The Golden Hour:
Angela Tiatia Angela Tiatia reflects on her colossal 32-metre long photographic collage commissioned for the Art Gallery of New South Wales entrance court.
I
was honoured to be invited by the Art Gallery of New South Wales to create a work for the 32-metre wall of their entrance court. I have always loved this space. I remember spending many visits to the gallery just standing here, marvelling and learning from the Colin McCahon that hung there. The Golden Hour was conceived, designed, shot and built with this specific space in mind and for this specific time. Both in terms of how it relates to The Archibald, but in a larger sense to grapple with ideas that relate to the time we are all living in.
“The Golden Hour is the magical time between day and night. It is neither day, nor is it night. It is a period of transition between the two. And it feels to me like we are living in a time of transition.”
I have seen the word ‘unprecedented’ in more headlines in the last 6 months than I have in the rest of my life. But beyond Covid, there are a series of fundamental changes whose waves are all cresting at the same time: ecological, economic, social, cultural, racial and political. And rather than being separate and independent, they are chorusing together and amplifying their impacts.
SUMMER 2020
These themes have been a driving force behind much of my work. It has been my means of trying to make sense of many of them, especially their impact on the disempowered. However, for this work I wanted to zoom
out from these issues directly, and instead acknowledge the landscape of our time that these changes are washing over. And it felt that the golden light of dawn or dusk was the perfect setting. The 19th-century German Idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel also drew upon the metaphor of a time between night and day when he noted that, "the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk." I'm no philosopher, but my understanding is he was observing that we don't tend to understand a time until it is passed. We live through it, but can only make sense of it in hindsight. With all due respect to Hegel, I'm not sure I agree. My belief is that art can help illuminate our situation and make clear the options we have in front of us while we still have them. In The Golden Hour, the characters are burning their own portraits. This is a motif I revisit from an earlier work, The Fall, which was a 2017 Australian War Memorial commission. As part of this commission, I was resident in Singapore to study The Fall of Singapore that happened 75 years earlier. While reading through accounts of survivors I came across descriptions of how people were burning their family portraits. They did this to erase connections between them and their loved ones, so as to protect themselves from invading forces looking to persecute relatives of people they saw as dissidents. But where this was an act of erasure of their connections to others, in this work the people are burning their own images. I was drawn to this visual idea in response to several contemporary dynamics, but in particular the selfcannibalization of social media. That in a world where you have more control than ever of how you curate
Angela Tiatia in front of her new photographic work, The Golden Hour 2020, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales
