished from 250–300 languages, with 600 dialects spoken, prior to European contact to just 200. (Today, all but 20 Aboriginal languages are considered endangered.) Lanzinger created a successful campaign to adopt a Wajarri word in the city of Geraldton and abroad. Those adopting a word could proudly wear a colour-coded T-shirt linking the word to its linguistic structure. Spaced artists are encouraged to stay true to a rigorous art practice, to not compromise and to exemplify artistic integrity. Spaced and Botkyrka konsthall have both worked with American artist Daniel Peltz, who exhibited with Botkyrka konsthall in 2013 and became a spaced 2: future recall artist in the mining town of Tom Price during 2013–14. Peltz demonstrates artistic integrity and dedication in his practice, which has led to a successful artwork that could not have been created without his prolonged stay at Tom Price. Peltz often uses, in his work, his interest in the global economy and how it has become one of the most influential

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forces in our daily lives no matter where in the world we live. But he also uses his own life and identity as material in art installations that are as relevant to audiences in Tom Price and Perth as they are to an audience at Botkyrka. A critical gaze on societies and the way they are organised and structured is used by both spaced artist Maddie Leach, from New Zealand, and Residence Botkyrka artist Henrik Andersson, from Sweden. In 2010, Andersson joined the Residence Botkyrka program with a project that, like Leach’s, worked to extrapolate some of the core aspects of representation and history-making. Andersson, who often works with aspects of economy and politics in a similar fashion to Daniel Peltz, chose to look at the funding he was given from the residency program in Botkyrka. This Swedish funding came from a former wage-earners’ fund (löntagarfonder) discontinued in the 1990s to become an important economic fund for experimental culture. Andersson researched old political campaigns that addressed these wage-earners’ funds and reprinted the election posters for a fake campaign supporting the funds during the national Swedish government elections in 2010, creating a leap in history and time on a specific site — Fittja. Andersson was called to the office of the local governing party, which some 20 years earlier had campaigned around the wage-earners’ fund, to explain his project and why he was creating a fake political campaign for the party. The discussion turned into an educational discussion about the unexpected ways art might appear in public space, and Andersson’s work remained intact in Fittja throughout the election campaign of 2010. Maddie Leach became a resident artist of the City of Mandurah, in Western Australia. During one of the first weeks of her residency, she was taken on a tour by the City of Mandurah and shown the site of the Pinjarra massacre in the neighbouring Shire of Murray. To the Bindjareb Noongar people of Pinjarra the border is fluid, and Leach’s project follows this trajectory. She researched the circumstances around

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BELOW Tom Price: the Opera poster, 2014. Photo Daniel Peltz.

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an absent plaque for the Pinjarra massacre, and as a result the City of Mandurah chose to end all communication with her. In a film that examines this story and the complications around commemoration, memory and shame, Leach not only touches a very sore spot by looking into a narrative that a community might wish to conceal, but she creates an uncanny and strong artwork by pinpointing a typographical error by the Shire of Murray regarding the date of the massacre. By making the error the work’s title, 28th October 2834, Leach has us look at our place in history and time from a point located in a very distant future. When it comes to connecting with community, the artists of spaced and Residence Botkyrka choose many different approaches. Finnish spaced artist Tea Mäkipää and Finnish Residence Botkyrka artist Jaana Kokko both had an engaged approach to community and they began their projects with similar intellectual concerns. Mäkipää focuses not on the people living in the area of Esperance, but on its most vulnerable inhabitants: endangered animal species. Animals too were central to Kokko’s work in Fittja. In 2011, she researched the relationships between humans and animals in the million-program neighbourhoods, which are always situated close to nature, partly because city planners have constructed ‘corridors’ for wild animals to move through as they share space with humans. During her residence period in Fittja, Kokko became increasingly uneasy about focusing on animal concerns in a neighbourhood struggling with unemployment and the effects of segregation. She had a small child who had just learnt to walk, and much of her time during the residency was spent with the traditional medium of drawing. Her real connections in Fittja were arrived at through mundane aspects of life, such as sharing a playground with other mothers and children. In terms of multidisciplinary work, Mäkipää and Residence Botkyrka artist Elena Mazzi shared an interest in technology and environmental concerns. While Mazzi’s work in Fittja proposed using sun energy for the first temporary exhibition space of Botkyrka konsthall in connection

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with the residency, Mäkipää created Business Hotspot in the Cape Le Grand National Park, a remote part of Western Australia’s south-east region. By offering high-speed wi-fi, Mäkipää points to the fact that the flora and fauna of the region are not stakeholders in their own habitat. As a result of Mäkipää’s almost three-month stay in Esperance and her close connection to the local community, she was successful in convincing people in the area to help her realise her project. Mazzi is yet to overcome the challenges of achieving a solar-energy platform in the community of Fittja. Still in the early phases, her project faces challenges such as how to install a huge mirror-based glass installation in a city neighbourhood known for restless youth culture. Because residencies are about living in a place for a time, as if it were your home, they create long and lasting relationships. It would be wrong to judge their success by the number of people who immediately testify to being enriched by an artist in residence. Some residency projects take more time than others to open the way we might see ourselves and our place in the world, while some are instantly provoking or immediately touching and generous by nature. I would suggest that spaced is not about a single residency project in space and time, but rather about linking together residencies and creating a fertile soil for new artistic strategies. In coming years, as Botkyrka konsthall builds new spaces for exhibitions, education, food practice and public engagement, the residency program will remain an important and vital way of finding new ideas and of rethinking of the past and carrying them into the challenges of the future. Artists will continue to add to the diversity of Fittja, sharing physical and mental space with the residents of this small neighbourhood in a northern corner of the world. I have a wish that as time moves on some of these dreams might materialise into places where life, if even for just a moment, is exciting and new. Joanna Sandell is a journalist, writer, curator and current Director of Botkyrka konsthall, Sweden.

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PROJECTS

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Bangalore, India Michael Bullock (VIC)

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Derby Ruben Santiago (Spain)

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Karratha Daphne Major (The Netherlands)

Tom Price Daniel Peltz (USA) Western Desert communities Lily Hibberd (VIC/France)

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Laverton Archana Hande (India)

Geraldton Pia Lanzinger (Germany) Cervantes Jay Koh (Singapore/Malaysia)

Mandurah Maddie Leach (New Zealand) Katanning/ Cocos-Keeling Islands John Mateer (WA)

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Albany Erin Coates & Albany AnnaNazzari Nazzari&(WA) Anna Erin Coates (WA)

Esperance Tea Mäkipää (Finland)

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Crossing the boundaries of art, history and community, spaced 2: future recall comprises 12 commissioned projects that took place in regional and remote Western Australian communities and one overseas location throughout 2013 and 2014. Australian and international artists were invited to develop and produce new works based on an engagement with local residents, histories and landscapes. Spaced 2: future recall unfolded over the course of two years, a period during which artists undertook their regional residencies, which were often split into two or more stages. The all-important interaction between visiting artists and local residents was recorded through artist blogs available via the spaced website. Excerpts from these blogs are presented in the following pages. The unique artistic, cultural and social outcomes from each of these projects were premiered in the host communities before being gathered together in a group exhibition at the Western Australian Museum Perth, 19 February–29 March 2015, presented as a part of the 2015 Perth International Arts Festival. The event was also accompanied by a symposium, which brought together industry leaders to reflect on the opportunities and challenges inherent in collaborative projects between artists, museums and communities. The spaced 2: future recall exhibition will tour nationally within Australia throughout 2016–17.

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MICHAEL BULLOCK VICTORIA

RIGHT Michael Bullock, Rope Variant I & II, 2015, installation view, Western Australian Museum Perth, bronze. Photo: Marco Marcon.

From October to December 2013, Michael Bullock was resident at 1.Shanthiroad, an art centre in the heart of the southern Indian city of Bangalore. Bullock’s creative entry point to his residency was his interest in sandalwood and its trade, a now-precious commodity that has traditionally been highly valued in India for its ritual and religious uses. Bangalore and the nearby culturally significant city of Mysore are the centres for sandalwood production in India.

PROJECT TITLE

Smoke Sculptures COMMUNITY

Bangalore, India RESIDENCY PARTNERS

Asialink and 1.Shanthiroad RESIDENCY DATES

6 October– 28 December 2013

As a result of his research, Bullock identified a ‘vocabulary’ of interrelated materials, linking sandalwood to soap, incense, rope and carbon paper. He is especially interested in the transient character of these materials, to which his works give permanency through traditional sculptural techniques and processes, such as bronze-casting and wood-carving.

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TOP Michael Bullock, Lightbulb (Contemporary Deity), 2013, Indian sandalwood. Photo: Michael Bullock. BOTTOM Michael Bullock, master craftsman Mohan and Suresh initiate the fabrication of the light bulb at Mohan’s workshop, Mysore, Karnataka, 2013.

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WEEK 2 ‘For the last few years, the trade of sandalwood

from Western Australia to Asia for the manufacture of carvings, trinkets and incense has guided and inspired the production of my artwork. It is a trade that is strongly connected to the colonial history of Western Australia, an example of revenue for an emerging colony, exchanged for tea from China.’ WEEK 5 ‘It didn’t take long before Mysore sandal soap was introduced to me as a material that used ‘sandal’ as a key ingredient. In Bangalore, Mysore sandal soap is evocative to residents, as a fragrance that connects to collective memory ... it is a soap and fragrance that every Bangolorean knows.’

‘I have been asking people that I meet at Shanthiroad, or indeed anywhere, to take a cake of soap and return it to me in about a month, after having used it for a period of time. I think I want to distribute about 100 cakes of soap. This transaction of asking strangers to participate in such an activity is a form of intimate introduction. It will be a collective and chronological portrait of the people I have met.’ WEEK 8 ‘Folklore says that the first image of the Buddha

that travelled from India to China was carved from sandalwood. This story is one that has fascinated me. I often imagine how rare and valuable objects and images were in the ancient world; it is especially different to the contemporary world, where industrialisation and digital technologies have formed a glut ...’

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‘Making sculpture, especially in a different country where every setting is unfamiliar, there is often confusion or wonder when relating to the everyday world, as everyday objects and the arrangements of them have the potential to be understood as sculpture.’ ‘In India, what we call in Australia a light globe is called a light bulb; I like how this taxonomy encompasses both the macro and micro. The common fluorescent light globe I noticed quite immediately when I arrived in India, it illuminates and frames every shop, stall and house, and it illuminates the sacred spaces of worship such as a temple. It represents energy and light in the most prosaic manner.’ ‘Another important motif and material that developed for me in Bangalore was that of rope. Through the chance encounters in the everyday activity of trade and commerce in the marketplace, I noticed the contrasting ability of rope to be both a way of defining form, through fastening, and being formless, through subsequent release. I liken this as similar to the trail of smoke from burning incense, a simple action that transcends to the metaphysical realm.’


TOP Michael offers Mysore sandal soap to Nazneen Tonse, a participant in The Washing Away of Time Project. Bangalore, Karnataka, 2013. BOTTOM Mysore sandal soap,

2013. OPPOSITE Michael Bullock, The Washing Away of Time, 2013, installation view, 1.Shanthiroad Bangalore, Mysore sandal soap. Photo: Michael Bullock.

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ERIN COATES & ANNA NAZZARI WESTERN AUSTRALIA

The Scrimshaw Project began with the idea of learning the ancient and waning art form of incising imagery into whale teeth.1 The journey to learn the skills and stories of those still connected to this practice involved working with scrimshanders, divers, marine biologists, the families of whalers and the residents of the coastal town of Albany, home of the last commercial whaling station in Australia. The oral history gained from the community provided the artists with a narrative starting point for two new works. The first is a series of scrimshawed teeth, produced by Nazzari, illustrating the imaginary afterlife of a whale through supernatural visitations, phantom body parts and trance-like forces. This spectral motif is echoed in the artists’ second work, Cetaphobia, a short film exploring a supernatural encounter with a whale.

PROJECT TITLE

The Scrimshaw Project COMMUNITY

Albany RESIDENCY PARTNER

Western Australian Museum Albany RESIDENCY DATES

3 November– 1 December 2013 17 November– 15 December 2014

Set in the coastal town of Albany, Cetaphobia is a ghost story that traces the haunting and ultimate misfortune of a married couple troubled by a whale spirit. The obscure and ambiguous spirit is an unsettling remnant of the port city’s once viable whaling industry. Its presence is awakened after the wife, who is a scrimshander, starts inscribing the only remaining evidence of its life: a tooth. This action unleashes a dark and cetaceous force that possesses the scrimshander and her husband and draws them back to the site of the Cheynes II, the sunken wreck of the whale chaser, where they are eventually overcome by a disconcerting and unknowable horror.

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Strict laws ensure that only antique marine ivory from animals killed prior to the end of commercial whaling in Australia are used today.


BELOW Erin Coates & Anna Nazzari, Cetaphobia, 2015, film still.

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LEFT Erin Coates & Anna Nazzari, Cetaphobia, 2015, film stills.

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WEEK 1 ‘According to local Albany scrimshander Arthur Tonkin, even though whaling finished in Albany in 1978, there is still enough sea ivory (whale teeth) to last another decade. Tonkin suggests this occurs because a lot of households in Albany still have sea ivory from whaling’s heyday and whale products can be purchased from deceased estates or private collections. Once it could also be found along the beach at old whaling station sites, but as time marches on the material degrades and is no longer usable. Tonkin, who is a diver and a hobby naturalist with a particular passion for humpback whales and penguins, is not interested in contraband material and fully acknowledges that the scarcity of the material will eventually spell the demise of the art of scrimshaw.’ WEEK 2 ‘Research I have uncovered about scrimshaw from

the West Sea Company suggests that whale teeth get more brittle with age. Although I am aware that anyone opposed to the art of scrimshaw would not care what year the teeth were extracted, knowing that my motley selection of teeth were retrieved in a time period congruent with Australia’s whaling industry is important to how I justify and approach this project. I am still very conscious of the sensitivities associated with the use of whale teeth and, thus, I think my own scrimshaw tests will attempt to focus on a more critical view of whaling.’ WEEK 3 ‘In his book, Stubbs mentioned ‘The Phantom’,

which was a name the whalers gave to whales that left a footprint but were never caught.’

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WEEK 4 ‘Laurel also recalled that although her dad was out whaling on her wedding day, she and he did form a strong bond after she was married. She loved fishing and they would often have great conversations about all aspects of marine life. “I desperately wanted to go out whale chasing”, Laurel confessed, “however, women, bananas and the colour green were all considered bad luck so it never eventuated.”’ WEEKS 5–6 ‘Chittleborough wrote “Whale milk tastes like

unsweetened tinned cream — best tried chilled, rather than still warm!” ... At the time, Chittleborough’s account triggered an idea for me, in which I imagined eccentric scientists engaged in futuristic whale-milking programs.’ ‘When I got back to Perth, this idea was still at the centre of my thinking. By chance, I also stumbled across the sci-fi classic It Came From Beneath the Sea. This film features a gigantic octopus that has been in the vicinity of hydrogen bomb testing and is radioactive and super aggressive. The film suggests that animals are often subject to the whims of human enterprise, which was something I was interested in exploring with the notion of milking wild animals.’


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OPPOSITE FROM LEFT Anna Nazzari, Hanging Whale, 2014, black ink pen on paper.

Anna Nazzari, The Burial Grounds, 2014, scrimshaw on whale tooth.

Anna Nazzari, Milk, 2015, scrimshaw on whale tooth.

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BELOW Erin Coates & Anna Nazzari, Cetaphobia, 2015, film still.


ARCHANA HANDE INDIA

Resulting from Archana Hande’s six-month residency in the remote community of Laverton, The Golden Feral Trail reflects local oral histories and charts the historical relationship between South Asia and Western Australia. Using photography, archive documents, animation and installation, Hande explores issues of religion, trade and migration through the early Afghan pioneers of the region and the identity politics associated with their transnational movement. The work references 19th century trade and migration routes linking Laverton and Coolgardie to Asia, traces of which Hande sees remaining in the landscape — in cemeteries, ghost towns, mining pits and archives. The Golden Feral Trail transforms the West Australian horizon into a screen displaying stories of nomadism, economic relations and loss of cultural identity.

PROJECT TITLE

The Golden Feral Trail COMMUNITY

Laverton RESIDENCY PARTNERS

Asialink, Shire of Laverton and Laverton Leonora Cross Cultural Association RESIDENCY DATES

1 September – 20 November 2013 1 April– 30 June 2014

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BELOW Archana Hande, The Golden Feral Trail I, 2013-15, installation comprising: colour HD video projection with audio, glass, metal, red earth, gold. Photo: Robert Frith, Acorn Photo.

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WEEK 1 ‘This post office is quite an adventurous place: from

here you can buy a metal detector and visit the abandoned gold-mining sites and start hunting for gold — as a pure Indian, my aim is to hunt for gold, make it into jewellery and wear it back to India (of course, illegally) ...’ WEEK 2 ‘The word “Afghan” in Australia is actually a very broad term. Basically, I feel what’s really meant is “Muslim”, but then I figured out all in this group were not Muslims, as there were also many Sikhs too, so maybe they meant Muslims and South Asians? I don’t think they even bothered to find the many layers. So “Afghan” was a convenient general term – that’s what the colonisers did all over the world: generalisation.’

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WEEK 3 ‘... they are called paddy melons or camel melons or Afghan melons. The Afghans got them from South Asia for the camels, as these melons contained a lot of water.’

‘The melons are very bitter, so people won’t eat them — but the camels love them. So the story is: the camel ate the fruit and walked all over the desert. The seeds came out from their dung and later the weed grows with many more melons all across the continent.’ WEEK 4 ‘I am amazed by these abandoned sites, with all the

history buried, and that nobody takes the machinery home. They are all preserved and protected in the land. In India we have the belief of what comes out of the earth should go back to the earth: the cycle of life.’


WEEK 11 ‘Looking at the archives, I have also come across only a few stories of the early native guides in Western Australia and their associations with the nomadic community that came from South Asia and settled. Now, when I mention the native guides, they were not only guides but also translators and interpreters, who formed the foundation of building the present society, the infrastructure and welfare, which we witness today.’

‘For me now the question is: are these things lost or abandoned? “Lost” because of the loss of history, but still, in contrast, it records the trail of human history; “abandoned” because these objects give you the feeling of homelessness, and also a sense of the meaninglessness of the life cycle. Homelessness and restlessness and flatness all fall into a thought of a loss of power and identity.’

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OPPOSITE Archana Hande, The Golden Feral Trail II, 2013–15, video stills. ABOVE FROM LEFT Archana Hande, The Golden Feral Trail II, 2013–15, video still.

Doreen Harris and Archana Hande, Laverton, 2013.


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OPPOSITE & ABOVE Archana Hande, The Golden Feral Trail I, 2013–15, installation comprising: colour HD video projection with audio, glass, metal, red earth, gold. Photo: Marco Marcon.

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LILY HIBBERD IN COLLABORATION WITH TYSON MOWARIN, GLEN STASIUK, CURTIS TAYLOR AND FIONA WALSH AUSTRALIA/FRANCE Films and photographs are powerful tools for looking back and forward. Some images lead us to ask the deeper question of how we belong to a place, for through such pictures we are looking from elsewhere, far away from home. This is when moving images make or renew memories and connections with people and places, whether near or far.

PROJECT TITLE

It goes both ways: moving images in different times and places COMMUNITY

Western Desert communities RESIDENCY PARTNER

Martumili Artists RESIDENCY DATES

It goes both ways: moving images in different times and places features the films, photographs and recorded conversations of Lily Hibberd, Tyson Mowarin, Glen Stasiuk, Curtis Taylor and Fiona Walsh, encountered during Hibberd’s spaced 2 residency, her collaboration with Martumili Artists spanning 2013–14 and more than four years of making art in Western Australia. Her installation gathered together the works of these artists to present their stories in a conversation about filmmaking in and out of the Pilbara — about moving and sharing memories across many places and times.

28 May –15 June 2014

Central to the work is a suite of films made in the Pilbara. In Footprints in the Sand: Jinna Mitinu Barnunga – The Last of the Nomads (2006), director Glen Stasiuk retells the story of Warri and Yatungka, a Martu couple who left their communities and lived in the Gibson Desert for more than 40 years. Contemporary interviews are combined with archive footage from 1977. The film is told through the voices of Warri and Yatungka’s son, Geoffrey Stewart (Yullala Boss), and other community members as they journey back to Yullala’s birthplace in the desert. Yullala’s homecoming is a ceremonial event.

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ABOVE Lily Hibberd, in collaboration with Tyson Mowarin, Glen Stasiuk, Curtis Taylor and Fiona Walsh, It goes both ways: moving images in different times and places, 2015, installation view, Western Australian Museum Perth. Photo: Robert Frith, Acorn Photo.

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LEFT Tyson Mowarin, All That I See, 365 Project, Day 64 (I was watching the trees), 2014.

Fiona Walsh’s Handing back the past: A journey to Martu country with old photos (2012) documents her return to the Western Desert Martu community of Parnngurr with more than 1400 photos she took in the 1980s and 90s. This film charts continuity and change over 20 years in social and ecological environments. As she travels, Walsh is anxious about bridging cultural worlds and the wide span of 20 years. Will these pictures be of interest to Martu people in a world of rapid change? Mamu (2010), written and directed by Curtis Taylor, tells the tale of a young disillusioned Martu man who breaks cultural protocol by sharing photos of powerful rock paintings on Facebook, and who then faces the frightening consequences. Tyson Mowarin’s Ngurra Wangaggu – Country Talking (2013) centres on a fishing trip, but this is a reconnection, a continuing practice and part of everyday life. Ngurra Wanggagu is a modern and ancient love story. It is presented in cinematic style, with stunning landscape timelapses as well as intimate one-on-one shots to explore the wider and more personal connections between a family and their country, and the connections with each other. The Phone Booth Project (2012–13) is a collaboration between Hibberd and Taylor and the Martu communities of Punmu and Parnngurr that relates the significance of phone booths for people in the Western Desert, especially in keeping dispersed families connected. Martu community members were actively involved in this retelling, also communicating diverse aspects of life in remote Australia.

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Woven across the four other monitors in the installation are films made in many other places: Sydney, Alice Springs, Wadjemup (Rottnest Island), Murujaga, the Burrup peninsula (West Pilbara) and Pernambuco (Brazil). Completing the scenario, It goes both ways presents seven prints from Tyson Mowarin’s series All That I See, 365 Project, part of his ongoing documentation of his many travels, and memories of encountering special people and places — one shot and one story for each day of a year. Of all the representations, the still image that moves us the most could be: to feel the coming storm under the foreboding sky in Day 75, underneath that cloud wave in the dust, red pindan and burnt ground.

RIGHT Tyson Mowarin, Ngurra Wangaggu – Country Talking, 2013, film still.

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LEFT CLOCKWISE Lily Hibberd & Curtis Taylor, The Phone Booth Project, 2012–13, video still. Commissioned by Fremantle Arts Centre and Martumili Artists for We don’t need a map: a Martu experience of the Western Desert.

ENTRY 2 ‘After these several months in 2013 and the official residency month in 2014, what I had planned to create with the artists necessarily changed. Except one consistent sense was retained: I did not want to work in isolation or to make art about the artists I was working with. To my delight, I found that what I had imagined I might have to begin alone was already being done by other filmmakers and researchers, people that I was discovering on the spaced 2 residency and others I was re-meeting after years of coming to Western Australia.’ ENTRY 3 ‘One night, as we sat and chatted out with the moths and howling dingoes, one of the younger women from Punmu, Morika Biljabu, came by. Fiona pulled out her iPad and showed Morika the old photos, images of her parents and grandparents, photos of Morika as a little girl. Sometime during those few days, Fiona shows me Handing Back the Past, her recent film made to document the very process that she was still undertaking: the sharing and renewing of memory though her old photographs. This commitment and the film itself have been in my heart and on my mind since I saw this intergenerational memory work unfolding in Morika’s hands ...’ ENTRY 4 ‘I’m not sure how we got to the subject of filmmaking, but I still haven’t forgotten what he said: “If you want to work with a great filmmaker in the Pilbara, look for Tyson Mowarin” … I followed Tyson’s work on his online digital storytelling archive, icampfiretv, as he travelled and filmed all over the west and way beyond.’

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Glen Stasiuk, Footprints in the Sand: Jinna Mitinu Barnunga – The Last of the Nomads, 2006, video still.

Fiona Walsh, Handing back the past: A journey to Martu country with old photos, 2012, video still.

ENTRY 5 ‘When I first discovered the films of Curtis Taylor, in late 2011, I was told he would be too busy to start another project … In 2013, we presented the project in Vivid Memories, a major survey of contemporary Aboriginal art and intercultural collaboration at Musée d’Aquitaine, in Bordeaux, France. From there, Curtis took a direct flight to Brazil, where he began filming his exchanges with the Pankararu indigenous communities of Pernambuco. When Curtis heard the Pankararu stories of land and culture preservation, he saw many common ties to Martu struggles for land rights and this inspired him to make the new video Caatinga – Milirripa: Spinifex Resin – keeping everything together…’ ENTRY 6 ‘… As an established documentary filmmaker of Noongar descent, Glen was strikingly experimental in his collaboration, which involved video and installation artworks, elements of which are in his latest feature, the 2014 film Wadjemup: Black Prison, White Playground.’ ENTRY 7 ‘What is being presented at the Western Australian Museum is a collection of films and photographs that Glen, Curtis, Fiona, Tyson and I have taken both in and out of the Pilbara. It is a collection gathered and organised for spaced 2: future recall in response to what I felt it was to make art in this totally foreign land, a country that I only learned a little of thanks to the openness of the people, the Martu, and those who have moved away from home to make a life in those communities. And through the work of these artists, I started to see how what I’d been trying to make in Western Australia might fit in, not in isolation but as a conversation across many times, people, memories and places.’


JAY KOH SINGAPORE/MALAYSIA

Cervantes’ Tales is the outcome of a three-part residency that Jay Koh undertook over 18 months. Koh’s approach to participatory art is based on dialogue and interpersonal exchange within networks of social relationships, resulting in projects in which authorship and decision-making are shared and negotiated. Adhering to this open and reciprocal approach, Koh helped develop a plan for a public art trail in Cervantes, a project chosen by the local community and now managed by the Cervantes Historical Society. The trail will include permanent and temporary artworks that mark several of Cervantes’ public and private spaces, and reference local histories and personal narratives. An icon symbolising a crayfish tail will signpost the location of each work. The activities documented here and in the spaced 2: future recall exhibition at the Western Australian Museum represent the beginning of a larger venture.

PROJECT TITLE

Cervantes’ Tales COMMUNITY

Cervantes RESIDENCY PARTNERS

Cervantes Cultural Committee and Cervantes Historical Society RESIDENCY DATES

15 May –14 July 2013 6 October–28 December 2013 10 June –10 July 2014

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BELOW Cervantes gathering, 2014. Photo: Jay Koh.

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ABOVE Don Juan Bartle and Jay Koh, 2014.

OPPOSITE Cervantes public art trail workshops, 2013–14.

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WEEK 1 ‘In this initial stage of my public participatory art

residency, listening and getting a feel for the locals are crucial processes of my encounters. The residents’ bonds and their support for each other, seen through sharing and assistance, seem to be my most important experience up until now.’ WEEK 4 ‘My last week in Cervantes was taken up with

intense interactions to discuss the individual history of some of the residents, including Dorothy, who came to Cervantes in 1994 and lives in one of the houses facing the beach and the sunset. Dorothy has actively built up the Cervantes Historical Society and has served in the role of president for 11 years. The main aim of this society is to assemble the richness of the residents’ background and the town’s histories in a meaningful archive … I believe connections to individual histories and memories are crucial for feeding and supporting constructive narratives for residents and for the town to move forward.’

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WEEK 8 ‘I met with the Cultural Committee members

in their monthly meeting to confirm the finer details of the project. Slowly and surely, my process of creating an artwork as a collaborative “withness” relationship is beginning to bear fruit. Participants and residents understood that we are not making art “about” or “for” them. So from here it is all go.’ WEEK 10 ‘Chu Yuan and I organised our last workshop for

this visit, when we discussed the evolution of public art and possible individual and collective installations/sculptures and durational performative artworks that could be developed with the residents.’ WEEK 12 ‘Winter is probably the time when most residents embark on travel, but nevertheless we begin to create the cultural indicator, this crayfish tail, to provide a public reference to individuals’ works presented in private spaces. Soon to be accessible to public audiences, the Cervantes public art trail will present works that conceptually connect to the histories and memories of Cervantes.’


PIA LANZINGER GERMANY

Pia Lanzinger’s project focuses on Wajarri, an Aboriginal language that today has less than 50 fluent speakers, despite it once being the most commonly spoken language in Australia’s mid-western region. Lanzinger’s project, Geraldton goes Wajarri, is concerned with the conservation of this language, and takes Wajarri words into the public spaces of the City of Greater Geraldton. During her residency, Lanzinger invited Jambinu (Geraldton) citizens to adopt a Wajarri word and to use it in day-to-day life, effectively to become mentors for the language. Through her adopt-a-word campaign and a series of playful public events, Lanzinger created a reservoir of knowledge, a living archive of the language in the consciousness of Geraldton residents.

PROJECT TITLE

Geraldton goes Wajarri: A city revitalises its endangered Aboriginal language COMMUNITY

Geraldton RESIDENCY PARTNERS

Western Australian Museum Geraldton, and the City of Greater Geraldton RESIDENCY DATES

1 November– 9 December 2013 20 October – 10 December 2014 25 February– 2 April 2015

www.geraldton-goes-wajarri.org

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BELOW Pia Lanzinger, Geraldton goes Wajarri, 2015, installation view, Western Australian Museum Perth. Photo: Robert Frith, Acorn Photo.

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LEFT AND FOLLOWING SPREAD

Participants in Geraldton goes Wajarri, 2014. Photos: Clinton Nalder, Pia Lanzinger.

WEEK 1 ‘Geraldton has a reputation for being a red-neck

town, but I have found already so many inspiring people and a growing alternative community. There are initiatives against fracking, the new proposed port area in the north, and calls for sustainable living … and last but not least there is a gallery called ACDC — not the Australian hardrockers but the Arts and Cultural Development Council, a venue for local and visiting artists.’ WEEK 2 ‘It is good to see that in the meantime — after the decline of Aboriginal Australian languages since the time of European colonisation and a government policy which supported a monolingual, monocultural Australia — there is an effort to preserve these languages.’ WEEK 4 ‘The Bundiyarra – Irra Wangga Language Centre offers, every Saturday morning, a Wajarri language course. I have decided to try my best to learn Wajarri and participate in these lessons — first in Geraldton and later back in Berlin, virtually …’ WEEK 5 ‘On my last Sunday I went to Greenough to visit Mena, Ron and their son, Bruce Bradfield, all very engaged in Aboriginal affairs as well as arts. Of particular importance was my meeting with Jennifer Kniveton and Leonie Boddington of the Bundiyarra – Irra Wangga Language Centre.’

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WEEKS 6–10 ‘On Thursday 20 November 2014 I launched

my public art project in the community of Geraldton — Geraldton goes Wajarri: A city revitalizes its endangered Aboriginal language. The project is designed to provide a forum for the conservation of this language by smuggling Wajarri into the public spaces of the City of Greater Geraldton, in a way that is both playful and enjoyable ... Instead of obligating people to engage with Wajarri, this project will make people aware of how beautiful the language is and how it breathes life into the fascinating culture that was created on this land.’ ‘Across the world, language diversity has taken a hit in the face of the homogenising factors of globalisation. The slow extinction of the languages of Aboriginal people, persecuted and exploited by Australia’s “civilised” conquerors, was until recently the declared goal of the colonial power. Locally, Wajarri has not been valued in the schools as one of the world’s oldest living languages. Geraldton goes Wajarri aims to support efforts that are attempting to keep this language alive.’ WEEKS 11–15 ‘To date, over 200 people from Geraldton, across Australia and overseas have adopted a Wajarri word. Sue Chiera from Bundiyarra Aboriginal Corporation who adopted the word “bundiyarra”, meaning “good place”, became the 200th person to adopt a Wajarri word!’


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MADDIE LEACH NEW ZEALAND

Maddie Leach spent two months in Mandurah in early 2014 and her residency was hosted by the City of Mandurah. On a cultural tour organised by the city she was introduced to the Pinjarra massacre site, its contested narratives and the ongoing impasse surrounding its naming and memorialisation. For Bindjareb Nyungar and many other locals, the ‘border’ between the City of Mandurah and Pinjarra (in the Shire of Murray) is nominal and fluid, and Leach’s project subtly traverses this boundary. What transpired was conversation and research focused on a large piece of rock marking the massacre site and the removal of two plaques that have been attached to it. Their noticeable absence and the sustained disagreement about the language and wording used to write the plaques became a persistent force in her thinking.

PROJECT TITLE

28th October 2834 COMMUNITY

Mandurah RESIDENCY DATES

28 February – 26 April 2014 14–22 December 2014

Leach’s project has manifested in two parts: a film that carefully records the reproduction of a redacted Shire of Murray fax document onto a large lithographic stone; and a newspaper reproduction of the resulting lithograph, with further information enigmatically removed, printed in the Mandurah Coastal Times on the day the spaced 2: future recall exhibition opened in Perth. In this ‘public’ context, the lithograph document was circulated to around 37,000 homes in the Mandurah–Pinjarra region. Leach’s project title — 28th October 2834 — is taken from a recurrent typographic mistake in shire minutes regarding the date of the Pinjarra massacre and it intentionally operates as both portent and enigmatic forecast.

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RIGHT Lithographic print, 59.4 Ă— 84.1 cm. Designed by Warren Olds, drawn by Terry Maitland, printed by Struan Hamilton, Auckland, New Zealand (2015). Reproduced from original fax supplied by Shire of Murray Archives, Pinjarra, Western Australia.

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WEEK 1 ‘Yesterday Kim had arranged for me to gatecrash a “cultural tour” for City of Mandurah staff. We had a small community bus and the tour was led by intrepid Community Development Officer Tim Williams and Aboriginal guides George Walley and his brothers Franklin and T.K., pretty cool people they are. We stopped at various historic sites and places of significance to the Binjareb Nyungar tribe, ending up at the site of the Pinjarra massacre (which in white history is continually referred to as the “battle of Pinjarra”). A large commemorative rock sits at the heart of a local friction — the Aboriginal community in Pinjarra put up a plaque which includes the word “massacre”, it gets ripped down by the local governing body, the Shire of Murray. Another gets put up, it gets ripped down … and so the rock sits with the ghost space of a plaque, which in itself speaks volumes about absence and contested memory.’ WEEK 5 ‘Contested language and acts of naming are

thoroughly evident in local debates here … Locally, there

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is no doubt that there is a sustained muting, if not quite a full disavowal, at work in Pinjarra’s contested history. The single date that puts Pinjarra on the Australian history map is 28 October 1834 and the massacre of the Binjareb community (an event predominantly referred to as a “battle”). The Wiki entry for Pinjarra, for example, brings this date to the fore in its opening sentences. Lonely Planet gives it a bordered paragraph in its description of Pinjarra. Yet in the township itself there are no signposts to the site, no words to announce where you are if you happen to turn off the main road south seeking a picnic spot under the trees.’ WEEK 8 ‘Denise (in the Shire Records Office) sent me a single-page document – a fax dated 13 April 2007 showing a request from the Shire of Murray for a plaque to be fabricated for an agreed sum of $390. It has a letterhead crest that the shire doesn’t use any more — an agrarian idyll depicting apple trees, cattle, sheep, fish, rivers and earthmovers … It is both a perfunctory and strangely enigmatic document. I thought about what it set in motion,


how it was a catalyst for both production and action and, at the same time, a signal of closure, deafness and refusal.’ ‘Alisdair and I visited the massacre site. As we parked near the boulder I noticed that there was a glint where the imprint of the plaque had been. I exclaimed, “Alisdair! That looks like a new plaque!” Sure enough there, firmly embedded in the space that has housed the two previous editions, was a bright, new stainless-steel plaque with a Nyungar inscription followed by an English translation. It used the same wording as the 2010 plaque … It must have only been a few days old … We both commented that it would be much harder to crowbar off. It was a brilliant “checkmate” moment.’

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FROM LEFT Pinjarra massacre site boulder and plaque, Shire of Murray, Western Australia, 2013. Photo: Maddie Leach.

Maddie Leach, 28th October 2834, 2014, video stills.


DAPHNE MAJOR THE NETHERLANDS

And It Is Here I Learnt to Float is a poetic cinematic exploration of the Pilbara region in northern Western Australia. In developing the work, Major drew on oral histories and testimonies held in the Oral Histories Archive at the Karratha Community Library, an archive that registers the profound mark the landscape has on local residents. The narrative of Major’s film is a multi-layered representation of the community and an exploration of the impact of landscape on language. As well as giving voice to the community, the film follows Major’s own journey into the landscape through sailing, driving, flying and hiking. And It Is Here I Learnt to Float, she has said, ‘speaks of the first of things: the first time learning to float, the first time experiencing landscape, and the first time seeing the largeness of the sky’.

PROJECT TITLE

And It Is Here I Learnt to Float COMMUNITY

Karratha RESIDENCY PARTNER

City of Karratha RESIDENCY DATES

1 July –20 August 2014

And It Is Here I Learnt to Float was produced on the traditional lands of the Yaburrara, Yindjibarndi, Gurrama, Ngarluma and the Marduthunira people; Daphne Major acknowledges them as the traditional owners of the lands.

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WEEK 1 ‘She manages the recorded voices of a community; she is sensitive to their presentation, to how they are formed and are materialised. The one that speaks, the voice of both present and future, is now heard through headphones sitting in a chair, on a floor that is moving. Not far from here, you can find fossilised bacteria spanning 3.5 billion years “Complex microbial ecosystems” pushing our dates of the world back by four million years. When I was a child a fortune teller read my palm and said I was to live till my 70s. So I find it easy to take history by its hand, to be shown an arrow head, a painting, or a leather sandal. I still find it difficult to hold fossils in my palms.’ WEEK 5 ‘We knew that we were in the right place for this

project when we came across an interview at Karratha Local History Centre with a man who said, “I have experienced many things, but I have never experienced isolation”. To us, this is very much what we deal with in all our artistic works, but it certainly reflects how we feel about our time in the Pilbara, with many of the people that we met.’

‘The film is shot in the Pilbara, of north Western Australia, featuring a landscape that is over 3.5 billion years old, the perfect place for the first of things. Stretch out an arm and imagine 3.5 billion years as starting at your shoulder, ending at the tips of your fingers. Now imagine filing your finger nails, the filings of those nails is the entirety of human history. And so, we found ourselves within geological time, a brief moment in continuous, unrelenting movement.’ ‘The film offers no answers within the understanding of what it means be in a place that has changed over billions of years, or what it means to be situated in a landscape that actively tells us how it changes, and how it still exists as strong as ever. The film is not about travel and learning as pure experience, nor talks about exoticism or otherness; the film is to recognise our own apathy and naivety towards a landscape that some of us think we know …’

WEEK 8 ‘And It Is Here I Learnt to Float is an exploration of

the first of things: the first time a material collides and a new experience of an object or moment rises to the surface; when a woman learns to swim in a gorge and learns about her buoyancy in water; or the moment a cloud discovers that same buoyancy within the air. It is the first time we learn about where we live; the first time we see a sky that falls behind the earth; the first time we hold a rock that is billions of years old.’

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FOLLOWING SPREAD Daphne Major, And It Is Here I Learnt to Float, 2014, video stills.


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TEA MÄKIPÄÄ FINLAND

RIGHT Tea Mäkipää, Battle of Australia, 2014–15, poster designs. Photo: Marco Marcon.

Tea Mäkipää’s Battle of Australia is a celebration of the beauty and charm of the ‘voiceless’ inhabitants of Western Australia’s vast expanses — our native fauna. Traditionally, Indigenous Australians domesticated many of these animals, but since European settlement countless species have become extinct due to land clearance or the introduction of non-native predators. Special programs have been introduced to protect highly endangered species, but scarcity of funding and bush fires render the programs unsustainable in the long term. Mäkipää believes that the re-introduction of domestic ownership of wild animals could revive many of Western Australia’s threatened species. Battle of Australia is a small-scale awareness-raising campaign that aims to foster a more balanced relationship between animals and humans, and highlights the unique biodiversity that still exists, for the moment, in Australia.

PROJECT TITLE

Battle of Australia COMMUNITY

Esperance RESIDENCY PARTNERS

DADAA and the Cannery Arts Centre Esperance RESIDENCY DATES

14 October – 31 December 2013

Alongside Battle of Australia, Mäkipää developed Business Hotspot and a collaborative project with Monika Thomas titled Not with Us Anymore. Business Hotspot is a temporary public artwork and wi-fi hotspot that was installed at the Cape Le Grand National Park, Esperance, over April–May 2014. The work comprised a fully functional wi-fi hotspot in a pristine and protected natural environment. While accessible to all who frequented the wilderness of the southern coast, the hotspot was intended as a commentary on the lack of value placed on native animals by the financial market, making the animals voiceless stakeholders of their own natural habitats. Not with Us Anymore is an ongoing artistic collaboration between Mäkipää and Esperance-based artist Thomas that involves creating a series of death notices based on the Austrian/German model of the Todesanzeige.

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LEFT Tea Mäkipää, Business Hotspot, 2014, Cape Le Grand National Park, Esperance. Photo: Robert Frith, Acorn Photo.

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LEFT Men’s Shed, Esperance constructing the Business Hotspot sign, 2014. Photos: Monika Thomas.

WEEK 2 ‘Even though us Finns only won the Eurovision

Song Contest once, I was inspired by this kitschy but entertaining competition’s scoring system and I tried to define how important it is to me and my project to meet specific species. Here is what I came up with: lesser longeared bat, tiger snake, noisy scrub-bird and burrowing bettong: 12 points; long-neck turtle, mallee fowl, Gilbert’s potoroo: 11 points; quoll: 10 points; possum, red-tail black cockatoo: 7 points; numbat: 4 points; echidna: 3 points; bilby: 2 points; dingo: 1 point.’ WEEK 6 ‘Barna Mia is a safe enclosure hidden inside

Dryandra. Surrounded by high electric and videosurveillance fences, a few individuals of these species are able to live without immediate danger of life in this tiny four hectare bush. I was horrified to hear that, in many cases, male and female animals are kept separate to control breeding. Even if the animals are extremely few and every life is precious for the survival of the entire species, there is no safe place to put the young; therefore the numbers are kept low. I must say I have a hard time understanding this logic. I of course agree that it would be great if animals could run wild on green meadows, but when the green meadows do not exist anymore and there is no sign of humans changing their practices I would put the highest priority on increasing the numbers of these animals — even if their ultimate wildness would blur a little in the process.’

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WEEK 8 ‘Those creatures that are numerous and flourish do so BECAUSE of their captive existence. The winners are cats, dogs, cattle, sheep, poultry, pigs … If you are an ugly, small, unknown, useless, unprofitable or inedible animal, too bad, you will probably fall out of the drawing tables of urban planners and developers who design how the land is used and who is allowed to fill the earth. Only our traditional bodily/domestic/agricultural/urban parasites are able to swim against this tendency.’

‘I feel privileged to have had the chance to see and meet a quoll (I wish I could have a couple as pets!), flying foxes, woylies, wallabies, long-nosed potoroo, koala ... I hope the government of Australia will change the laws and allow native Australian animals to become pets, in order to let them escape the extinction caused by land clearing, cats, dogs and foxes. Pets will likely be free from hunger, diseases, homelessness, misunderstanding and hatred.’


JOHN MATEER WESTERN AUSTRALIA

RIGHT Jawi transcription by Alfian Kuchit of the Malay translation from The Quiet Slave: A history in eight episodes (detail), 2015.

Conceived over a two-year period in the rural town of Katanning and on the Cocos-Keeling Islands, The Quiet Slave is an installation and research project realised as a historically accurate fiction set on the Indian Ocean islands during the early 19th century.

PROJECT TITLE

The Quiet Slave: A history in eight episodes COMMUNITY

Katanning and Cocos-Keeling Islands

It describes the first years of settlement on the CocosKeeling Islands, located between Perth and Sri Lanka, through the eyes of Rosie, a female Malay slave belonging to the controversial Englishman Alexander Hare. Uncovering the origins of the Malay community of the Cocos-Keeling Islands, the project restores a sense of its place both in the history of the South-East Asian slave trade and in the British Empire.

RESIDENCY PARTNERS

Shire of Katanning and the Islamic Association of Katanning RESIDENCY DATES

28 October – 22 December 2013 ongoing in 2014

The work consists of the story The Quiet Slave: A history in eight episodes presented as a book in John Mateer’s original English and in Malay translation by Singaporean Nur-El-Hudda Jaffar; a re-presentation of the section that deals with Stamford Raffle’s meeting with Napoleon on St Helena in the Jawi/Arabic-Malay translation by Islamic scholar Alfian Kuchit; and a 20-minute audio piece dramatising, in several voices of the Cocos-Malay community of Katanning, the crisis that precipitated the Malay slaves being abandoned by Alexander Hare on the islands nearly two centuries ago. The Quiet Slave reminds us that language, as much in the fading material of its script, as in its quiet narrative, is the basis of community and history.

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‫روسيي برڤورا‪-‬ڤورا مڠيڠتي للاکي يڠ دسبوت‪-‬سبوت ۑاي ساتو‪ ،‬ايت للاکي ڤنتيڠ يڠ‬ ‫تله مڠيريم سورت کڤد توان اليکسندر‪ .‬کتيک منچوچي ڤاکاين دڠن أير يڠ دباوا‬

‫اوليه اورڠ‪-‬اورڠ للاکي دري ڤولاو‪ ،‬کوکوس روسيي دان ۑاي ساتو بربوال‪ .‬ۑاي‬

‫ساتو سأورڠ يڠ سنتياس تݢس دان تيدق سوک برݢوراو‪ .‬روسيي تيدق ڤرنه برجناک‬ ‫دڠنڽ‪ .‬تتاڤي ڤد هاري‪ ،‬اين ۑاي باۑق‪ ،‬بربوال تنتڠ سأورڠ للاکي يڠ منجادي کنلن‬ ‫توان اليکسندر دان سورت ايت‪.‬‬ ‫ۑاي ساتو‪ :‬روسيي کامو ايڠت تق للاکي اين؟ توان ستامفورد؟ دي تله منجادي راکن‬ ‫ٴبايق توان اليکسندر برتاهون‪-‬تاهون لماڽ‪ .‬مريک برجومڤا دملاک‪ ،‬اتاو دإينديا‪.‬‬

‫دملاک دي تله باۑق کالي مڠونجوڠي رومه کامي‪.‬‬

‫روسيي‪ :‬رومه کامي! اڤاکه رومه ايت ميليق ۑاي ساتو دان توان اليکسندر سهاج؟‬ ‫سأوله‪-‬اوله ايستري توان‪ ،‬اليکسندر وانيتا ڬوجاراتي ايت تيدق اد دسان!‬ ‫ايستري توان اليکسندر ماسيه براد دجاوا دلادڠ تانمن‪ ،‬مريک دڠن انق للاکي‬ ‫مريک يڠ ماسيه کچيل‪ .‬اد همبا يڠ برکات بودق للاکي ايت کيني ڤميليق لادڠ ايت‪.‬‬ ‫ۑاي ساتو‪ :‬يا دي سر يڠ داتڠ کرومه کامي‪ .‬دان دي باوا ايستيريڽ برساماڽ‪ .‬کامو‬ ‫ڤستي ايڠت ايستريڽ؟‬ ‫روسيي ايڠت‪ .‬دي ايڠت ايستري توان ستامفورد‪ .‬وانيتا بڠسا ايڠݢريس ايت سلالو‬ ‫بربوال دڠنڽ دان همبا‪-‬همبا ٴلاين دالم بهاس ملايو يڠ باݢوس‪ .‬دي سلالو برکات يڠ‬

‫همبا‪-‬همبا ڤاتوت بربوال دالم بهاس ملايو دڠن‪ ،‬تراتور سبب ايت بهاس ايبوندا‪،‬‬ ‫مريک بهاس يڠ لبيه باݢوس درڤد بهاس ڤورتوڬيس مريک يڠ بوروق‪ .‬روسيي‬ ‫ايڠت وانيتا بڠسا ايڠݢريس ايت‪ ،‬بربوال تيدق دڠن سوارا يڠ‪ ،‬کاسر تتاڤي دڠن نادا‬ ‫کإيبوان يڠ مڠݢالقکن‪.‬‬ ‫‪99‬‬


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LEFT & BOTTOM RIGHT

Photographs taken during one of the United Nations’ decolonisation missions to the islands in the 1980s. Courtesy the Home Island Museum.

TOP RIGHT Haji Adam, the

Imam, at the door of the Home Island Mosque, 2014. Photo: John Mateer.

WEEK 1 ‘I was invited to the mosque on the Friday, where

WEEK 6 ‘After considering several directions for the

WEEK 3 ‘As I was with the mosque, I was very taken by

WEEK 7 ‘Thus my research has taken me in an entirely new

Alep introduced me to the men of the community … He spoke only in Malay, and at the end of the sermon I followed some of what he was saying about me: a writer is here to meet with those Cocos Islanders who left the island in the 1970s.’ just how Malay the aesthetic of each family’s house was, most with Islamic calligraphy on colourful walls, pictures of their children’s and grand-children’s weddings, a large flat-screen TV showing Indonesian or Malaysian cablenetworks.’ ‘Some of the people I spoke with revealed that they had learned to read and write as children, despite the CluniesRoss family mostly hindering that. But they learnt the Malay script, Jawi, not our Roman one.’

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development of the project, I have returned to thinking about language and writing. In Katanning, through interviews I discovered that a number of the older members of the community had, in their youth, been taught to read Malay in the Jawi script, a script I thought long defunct.’ direction. It is now looking likely that I could piece together something of an objective account of the preceding years and earliest days of the founding of the Cocos settlement … These texts will detail events that explain what led up to the establishment of what would become their community, looking at the experiences of the Malay people and of Hare and Clunies-Ross, even from more than a decade before they arrived on the islands.’


DANIEL PELTZ USA

When we dig, things come up explores the act of mining. It arose from Peltz’ sense that his role as an American artist in residence in a Western Australian town founded on American ambition and greed was something of a reenactment. In response to this situation, Peltz ‘mined’ a series of narrative fragments from and about Tom Price — the US businessman, the former mountain and the presentday purpose-built mining town and open-pit iron ore mine. ‘I extracted material everywhere I went’, says Peltz, ‘in conversations, workshops, solitary walks, meditations and dreams, applying the same minimum standards used in the mining industry [65 per cent purity] to the narrative fragments I extracted’. The selected fragments were then shipped to a Chinese opera company and a landscape painter, following the same trade routes as the mined iron ore. These skilled artists ‘refined’ the narrative fragments and returned a Beijing opera for public exhibition in the township of Tom Price, and a series of landscape paintings for display in the Western Australian Museum.

PROJECT TITLE

When we dig, things come up COMMUNITY

Tom Price RESIDENCY DATES

14 June –12 July 2013 10–28 June 2014

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RIGHT Daniel Peltz & Chang Yi-Tsu, when we dig, things come up, 2014, ink brush painting on paper. Photo: Robert Frith, Acorn Photo. TOP Fontana, California

[Kaiser Steel Mill] CENTRE Tom Price BOTTOM Baotou

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LEFT Daniel Peltz, When we dig, things come up, 2015, installation view, Western Australian Museum Perth. Photo: Robert Frith, Acorn Photo.

WEEK 2 ‘I might have made a friend at the local radio station. I spend some time at two of the Aboriginal communities preparing for a workshop I’ll conduct during NAIDOC week. I step into some thick mud and discover how heavy the earth around me can be. Financial markets around the world convulse at the thought of less US stimulation. I go to Coles and pull a bill from my envelope to buy the same local apples I’d bought the day before. I’m not so different from all the other contract labour in this company town, sent here to mine, trying to craft a life from the excess.’ WEEK 3 ‘I notice the thought of my daughter going to Tom Price Primary School crossing my mind and it doesn’t seem so strange. I find a warm community in the caravan park. My evening walks turn to the trail along the highvoltage power lines, the BMX club and the foothills of Mount Namelesss. Tonight we’ll host a sounds of mining workshop with some of the young people at Wakathuni.’ WEEK 4 ‘I find myself drawn to the itinerant nature of this

town, and to its history enmeshed in the complications of a long-distance relationship with the US and China, being smelted with my own itinerancy. A town carrying the name of an American vice-president from the now bankrupt Kaiser Steel, whose landscape is dominated by a mountain they call Nameless. A town whose reason for being is to plant charges in its rock faces, dig out its insides, load them on trains and ship them to unseen factories in China, where they are deemed more valuable. A global industry located in the bush that, while moving towards an increasingly unmanned future, continues to require tens of thousands of people to displace themselves from their lives and families

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in order to extract the riches embedded inside mountains. A company attempts to provide the infrastructure necessary to sustain a human life; people, drawn to the promise of work and a small, but big enough, slice of wealth extracted from a legacy of millions of years of geologic history.’ WEEK 6 ‘We had a long, productive meeting in the studio of Tr. Chang, the landscape painter I’ve been working with on the other component of the project, a triptych recounting a fuller story of Tom Price. We look over initial sketches and discuss the meaning of various elements within the narrative fragments in detail. It is strange to see the reference images here on the other side of the world, all neatly printed and stacked.’ WEEK 7 ‘The opera finally arrives in Tom Price … Just as

most of Australia’s iron ore is now being refined in China, the story of Tom Price has been refined by a Chinese opera company and is now being brought back to the town of Tom Price as a new Chinese opera. This “new” opera uses the classical style of Peking opera to tell the complex tale of global relationships that make up Tom Price: the town, the mine and the American man whose name they both carry.’


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LEFT Daniel Peltz, Tom Price: the Opera, 2014, Tom Price screening view.

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ABOVE FROM TOP Daniel Peltz with Gumula radio broadcaster Tadam Lockyer and Beena James collecting mining sounds for the sounds of mining workshops. Photo: Elanor Lukale.

Daniel Peltz, 張榕容 Chang Jung-jung (interpreter) and 張亦足 Chang Yi-Tsu (Chinese landscape Painter) in Chang Yi-Tsu’s studio.


RUBEN SANTIAGO SPAIN

RIGHT Ruben Santiago, Not What It’s Cracked Up to Be (detail), 2014, 60 carved boab nuts. Photo: Robert Frith, Acorn Photo.

Ruben Santiago’s project focuses on Boab nut carving, an art form specific to the Kimberley region where he undertook a residency in the township of Derby. Santiago carved 60 nuts, one for each day of his stay. Most of his carvings are textual and reflect his personal response to his experiences, thoughts and perceptions during his residency. It is believed the Indigenous inhabitants of the Kimberley developed nut carving after the arrival of European colonisers; today, the art is practised by carvers of diverse descent and heritage. A freely available material, the nuts are carved with pocketknives and sold as simple souvenirs, but they can also be powerful expressions of individual concerns, voicing political and social messages. Despite nut carving often being considered a minor skill, many nut carvers have proven the practice can be an effective art form to preserve memories and stimulate cross-cultural knowledge sharing.

PROJECT TITLE

Not What It’s Cracked Up to Be COMMUNITY

Derby RESIDENCY PARTNER

DADAA RESIDENCY DATES

1 August– 30 September 2014

With an emphasis on historic situations that turned out ‘not as good as they were cracked up to be’, this work aims to expand the narrative potential of a relatively recent art form, while paying tribute to the many local carvers present and past, and increasing recognition of their work.

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LEFT Phil Palmer and Ruben Santiago collecting boab nuts, Derby, 2014. Photo: Ruben Santiago

WEEKS 3–4 ‘Slowly, the ruling and underlying narrative

behind the town was revealing itself. The same tenuous yet undeniable subtext was to be found everywhere … in the evolution of the religious mission structure to the arts centre, and even my personal favourite — in a nonfavourite way — the history of the Durack family ...’ ‘As the stories showed me their interlinked appeal and horror, nature struck me daily with ineffable power, in a way a global city boy cannot handle properly. I was falling deeper and deeper in love with the Kimberley, as naive as it may sound. Derby turned into a place where I could live ...’ ‘Feeling already as a future inhabitant of this region took me to the next question … what if I had been born here? And next … if I had been born in Derby … how would I make a living? ... That is how I found out what I should be learning: It was boab nut carving.’ ‘Boab nuts are carved in a wide range of styles and mostly depict elaborate images of local fauna and flora. You can also find, in a smaller proportion, religious imagery such as wandjinas and other mythical beings, snaps from daily life, realistic portraits of individuals, and representations of past and present events. But something that really caught my attention was the fact that they rarely, if ever, included any writing, other than the occasional name of the author and the year of manufacture.’ ‘When facing the need to focus my project around one of the many communities within the larger human group geographically and politically defined as “Derby, Western Australia”, it was somehow obvious that nuts carvers would be the focus. And it would be through their activities,

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by turning them into my own, that I could articulate and display my own subjective and tendentious take on the issues I have been gathering data about since my arrival on site.’ WEEKS 5–8 ‘Going back in time, returning to the Kimberley

… Phil and I finished the nut recollection. The processing, selection and crating of several hundred nuts was also completed. With the help of both Phil and Peter, from Mowanjum Arts Centre, we set up a series of nut-carving workshops to be held with well-known and younger artists, such as Gordon Barunga and Samantha Ailles, among others.’ ‘It was during that final month in WA that I decided the final outcome would be a collection of 60 carved nuts, one for each day of my stay in Derby. Why 60? I was intrigued and very interested in the historic figure of one nut carver … I am talking, of course, about Jack Wherra… In 1964, an American anthropologist named John McCaffrey visited the Mowanjum community, where he met Jack Wherra and commissioned him to carve whatever he wanted for a period of three months. The result was a series of roughly 60 boab nut carvings that depicted a vast body of information about Indigenous experience and deep insight into both secular and ritual knowledge … Beyond the figure of the artist, I understand Jack as an historian who operated outside Western written tradition.’


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LEFT Derby, 2014. Photos: Ruben Santiago.

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ABOVE Ruben Santiago, Not What It’s Cracked Up to Be, 2014, installation view, Western Australian Museum Perth. Photo: Marco Marcon.



BIOGRAPHIES

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MICHAEL BULLOCK

ERIN COATES

Michael Bullock was born in Perth and is now based in Melbourne. He works in sculpture and painting. His practice draws on time spent in Asia and his interest in the passage of people, culture and religion throughout this region, with its epochs of ancient tradition, colonialism, modernity and post-colonial life.

Erin Coates is a curator and an artist working across drawing, 3D and screen-based media, and her work has been included in both gallery exhibitions and film festivals. Her artwork was recently shown in a major solo exhibition, Kinesphere, at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), 2014. This was the result of the Catalyst: Katherine Hannay Commission for the Visual Arts and included a published artist monograph. Coates has curated several exhibitions, including the co-production between Fremantle Arts Centre and Martumili Artists We don’t need a map: a Martu experience of the Western Desert, currently touring national regional galleries. She holds a Masters degree in fine art from the University of British Columbia and has lectured in studio arts, art history and architecture at the University of Western Australia and Edith Cowan University. She is an avid rock climber and comes from a family obsessed with the ocean.

He has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions, including The Trail of Time: The Sandalwood Project, Fremantle Arts Centre, 2013; Enlightenment Figures, Linden Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2012; Duo, Kings ARI, Melbourne, 2006; and Chuyen The, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne, 2003. Group exhibitions and projects in Australia and internationally that he has been part of include a window until the rains come, albb open studio program, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, 2010; The Boryeoung International Stone Sculpture Symposium, Boryeoung, South Korea, 2006; and The Fourth International Sculpture Symposium, An Giang, Vietnam, 2003.

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ARCHANA HANDE

LILY HIBBERD IN COLLABORATION WITH CURTIS TAYLOR, TYSON MOWARIN, FIONA WALSH AND GLEN STASIUK

Archana Hande is an artist based in both Bombay and Bangalore, India. Her practice focuses on a process of community engagement and oral storytelling. Through her works she traces contested terrains within communities, where these contestations arise over issues such as tradition, religion, trade and migration.

Lily Hibberd is an artist and writer from Melbourne, living in France and Australia. Her work involves collaborations with various communities, artists and archives to reconnect forgotten or disconnected memories, people and histories. Her projects include Twin Cinema, commissioned for The Cinemas Project, Gippsland, Victoria, 2014; Benevolent Asylum: an eclipse of historical fiction, Fremantle Arts Centre, Western Australia, 2011; the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct Memory Project, co-founded with Parragirl Bonney Djuric, Sydney, 2012; and First Light, a solo exhibition at the Musée des arts et métiers, Paris, France, 2015. Hibberd completed a PhD in fine art in 2010 and is represented by Galerie de Roussan, Paris.

Hande has exhibited extensively in India and internationally, including in To let the world in: narrative and beyond in contemporary Indian art, curated by Dr Chaitanya Sambrani from the Australian National University and held at Lalit Kala Regional Centre, Chennai, India, 2012. Hande’s work was included in Social Fabric, Invia, London, 2012; Shadow lines, Yogyakarta Biennale, Jakarta, 2011; and The edge of desire: recent art in India, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 2008. Hande has undertaken international residencies in Switzerland, India and the United Kingdom.

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Curtis Taylor is a Martu filmmaker born in Broome and now based in Perth. His Australian films have been produced with CuriousWorks and Martu Media (a division of Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa), in collaboration with filmmakers David Wells, Caro Macdonald and producer Shakthi Sivanathan. He has collaborated in Brazil with the Pankararu Indigenous Community of Pernambuco, with the support of Alexandre Pankararu Santos from Jatoba, Pernambuco and Renato Athias of University Federal of Pernambuco, Recife.


JAY KOH

Tyson Mowarin is a filmmaker, director, writer, musician and photographer, and a Ngarluma man from Roebourne. His short films and documentaries have screened on ABC TV, been selected for the Dreaming and St Kilda Film Festivals and have won multiple awards, including the Troy Alberts Award for Excellence in Cinematography. Mowarin is the founder of the Indigenous video production and photography business Weerianna Street Media.

Jay Koh was born in Singapore. He is a German citizen but identifies as a South-East Asian artist, curator, evaluator and researcher. His multifaceted practice seeks to establish responsive, dialogical and critical engagement with others. Koh has initiated participatory art projects across Asia and Europe; founded art spaces in Cologne and Yangon; and run development programs in Hanoi, Hue, Yangon and Ulaanbaator, in collaboration with Malaysian artist Chu Yuan.

Dr Fiona Walsh has lived in the desert regions of Australia for 25 years, working as a filmmaker and ethno-ecologist. Her films have been produced by and presented with the support of Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa, CSIRO and ABC Open.

Koh’s recently published Art-led Participative Processes (University of the Arts, Helsinki, 2015), opens discussion that explores viable ethical and holistic art processes. It also continues research on the validation and accountability of publicly engaged art activities.

Dr Glen Stasiuk is a Perth-based filmmaker of Minang-Wadjari Nyungar and Russian descent. He lectures at Murdoch University and is managing director of BlackRussian Productions.

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PIA LANZINGER

MADDIE LEACH

Pia Lanzinger is a German artist based in Berlin. Lanzinger’s practice focuses on collaborative projects in public spaces that attempt to notice the breaks and inconsistencies in the conditions of daily existence, and that enable communicative experimentation. Her works engage with littleobserved structures of contemporary living and apply aspects of architectural pre-settings to social and historical frames of reference. In doing so, her works look for the roots of conflicts and for available alternatives.

Maddie Leach was born in New Zealand, where she still lives and works. Her practice is largely project-based, investigating viable ways of making artworks in order to interpret and respond to specific place-determined content. Leach continually varies the way she resolves her work: having fabricated objects or had them fabricated for her, using text and print media, and working with video, performative actions and processes of exchange. Leach is interested in the space between what is expected and what happens, between potential and actuality. Her works are often idiosyncratic compositions of seemingly disparate elements that suggest the dynamic and diffuse nature of place, often imparting a transient, almost fugitive status to the artwork.

Lanzinger’s most recent project, Rolling Dice for Berlin (2014), comments on the current Berlin real estate sector as it transforms into a profitable industry. Her ‘Gentrification Game’ transmits this logic into a life-size boardgame played in the public sphere. The implications of the situation and the different trails to reclaim the right to the city are reconstructed as part of a global game with local particularities. Her other projects include Prendre la Parole, Centre for Contemporary Art, Graz, Austria, 2013; Petze’s Freedom, Deutsche Stiftung Kulturlandschaft, Petze, Germany, 2011; and Three pieces for street sweepers, Residual: Intervenciones Artísticas en la Ciudad, Mexico City, 2010.

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Her work has been commissioned for If you were to live here …, The 5th Auckland Triennial, New Zealand, 2013; Iteration: Again, Tasmania, 2011; the National Sculpture Factory and Cork City Council, Ireland, 2011; Close Encounters, Chicago, 2010; and One Day Sculpture, New Zealand, 2008. In 2014, Leach’s If you find the good oil let us know was nominated for New Zealand’s premier art award, the Walters Prize.


DAPHNE MAJOR

TEA MÄKIPÄÄ

Fictional artist Daphne Major lives and works in the Netherlands. She charts the complexities and nuances born out of isolation, connection to landscape and poetic exchanges, which she achieves through ambitious work combining film, text, archival material and sound. Her projects are a collective embodiment of two individuals, whose practices are defined as writer, artist and curator.

Tea Mäkipää was born Lahti, Finland, and lives in Weimar, Germany. Her practice spans installation, photography, video and sculpture, and explores the relationship between nature and technology. Often working with plants and animals, Mäkipää is interested in primal processes, such as food production and shelter creation, and her works emphasise ecological, social and ethical responsibility. At the core of her practice is the idea of the ‘post-environmental’, a vision of society sensitively aligned to the existence of other species on our planet.

Major’s recent collective and individual happenings include exhibitions, screenings and texts at Rupert, Vilnius, Lithuania; 501, Chongqing, China; São Paulo Bienal, Brazil; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; De Appel, Amsterdam; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; West, Den Haag, The Netherlands; and the Centre International D’Art Et Du Paysage Ile De Vassiviere, France.

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Her most recent solo exhibitions include Pet love, Galería JM, Málaga, Spain, 2012; Oilissimo, Kunsthalle Weimar Harry Graf Kessler, Weimar, Germany, 2011; Domesticated nature, Z2O Galleria/Sara Zanin, Rome, Italy, 2011; and Catwalk, CAC Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Málaga, Spain, 2010. Mäkipää has also been involved in numerous international group exhibitions, including Worldly house, Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany, 2012; The unknown, Mediations Biennale, National Gallery, Poznan, Poland, 2012; and Allegory of the cave, Retretti, Punkaharju, Finland, 2012.


JOHN MATEER

ANNA NAZZARI

John Mateer is a writer, poet and curator. His work includes essays, books of poems and Semar’s Cave: an Indonesia Journal. For two decades he has published criticism on contemporary art. He was on the steering committee of the South Project, a Melbournebased venture that developed cultural links across the Southern Hemisphere. In 2005, he was a fellow in the Iowa International Writing Program, supported by the Chicago Humanities Festival, and in 2012 he was the Australia Council’s inaugural art writer-in-residence at ACME, London. He has lectured and read his work in many countries. Recent presentations include a three-day seminar on the metaphor of the museum at Maumaus art school in Lisbon and a paper on Damien Hirst and Egyptology at the ‘Afro-Europeans’ conference at UCL, London. He convened the 2013 symposium ‘The Ambiguity of Our Geography’ at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, as part of In Confidence: Reorientations in Recent Art, the Indian Ocean–focused exhibition he curated for that institution. Currently he is an honorary research fellow at the University of Western Australia, researching traces of explorer William Dampier’s voyages in Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels.

Anna Nazzari is a Perth-based artist. Her practice investigates mythological tales, superstitions and unusual events that emphasise moral certainty and foster a reading of the absurd. Her work is often painstakingly made and combines old-world skills with contemporary art processes to aesthetically convey contradictory or futile facets of life. In 2011, she completed a Doctorate of Philosophy (Art), which analysed the absurd fate of gender-ambiguous narratives. Her art practice primarily accommodates 3D form but can also incorporate video, drawing and photography. Her recent solo exhibitions include The Oracle, Turner Galleries, Perth, 2013; Horse Play, Turner Galleries, Perth, 2011; and Casino Sisyphus, John Curtin Gallery, Bentley, 2010. Nazzari currently works as a lecturer at Curtin University’s School of Design and Art, OUA Art Studies’ program.

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DANIEL PELTZ

RUBEN SANTIAGO

Daniel Peltz was born in the USA and is based in Providence, Rhode Island. Through his public projects and media installations, he explores complex social systems, attempting to provoke ruptures in the socio-cultural fabric through which new ways of being may emerge and be considered. He uses a range of intervention, ethnographic and performance strategies to accomplish this. His projects often take the form of existing social systems to directly engage non-art audiences in the language of critical art practice.

Spanish artist Ruben Santiago scrutinises the mechanisms through which collective memory is formed and symbolic value developed. Using installations, site-specific projects, online processes, video, objects and publications he analyses and exposes how power networks are distributed in tandem with regulations and legitimising systems of control in contemporary societies.

Peltz is a professor of film, animation and video at the Rhode Island School of Design. His recent exhibitions, public interventions and commissioned projects include faith, hope and deficit, Botkyrka konsthall, Sweden, 2013; The Museum of Forgetting: political is collective, Passagen, Linköping, Sweden, 2012; unrealized gain/loss, Cemeti Art House, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, 2011; and Crossing non-signalized locations, Cambridge, USA, 2010. He is a former resident artist at Yaddo, USA; Helsinki International Artist Program, Finland; International Artists Studio Program, Sweden; Artspace, Australia; and Cemeti Art House, Indonesia.

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His most recent solo projects include Long drop into water, Iteration: again – 13 Public Art Projects Across Tasmania, Hobart, 2011; Since 1958: for 1.18 million years, Centro Cultural de España en Buenos Aires (CCEBA), Argentina, 2010; and En Cadena, Off Limits, Madrid, Spain, 2009. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions internationally, including Useful Art Museum, Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, co-produced with Queens Museum, New York, USA, 2013; Visión: Desafíos, Loop/Instituto Cervantes, Higher Institute of Cinema, Giza, Egypt, 2010; Instituto Cervantes, New Delhi, India; and Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, 2007.


LIST OF WORKS

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MICHAEL BULLOCK

Lightbulb, 2013 Indian sandalwood 16 x 6 x 6 cm Commissioned for spaced 2: future recall The Washing Away of Time, 2014 bronze various dimensions Commissioned for spaced 2: future recall Rope Variant I & II bronze 60 x 60 x 60 cm (each) Commissioned for spaced 2: future recall The Trail of Time, 2013 patinated bronze objects, table 150 x 350 x 75 cm (overall) All works courtesy the artist ERIN COATES & ANNA NAZZARI

Cetaphobia, 2015 HD video with stereo sound 12 minutes Directors/producers: Erin Coates and Anna Nazzari Scrimshander: Bec Johnson Scrimshander’s husband: Steve Pratt Gaffer: Dion Borrett Land and underwater best boy: Mark Strickland Special effects: Michelle Becker Aerial camera rig pilot: Captain Jon Marsh Underwater location manager: John Coates Underwater camera operator: Matt Hawksworth Assistant diver: Troy Dwyer Caterer: Caroline Coates Editors: Erin Coates and Anna Nazzari

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Colourist: Sohan Ariel Hayes Post-production special effects: Juan Zubiaga Sound designer: Roly Skender Narrator and archival film footage: Carmelo Musca Narration: based on text by Graham Chittleborourgh Composer: Cat Hope Viola: Aaron Wyatt Cello: Tristen Parr Double bass: Libby Browning Music recording: Stuart James Shot on location in Albany and underwater on the wreck of the Cheynes III whale chaser, Western Australia. | No animals were harmed in the making of this film. This project is supported by the Western Australian Government through the Department of Culture and the Arts and by International Art Space. Copyright © Deep Sea Phantom, 2015 ERIN COATES

Kingdoms – II (Phylum Coelenterata/Heraldic Crest), 2007 ink pen on paper 62 × 90 cm ANNA NAZZARI

The Burial Grounds, 2014 scrimshaw on sperm whale tooth 14 × 9 × 2.5 cm The Séance, 2014 scrimshaw on sperm whale tooth 19 × 7 × 3 cm The Phantom Leg, 2015 scrimshaw on sperm whale tooth 16 × 8.5 × 2.9 cm


Milk, 2015 scrimshaw on whale tooth 16.5 × 5.5 × 3 cm Hanging Whale, 2014 black ink pen on paper 30 × 42 cm King George Sound, 2013 black ink pen on paper 30 × 42 cm Whale Diver, 2014 black ink pen on paper 21 × 14.5 cm On the Road Again, 2014 giclee print on paper 30 × 42 cm Exploding Whale Study, 2014 black ink pen on paper 14.5 × 21 cm All works commissioned for spaced 2: future recall All works courtesy the artists

Compositor: Anand Bhutkar, the Media Tree Editor: Archana Hande Sound designer: V.P. Mohandas Image editor assistant: Nilesh Kawle Commissioned for spaced 2: future recall www.arrangeurownmarriage.com, 2002–08 interactive website, objects, postcards installation dimensions variable Design and development: Studio Green Software design Pvt Ltd, H.R. Cheluvaraj, Ashwin Nandihalli Editor: Janhavi Acharekar History writer: Abhijeet Tamhane Legal consultants: Veena Gowda and Kaveri Dadhich Technical assistants, objects: Suresh Kumar, M. Shantamani, Lalitha Shankar, Ajit Shirke, K. Patel and Arogya Swamy Photo editors: P. Muthukumaran, Amritha Digital Studio, Chennai Nagesh and Tejas Studio All works courtesy the artist

ARCHANA HANDE

The Golden Feral Trail I, 2013–15 installation, including colour HD video projection with audio, glass, metal, red earth, gold 490 × 340 cm (overall); 4:10 minutes Compositor: Anand Bhutkar, the Media Tree Editors: Deeksha Sharma and Archana Hande Sound designer: V.P. Mohandas Assistant image editor: Nilesh Kawlee Commissioned for spaced 2: future recall The Golden Feral Trail II, 2013–15 colour HD video with audio 7:33 minutes

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LILY HIBBERD IN COLLABORATION WITH CURTIS TAYLOR, TYSON MOWARIN, FIONA WALSH AND GLEN STASIUK

It goes both ways, artists in conversation – part one, 2015 colour HD video with audio 14 minutes Tyson Mowarin interview Cinematographer: Torstein Dyrting ACS Sound: Glenn Martin Lily Hibberd, Glen Stasiuk and Curtis Taylor interview Camera/sound: Nathan Mewett, Media Arts Centre, Murdoch University Fiona Walsh interview


Camera/sound: Leonardo Ortega Edited for spaced 2: future recall by Lily Hibberd Commissioned for spaced 2: future recall It goes both ways, artists in conversation – part two, 2015 colour HD video with audio 19 minutes Lily Hibberd, Glen Stasiuk and Curtis Taylor interview Camera/sound: Nathan Mewett, Media Arts Centre, Murdoch University Tyson Mowarin interview Cinematographer: Torstein Dyrting ACS Sound: Glenn Martin Edited for spaced 2: future recall by Lily Hibberd Commissioned for spaced 2: future recall It goes both ways, artists in conversation – part three, 2015 colour HD video with audio 19 minutes Fiona Walsh interview Camera/sound: Leonardo Ortega Lily Hibberd, Glen Stasiuk and Curtis Taylor interview Camera/sound: Nathan Mewett, Media Arts Centre, Murdoch University Tyson Mowarin interview Cinematographer: Torstein Dyrting ACS Sound: Glenn Martin Edited for spaced 2: future recall by Lily Hibberd Commissioned for spaced 2: future recall All That I See, 365 Project, 2015 colour HD video/slideshow of digital photographs 36 minutes Photographer/narrator: Tyson Mowarin Editor: Lily Hibberd Cinematographer: Torstein Dyrting ACS Sound: Glenn Martin

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Caatinga – Milirripa: Spinifex Resin – keeping everything together, 2015 colour HD video audio 7 minutes Director/editor: Curtis Taylor Camera: Curtis Taylor and Caro Macdonald (Brazil) Sound: Evan Gapella (Brazil) Acknowledgements: The Martu people and Parnngurr elders and families and Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa for archival footage from Parnngurr, the Pankararu indigenous community of Pernambuco, Brazil, Alexandre Pankararu Santos of Jatoba, Pernambuco and Renato Athias, University Federal of Pernambuco, Recife, developed and produced as part of a long-term international film collaboration with Caro Macdonald, produced by Tom Zubrycki Thunderstorms, 2014 colour HD video with audio 26 minutes Writer/director: Tyson Mowarin Producers: Robyn Marais/Weerianna Street Media and Metamorflix Developed and produced in association with ScreenWest and National Indigenous Television (NITV), a division of SBS Australia Vanishing Point, beyond the west, 2010–14 colour HD video with audio 13 minutes Writer/director/camera/sound: Lily Hibberd Narrator: Cedric Jacobs Camera assistant: Curtis Taylor Acknowledgements: Whadjuk people, traditional custodians of Wadjemup, Hannah Eames and the Rottnest Island Authority and Glen Stasiuk Wadjemup: Black Prison White Playground, 2014 colour HD video with audio 58:16 minutes Writer/director: Glen Stasiuk


Producers: Glen Stasiuk and Jeffory Asselin, BlackRussian Productions in association with Kulbardi Productions Cycle of Life in a Desert Town, 2013 colour HD video with audio 2:15 minutes Writer/director/camera: Fiona Walsh Writer/narrator: Ruby Robertson Music: Chris Zabriskie Broadcast by ABC Open Ngurra Wangaggu – Country Talking, 2013 colour HD video with audio 8 minutes Writer/director: Tyson Mowarin Cinematographer: Torstein Dyrting ACS Sound: Glenn Martin Producer: Joined Up Films Developed and produced in association with ScreenWest and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Somebody’s Child, 2013 colour HD video with audio 3 minutes Writer/director: Fiona Walsh Acknowledgements: David Nixon, Jude Prichard, Craig San Roque and ABC Open Central Australia The Phone Booth Project, 2012–13 colour HD video with audio 14:07 minutes Writer/directors: Lily Hibberd and Curtis Taylor Producers: Fremantle Arts Centre and Martumili Artists for We Don’t Need a Map, 2013 Acknowledgements: Martu Western Desert communities and families of Punmu and Parnngurr and Gabrielle Sullivan and Carly Day of Martumili Artists, Jim Cathcart and Erin Coates of Fremantle Arts Centre

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Handing back the past: A journey to Martu country with old photos, 2012 colour HD video with audio 27 minutes Writer/director: Fiona Walsh Editor: David Nixon Producers: Fiona Walsh with CSIRO and Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa spaced 2: future recall version editor: Lily Hibberd Acknowledgements: Western Desert Martu families from Parnngurr, Punmu and Jigalong, and ABC Open Ngurra Mulyagu – Stolen Land – Chapter Four, 2012 colour HD video with audio 7:20 minutes Writer/director: Tyson Mowarin Cinematographer/camera: Torstein Dyrting ACS Sound: Glenn Martin Camera assistant: Curtis Taylor Producer: Robyn Marais/Weerianna Street Media Benevolent Asylum: an eclipse of historical fiction, 2011 colour HD video with audio 16 minutes Writer/camera/editor: Lily Hibberd Commissioned by Fremantle Arts Centre, Western Australia This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body Jukurrpa Ninti – Knowledge of Culture, 2011 colour HD video with audio 1:48 minutes Directors: Curtis Taylor, Anthony Gibbs, Owen John, Carol Macdonald Producer: Dave Wells for The Stories Project, CuriousWorks and Martu Media, a division of Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa


Mamu, 2010 colour HD video with audio 9:06 minutes Writer/director: Curtis Taylor Assistant director: Dave Wells Camera: Platon Theodoris Editor: Craig Anderson Visual effects: Craig FX Executive producers: Shakthi Sivananthan for CuriousWorks and Martu Media, a division of Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa Broadcast by National Indigenous Television (NITV), a division of SBS Australia OJ On Broadway, 2010 colour HD video with audio 2:02 minutes Director/camera: Morika Blijabu and Curtis Taylor Editors: Desert Stories Crew and CuriousWorks Producers: CuriousWorks and Martu Media, a division of Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa Mabuji, 2009 colour SD video with audio 5:41 minutes Writer/director: Tyson Mowarin Cinematographer: Torstein Dyrting ACS Sound: Glenn Martin Producers: Robyn Marais/Weerianna Street Media and FTI/Excalibur Produced and developed for Deadly Yarns, Film and Television Institute WA Inc., with the assistance of ScreenWest and the Australian Broadcasting Commission Footprints in the Sand: Jinna Mitinu Barnunga – The Last of the Nomads, with Geoffrey ‘Yullala Boss’ Stewart, 2006 colour SD video transferred to HD video with audio 26 minutes Writer/director: Glen Stasiuk

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Narrator: David Ngoombujarra Producers: Glen Stasiuk and Paul Roberts, BlackRussian Productions Acknowledgements: Martu-Mandildjara people of the Wiluna Gibson Desert region, Glen Cooke and the Farmer and Stewart families All That I See, 365 Project, 2014– 7 prints selected from an ongoing series of 178 archival inkjet print mounted on acrylic 53.3 × 80 cm (each) All works courtesy the artists JAY KOH

Video documentation of Cervantes’ Tales, 2014 colour video with audio 9:14 minutes Producer/editor: Victor Gentile Commissioned for spaced 2: future recall PIA LANZINGER

Geraldton goes Wajarri, 2014–15 installation, including 2 colour HD videos with audio, vinyl wallpaper, 5 types of postcards installation dimensions variable 30:50 minutes, 7:20 minutes Media programmer: Michael Hauffen Photographers: Clinton Nalder, Pia Lanzinger and Wajarri word mentors Camera: Ralf Mulks, Victor Gentile Editor: Roberto Duarte Wajarri words voiceover: Edie Maher Design: BANK™ Commissioned for spaced 2: future recall Tres piezas para barrenderos: De lo invisible a lo visible Three Pieces for Street Sweepers: From the Invisible to the Visible, Mexico City, 2010 installation, including colour video with audio


and English subtitles, 3 digital photographic prints, painted wall, postcards installation dimensions variable 27:06 minutes

If you find the good oil let us know, 2014 newspaper page 80 × 57.5 cm

All works courtesy the artist

Acknowledgements: Warren Olds, Studio Ahoy All works courtesy the artist

MADDIE LEACH

DAPHNE MAJOR

28th October 2834, 2014 colour HD video with audio 28:34 minutes Commissioned for spaced 2: future recall

And It Is Here I Learnt to Float, 2014 colour UHD video projection with multichannel audio randomised 1-minute films Commissioned for spaced 2: future recall

Mandurah Coastal Times, 18 February 2015 newspaper page Commissioned for spaced 2: future recall I Was Using Six Watts When You Received Me, 2013 letterpress QSL confirmation card 14 × 22 cm Signs and Wonders Shall Appear, 2009 digital print on paper 43 × 28 cm Evening Echo, 2011– newspaper page 58 × 37.5 cm Evening Echo, 2011– offset printed poster 36 × 56.5 cm The Most Difficult Problem, 2013 web press printed text 39.5 × 57 cm Let us keep together, 2011 newspaper page 40 × 57.5 cm

In Which Suppositions are Made, 2014 audio recording 1:22 minutes (looped) All works courtesy the artists TEA MÄKIPÄÄ

Battle of Australia, 2014 installation, including 8 posters, postcards, T-shirts, tote bags various dimensions Commissioned for spaced 2: future recall Business Hotspot, Cape Le Grand National Park, Esperance, 2014 public artwork, including sign, solar panel, wi-fi various dimensions Commissioned for spaced 2: future recall Not with us anymore, 2014 (in collaboration with Monika Thomas) 7 memorial plaques of glazed prints on kiln-fired porcelain 20 × 20 cm (each) Petteri – My Life as a Reindeer, 2007 colour video with audio 20 minutes

Perigee # 11, 2008 newspaper page 40 × 57.5 cm

All works courtesy the artist

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The Singapore to Cocos-Keeling Islands shipping route, 2015 image reproduced from F. Wood-Jones’ ‘Coral and Atolls’ archival inkjet print on cotton rag paper 58 × 77 cm

JOHN MATEER

Recording of three episodes in the voices of the Katanning Cocos-Malay community from The Quiet Slave: A history in eight episodes (Episodes 3, ‘The Cave and the Kraal’; 6, ‘Boats’; and 7, ‘Some Flowers from his Garden’), 2014 The Cocos-Keeling Atoll showing the Malay names audio recording of the islands, 2015 26 minutes reproduced from F. Wood-Jones’ Readers: Siti Aeson, Moh Aeson, Nora Leman, ‘Coral and Atolls’ Yassin Sin, Anah Zal, Wahidah Potter and archival inkjet print on cotton rag paper Jaffar Potter 46 × 47 cm Sound editing: Roly Skender Pulau Bras and the furthest reaches of Pulau The Quiet Slave, 2015 Gangsa viewed from a vessel crossing the lagoon, colour publication, 120 pages 2015 photograph by the artist 14. 8 × 21 cm archival inkjet print on paper Translator: Nur-El-Hudda Jaffar 140 × 105 cm Transcriber: Alfian Kuchit All works commissioned for spaced 2: Graphic design: Jake Cormack future recall Extract from The Quiet Slave: A history in eight Acknowledgements: Tony Nathan, IMAGELAB episodes (Episode 4, ‘Tuan Alexander’s Letter All works courtesy the artist about Napoleon’), 2015 archival inkjet print, mounted on aluminium 70 × 35 cm (each) DANIEL PELTZ Jawi transcription by Alfian Kuchit of the Malay translation from The Quiet Slave: A history in eight episodes (Episode 4, ‘Tuan Alexander’s Letter about Napoleon’), 2015 archival inkjet print, mounted on aluminium 70 × 35 cm (each) Pulau Bras, otherwise known as Rice or Prison Island; the site of Alexander Hare’s final house and of the quarters for the female slaves and their children, 2015 scan of an image by an unknown photographer (c. 1940s) archival inkjet print on paper 24 × 16 cm

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Journey to Mount Nameless, 2013 colour video projection with audio 30 minutes Co-written with 鍾敬生 Ching-Sheng Chung Produced with 新竹市國劇研究協會 Hsinchu City Opera Research association and 台中國劇演藝團 Taichung Chinese Opera troupe Associate producer: Jiyun He Commissioned for spaced 2: future recall When we dig, things come up, 2014 ink brush painting on paper 103 × 50 cm (each) Chinese landscape painter: 張亦足 Chang Yi-Tsu Mounting and framing: 林義桓 Lin Yi-Huan


Interpreter: 張榕容 Chang Jung-jung Assistant: Jiyun He Commissioned for spaced 2: future recall Tom Price: the Opera, 2013 performance poster 150 × 90 cm Commissioned for spaced 2: future recall Inventory of narrative fragments extracted from Tom Price: the man, the mine and the mountain, 2013 black ink on paper 21 × 29.7 cm (each) Commissioned for spaced 2: future recall unrealised gain/loss, 2012 installation, including batik sarongs (106.7 × 182.8 cm each) and copper stamps (17.7 × 12.7 cm each) client of the firm, 2013 colour video with audio 8:25 minutes All works courtesy the artist RUBEN SANTIAGO

Not What It’s Cracked Up to Be, 2014 60 carved boab nuts various dimensions, from 10 × 8 × 8 cm to 20 × 14 × 14 cm (each) In memory of Jack Wherra Commissioned for spaced 2: future recall Nailed, 2001 43 rusty iron nails installation dimensions variable All works courtesy the artist

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THANKS

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PRESENTING PARTNERS Visual Arts Program Partner

PRINCIPAL PARTNERS

ORGANISATIONAL PARTNERS

REGIONAL PARTNERS

INTERNATIONAL ART SPACE PTY LTD IS ASSISTED BY THE GOVERNMENT OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA THROUGH THE DEPARTMENT OF CULTURE AND THE ARTS. INTERNATIONAL ART SPACE PTY LTD IS SUPPORTED BY THE AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT THROUGH THE AUSTRALIA COUNCIL, ITS PRINCIPAL ARTS FUNDING BODY, AND BY THE VISUAL ARTS AND CRAFT STRATEGY, AN INITIATIVE OF THE AUSTRALIAN STATE AND TERRITORY GOVERNMENTS.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many generous organisations and individuals have helped make spaced 2: future recall possible. First and foremost we thank the spaced 2: future recall artists, our regional partners and all participants, who are at the core of this project. International Art Space would like to thank the dedicated board members, staff and volunteers, both past and present, whose vision, expertise and knowledge have contributed to the realisation of spaced 2: future recall: BOARD

Virginia Miltrup (Chair) Richard Ellis (former Chair) Dr Marnie Badham Erin Coates Dewi Hyde Sarah Klahn-Jolley Eva Lin Hannah Mathews Matthew West STAFF

Artistic Director & Co-founder Marco Marcon Community Liaison & Digital Producer Manager Victor Gentile Operations & Communications Manager Katherine Wilkinson Bookkeeper Eric Sankey Design Isabel KrĂźger (IZZI)

International Art Space especially acknowledges the continued support of our principal partners, the Australia Council for the Arts, the Government of Western Australia through the Department of Culture and the Arts, the City of Perth, the Foundation for Rural & Regional Renewal and the Gordon Darling Foundation. We acknowledge the co-operation and contributions of our presenting partners, the Western Australian Museum and the Perth International Arts Festival. In particular we would like to thank the following individuals: Chief Executive Officer WA Museum Alec Coles Director Creative & Regional Development WA Museum James Dexter Manager, Adult & Family Programs WA Museum Felena Alach Program Manager Visual Arts Perth International Arts Festival Margaret Moore Special thanks to the WA Museum exhibition design and installation team, particularly Sahrum Safuan and Dave Primmer. We are also expressly grateful to board member Hannah Mathews, who acted as a curatorial advisor for the spaced 2: future recall exhibition. We thank our organisational partners Asialink, recognising the contributions of Lesley Alway and Eliza Emily Roberts; DADAA, with thanks to David Doyle and Chris Williams; and the Accion Cultural Espanola.

Web design Orla Larkin (Werkshop) VOLUNTEERS

Shaaron du Bignon Candice Jee

The generosity of our private donors Eva Lin, Mr Bubble, Sujora Conrad, Sarah Miller and other anonymous donors, is greatly appreciated. And lastly we would like to thank the following individuals: Robert Frith – Acorn Photo, Pamela Gaunt, Michelle Glaser, Sue Italiano and Monika Thomas. 135


PROJECT ACKNOWLEGEMENTS ALBANY

Spaced, Erin Coates and Anna Nazzari acknowledge project partners the Western Australian Museum Albany and Perth, Whale World, and the scrimshanders, divers and families of whalers and other residents of Albany, Denmark and Perth who assisted with the research and creation of this project. BANGALORE

This project was presented as a part of the Asialink residency program in India, supported by the Australian Government through the Australia–India Council and the Australia Council for the Arts. Spaced and Michael Bullock acknowledge and thank project partners Asialink and 1.Shanthiroad, and special thanks go to Suresh Jayaram, Cop Shiva and Ricardo Gallega. CERVANTES

Spaced and Jay Koh would like to acknowledge the support of the Cervantes Historical Society and Cervantes Cultural Committee, as well as Cervantes’ residents and the many others who donated resources to this project. Special thanks go to John Bartle, Dorothy Boys, Murray Ford, Dianne Knight, Ivan Mclay, Max and Ann Preitz, and Gloria White. DERBY

Spaced and Ruben Santiago gratefully acknowledge the support of community partner DADAA, with special thanks to Phil Palmer and family, Peter Crowley, Gordon Barunga, Samantha Allies, Russel Davey, Gabriella Dolby, Kimberley Aboriginal Land and Culture Council, Jarlmadangah Burru Community and the Mowanjum Arts Centre crew. ESPERANCE

Spaced and Tea Mäkipää gratefully acknowledge project partners DADAA and the Cannery Arts Centre Esperance, along with Warren and Tammy Andrews, Baxter and Maree Gallery, Bay of Isles Computers, Rob Blok, the Bundanon Trust, Jane Butcher (Kanyana Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre), Clearwater Motel Apartments Esperance, Concrete World Esperance, Tony Connor, Department of Parks and Wildlife, Esperance Community Arts,

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Esperance Surveys, Robert Frith (Acorn Photo), Warren and Michelle Grieves, Deborah Kelly, Mick and Monika Liebeck, John Mateer, Karen McClurkin, Men In Sheds Esperance, Dr Jane Mulcock, Ramm’s Building Design, Hans Spengler, Telstra Esperance, Monica and Greg Thomas, Uralla Wildlife Sanctuary, Whale World Zoo Albany, Yongergnow Australia Malleefowl Centre, and the wildlife carers and rehabilitators of Western Australia. GERALDTON

Spaced and Pia Lanzinger gratefully acknowledge project partners the Western Australian Museum Geraldton and the Shire of Geraldton, along with the generous support of the Central Greenough Artist in Residence Program, Irra Wanga Language Centre, City Hive/Pollinators, Geraldton Regional Art Gallery, Geraldton Regional Library, Greenough Museum and ACDC Gallery. Special thanks go to Edie Maher and to all Wajarri elders who supported this project, especially Leonie and Robin Boddington, Dawn and Colin Hamlett, Gloria Merry, Elvie Dann and Myra Ronan. This project was possible thanks to Aida Aman, James Bednell, Chris Budhan, Deborah Cain, Helen Clarke, Steve Davidson, James Davies, Luc Defossez, Judith Forrest, Nola Gregory, Ingrid Horn, Glenys Kelly, Ric McCracken, Leigh O’Brien, Andrew Outhwaite, Amanda Rowland, Andrea Selvey, Pieter Vorster, Angie West and Alexis Zahner. Finally, thank you to all Wajarri word mentors; it is only through your collective participation that this project has been realised. KARRATHA

Spaced and the artists would like to thank the City of Karratha for its support of this project. Daphne Major also extends her thanks to Patrick Churnside, Clinton Walker, the Sweetmans, the Birnies and the Steadmans for their generosity and support. The film was produced on the traditional lands of the Yaburrara, Yindjibarndi, Gurrama, Ngarluma and the Marduthunira people and Daphne Major acknowledges them as traditional owners of these lands. KATANNING/ COCOS-KEELING ISLANDS

Spaced and John Mateer would like to thank project partners the Shire of Katanning and the Islamic


Association of Katanning for their generous contributions towards this project. John Mateer would also like thank the Ocean Villa – Cocos Islands and Kobeelya House, along with the many individuals who offered their knowledge and support, including translator Nur-El-Hudda Jaffar, transcriber Alfian Kuchit, performers Siti Aeson, Moh Aeson, Nora Leman, Yassin Sin, Anah Zal, Wahidah Potter and Jaffar Potter; members of the Cocos Malay community of Katanning Imam Alep Mydie, Juaini Taylor, Yusnie Laurie, Sidah Sahak, Butler Ezen, Doley Naple, Enjia Corrie, Abtar Eman, Jewita Mohktar; members of the Cocos Malay community of Home Island Iman Haji Adam, Zulaikha Jadah, Cree bin Haig, Romnie Mokhtar, Nek Neng, Collin Puria, Woren Dedian and Mak Emma; historians C.A. Gibson, J.G. Hunt, Margaret Ackrill, Achmat Davids and Sharifa Ajhum; and advisors Harry Aveling, Alvin Pang, Louise Ryan and Annaliza Bakri. LAVERTON

Spaced and Archana Hande acknowledge project partners Asialink, the Shire of Laverton and Laverton Leonora Cross Cultural Association, along with support from the Battye Library, Eastern Goldfields Historical Society, Laverton Community Resource Centre, Laverton Public Library, Poseidon Nickel Ltd, State Library of Western Australia, Western Australian Museum Kalgoorlie-Boulder and Perth, The Dwyer Collection, Western Mining Corporation and Windarra Nickel Project. The artist would also like to thank Christine Boase, Gary Buckmaster, Ian Day, Tegan Dodd, Eleanor Hill, Laurinda Hill, Peter Hill, Bede Jacobsen, Johanna McGuire, Annette Nykiel, Julie Ovans, Paul Ovans, Bill Rixon, Joanna Scezkowski, Harvey Sunter Smith, Celia Sullivan and Regina Sullivan. MANDURAH

Spaced and Maddie Leach would like to thank Leigh Angilley (Murray Library), Guy Boyce, Contemporary Art Space Mandurah (CASM), Elam School of Fine Arts (University of Auckland, NZ), Iain Frengley (cinematography and editing, NZ), Struan Hamilton (print production, NZ), Kim Jameson, Terry Maitland (signwriting/lithography, NZ), Harry Nannup, Warren Olds (design, NZ), Deidre Robb,

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Sue Grey-Smith, Alisdair Wardle and Whiti o Rehua School of Art (Massey University, NZ). TOM PRICE

Chinese opera: Spaced and Daniel Peltz acknowledge the contribution of co-writer 鍾敬生 Ching-Sheng Chung, collaborators 新竹市國劇研究協會 Hsinchu City Opera Research Association, 台中國劇演藝團 Taichung Chinese Opera troupe and associate producer Jiyun He. | 林義桓 Lin Yi-Huan (mount & frame), 張榕容 Chang Jung-jung (interpreter), 張亦 足 Chang Yi-Tsu (Chinese landscape painter). WESTERN DESERT Spaced, Lily Hibberd and her collaborators

acknowledge and pay respects to the Whadjuk people, traditional custodians of the Perth region and of Wadjemup. They acknowledge and respect their continuing culture and the contribution they make to the life of this city and this region. The artists also acknowledge the Martu people and the families of Western Desert communities of Parnngurr, Punmu, Kunawarritiji and Jigalong; the Martu-Mandildjara people of the Wiluna Gibson Desert region; the Ngarluma people of West Pilbara; and the Pankararu indigenous community of Pernambuco, Brazil.

The artists thank and acknowledge the following organisations and production companies for the funding and development of these works. Martumili Artists, Australia Council for the Arts, CuriousWorks, Martu Media, Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa, ABC, ABC Open, CSIRO, BlackRussian Productions, Weerianna Street Media, Metamorflix, ScreenWest, NITV, FTI and Joined Up.


ABOUT INTERNATIONAL ART SPACE

Spaced is a recurring event of Australian and international socially engaged and contextresponsive art. Conceived and coordinated by International Art Space (formerly IASKA), spaced brings together international and Australian artists with communities throughout Western Australia to explore the relationship between globalisation and local identity. International Art Space was formed in 1998 by farmers and art professionals interested in exploring cultural identity through art. Since its inception, International Art Space has run more than 100 residency-based projects by artists from 20 countries and organised four national touring exhibitions. spaced.org.au

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spaced 2: future recall A recurring international event of context-responsive art Published and distributed by International Art Space in support of the spaced 2: future recall program, 2013–14 and exhibition at the Western Australian Museum, Perth 19 February – 29 March 2015 spaced.org.au Catalogue text: Marco Marcon, Joanna Sandell Catalogue editors: Hilary Ericksen, Marco Marcon, Katherine Wilkinson Catalogue design: Isabel Krüger (IZZI) Artwork photography: Robert Frith (Acorn Photo), Marco Marcon, Darren Smith (Acorn Photo) Printed in Singapore by Craft Print International National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Title: spaced 2 : future recall ISBN: 9780987364722 (paperback) Subjects: Artists and community--Western Australia. Art, Australian--Western Australia--Exhibitions. Art, Australian--21st century--Exhibitions. Art, Modern--Exhibitions. Western Australia--In art--Exhibitions. Other Authors: Marcon, Marco, author. Sandell, Joanna, author. Dewey Number: 709.94074941 Copyright © 2015 the artists, the authors and International Art Space All rights reserved. All works of art are copyright of the artist, all images are courtesy of the artist unless otherwise stated. This catalogue is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no material whether written or photographic may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the artist, authors and International Art Space.


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