Di'van | A Journal of Accounts | Issue 8

8_S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 0

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ART | CULTURE | THEORY

Brook Andrew | Stephanie Bailey | Diana Campbell Betancourt | Paul Gladston | Reuben Keehan Andrew Renton | Una Rey | Genevieve Trail | Andrew Wood | Murtaza Vali | Yao Souchou

Tai Kwun Contemporary, JC Contemporary, Tai Kwun, 10 Hollywood Road, Hong Kong

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Editor Contributing Editor Publisher

Design

A Journal of Accounts Art | Culture | Theory

Alan Cruickshank Paul Gladston DIVAN ART JOURNAL | University of NSW Art & Design Alan Cruickshank

ISSN 2207-1563 © Copyright 2020 Alan Cruickshank in conjunction with the University of NSW Art & Design, Sydney, the authors and artists No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD NANCY ADAJANIA India Cultural theorist, editor, writer and curator, Mumbai STEPHANIE BAILEY Hong Kong/United Kingdom Writer and editor, Hong Kong/London THOMAS BERGHUIS The Netherlands Independent Curator and Art Historian, Leiden DIANA CAMPBELL BETANCOURT Bangladesh Chief Curator, Dhaka Art Summit, Artistic Director, Samdani Art Foundation, DhakaArtistic Director, Bellas Artes Projects, Manila FULYA ERDEMCI Turkey/The Netherlands Curator and writer, Istanbul/Amsterdam

d ɪˈv a n | A Journal of Accounts is published biannually by DIVAN ART JOURNAL and University of NSW Art & Design, Sydney

PATRICK FLORES The Philippines Professor of Art Studies, University of The Philippines, Manila

Editorial | Subscription | Advertising inquiries: Email: artandculturejournal@gmail.com Post: University of NSW Art & Design Paddington Campus, Cnr Oxford St & Greens Rd, Paddington, SYDNEY NSW 2021 Australia

ADAM GECZY Australia Senior Lecturer, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney; author, artist, Sydney

The views and/or opinions expressed in d ɪˈv a n | A Journal of Accounts are those of the contributing writers and not necessarily those of the editor, DIVAN ART JOURNAL or the University of NSW Art & Design, Sydney divan: from the Persian dīwān, an account book; origin dēvan, booklet; also related to debir, writer; evolved through ‘a book of poems’, ‘collection of literary passages’, ‘an archive’, ‘book of accounts’ and ‘collection of sheets’ to ‘an assembly’, ‘office of accounts’, ‘custom house’, ‘government bureau’ or ‘councils chamber’, to a long, cushioned seat, which in this sense entered European languages divan presents a shift of content and meaning over time coexistent with evolving historical relationships between the East and West. d ɪˈv a n | A Journal of Accounts offers critical interpretations on contemporary art and culture, and its broader historical, socio-political and theoretical contexts, from the greater Asia (Middle East, South/Southeast/East Asia and Asia-Pacific) regions which determine historical and current socio-cultural affinities with contemporary Australian art and society

BLAIR FRENCH Australia CEO, Carriageworks, Sydney

PAUL GLADSTON Australia Judith Neilson Chair Contemporary Art, University of New South Wales Art & Design, Sydney ALEXIE GLASS-KANTOR Australia Executive Director, Artspace, Sydney REUBEN KEEHAN Australia Curator Contemporary Asian Art, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane VASIF KORTUN Turkey Curator, writer, Board Member, SALT, Istanbul LEE WENG CHOY Malaysia Independent art critic, Kuala Lumpur IAN McLEAN Australia Hugh Ramsay Chair of Australian Art, University of Melbourne, Melbourne VALI MAHLOUJI United Kingdom Curator, writer, critic and author, London GUY MANNES-ABBOTT United Kingdom Writer, essayist and critic, London CHARLES MEREWETHER Georgia Curator of Contemporary Art, National Museum of Georgia, Tbilisi NAT MULLER The Netherlands Independent curator and critic, Amsterdam DJON MUNDINE Australia Independent curator, writer and art critic, Sydney NIKOS PAPASTERGIADIS Australia Professor, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Melbourne ROBIN PECKHAM China Co-director Taipei Dangdai, writer, Taipei SHUBIGI RAO Singapore Artistic Director 2020 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, artist TAN BOON HUI USA Director, Asia Society Museum, New York PHIL TINARI China Director, Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing

Cover: Ali Cherri, from the Grafting series, 2019 Head of a Lobi protection figure–Sandstone Buddha bust (Thailand, Ayuthaya Kingdom, XVth century) 2020 Kochi-Muziris Biennale: In Our Veins Flow Ink and Fire Image courtesy the artist and and Imane Farès, Paris

MURTAZA VALI USA/UAE Writer, art historian and curator, New York ALA YOUNIS Jordan Curator and artist, Amman

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This issue of d ɪˈv a n | A Journal of Accounts has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body

CONTENTS

6 Parergon

ALAN CRUICKSHANK

8 Going Over the Edge: COVID-19, the Global Artistic-Industrial Complex and NIRIN

75 A Perfect (Shit)Storm: On Memes, Movements and Geopolitics STEPHANIE BAILEY

PAUL GLADSTON

28 No Centre or Periphery: Powerful Objectives

ANDREW RENTON | BROOK ANDREW

94 Plurality of Memory: History Projects, Diaspora and Nationalism GENEVIEVE TRAIL

42 Seismic Moments

104 Wawasan 2020: At the End of the Day Even Art is Not Important

DIANA CAMPBELL BETANCOURT

YAO SOUCHOU

54 A “Real Allegory” of Manual Labour in The Age of Global Capital

118 Into the Void: Concealed Histories, Buried Memories

MURTAZA VALI

REUBEN KEEHAN

66 The Nemesis and The Muse: E. Phillips Fox’s Cook and Daniel Boyd’s Pirates

126 Frangipani on the Grand Canal: The Art of Yuki Kihara ANDREW WOOD

UNA REY

138

IMAGE NOTATIONS

COM I NG S O ON

ASIA SOCIETY

TRIENNIAL WE DO NOT DREAM ALONE

HAMR A ABBAS GHIOR A AHARONI SONG-MING ANG REZA ARAMESH CHRISTINE AY TJOE NANDAL AL BOSE MINA CHEON CHEUK WING NAM DANIEL CROOKS VIBHA GALHOTRA KYUNGAH HAM JOYCE HO SUSIE IBARRA

PART 1 OCTOBER 27, 2020–FEBRUARY 7, 2021 PART 2 MARCH 16, 2021–JUNE 27, 2021

ABIR KARMAKAR KIMSOOJA L AO TONGLI DINH Q. LÊ LI JIANJUN MINOUK LIM

EXECUTIVE CHAIR AND CHAIR OF THE STEERING COMMITTEE Agnes Hsu-Tang, Ph.D.

LU YANG

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Boon Hui Tan

KEVORK MOUR AD

EXHIBITION COCURATORS Boon Hui Tan and Michelle Yun GUEST CURATORS Susan L. Beningson, Ph.D. Special Project, We the People: Xu Bing and Sun Xun Respond to the Declaration of Independence

Giovanna Fulvi

PRABHAVATHI MEPPAYIL MOUNTAIN RIVER JUMP! (HUANG SHAN + HUANG HE) AHMET ÖĞÜT NASIM NASR JORDAN NASSAR HETAIN PATEL ANNE SAMAT ANGIE SEAH SHAHZIA SIKANDER ARPITA SINGH SAMITA SINHA SUN XUN

Film Series, Dreaming in Color

MEL ATI SURYODARMO

Wendy N. E. Ikemoto, Ph.D.

NATEE UTARIT

Collateral Exhibition, Dreaming Together: New-York Historical Society and Asia Society Museum

WEN HUI

AT TRIENNIAL VENUES AND PARTNERING INSTITUTIONS ACROSS NEW YORK CITY

Check AsiaSociety.org/Triennial for updates.

JASON WEE XU BING XU ZHEN ® ON VIEW: PART 1 AND PART 2 KEN + JULIA YONETANI HUANG RUO (COMPOSER IN RESIDENCE)

CONTRIBUTORS

Brook Andrew is a Melbournebased Wiradjuri/Celtic artist whose interdisciplinary practice examines dominant narratives, often relating to colonialism and modernity. Through museum interventions and curatorial projects, he aims to make forgotten stories visible and offer alternative choices for interpreting history in the world today; major exhibitions include A Solid Memory of the Forgotten Plains of our Trash and Obsessions, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Spain (2014), Ahy-konuh-klas-tik, Van Abbemuseum, Netherlands (2017) and The Right to Offend is Sacred, National Gallery of Victoria, Australia (2017); this year, exhibiting in À toi appartient le regard et (...) la liaison infinie entre les choses, Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, and next year will be resident in the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Italy; DPhil candidate, Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, Associate Professor of Fine Art, Monash University, Enterprise Professor in Interdisciplinary Practice, University of Melbourne; Artistic Director, NIRIN, 2020 Biennale of Sydney.

Stephanie Bailey is editor-in-chief of Ocula Magazine, contributing editor to ART PAPERS, managing editor of Podium, the online journal for M+ in Hong Kong, editorial advisory board member of d’ivan, A Journal of Accounts, and part of the Naked Punch editorial collective. Formerly senior editor of Ibraaz, she also writes for ArtMonthly, Canvas and Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, and since 2015 has curated the Conversations program for Art Basel Hong Kong; essays have appeared in Navigating the Planetary: A guide to the planetary art world–its past, present, and potentials (eds. Hildegund Amanshauser and Kimberly Bradley, VfmK, 2020); Germaine Kruip: Works 1999-2017 (ed. Krist Gruijthuijsen, Koenig Books, 2018); Future Imperfect: Contemporary Art Practices and Cultural Institutions in the Middle East (ed. Anthony Downey, Sternberg Press, 2016); The future is already here–it’s just not evenly distributed, 20th Biennale of Sydney catalogue (ed. Stephanie Rosenthal, 2016); Armenity, the catalogue for the Armenian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale (ed. Adelina von Furstenburg, Skira, 2015); Happy Hypocrite #8: FRESH HELL (ed. Sophia Al-Maria, Book Works, 2015); Hybridize or Disappear (ed. Joao Laia, Mousse Publishing, 2015); and You Are Here: Art After the Internet (ed.

Omar Kholeif, Space/Cornerhouse, 2014).

Diana Campbell Betancourt is an American curator working in South and Southeast Asia, primarily Bangladesh and the Philippines.Currently she is the Artistic Director of Dhaka-based Samdani Art Foundation and Chief Curator of the Dhaka Art Summit. Formerly based in Mumbai for six years, she facilitated inter-regional South Asia dialogue through

her exhibitions and public programs; from 2016 to 2018, Founding Artistic Director, Bellas Artes Projects, a production based residency program and exhibition space in Bagac, Bataan and Manila, Philippines.

Paul Gladson is the Judith Neilson Chair in Contemporary Art, University of New South Wales Art & Design, Sydney; previously Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures and Critical Theory and Director of the Centre for Contemporary East-Asian Cultural Studies, University of Nottingham; has written extensively on the theory and practice of contemporary Chinese art for numerous journals and magazines including Modern China Studies, Culture and Dialogue, Yishu, Leap, Art Review, Contemporary Art and Investment, Artworld, Wink, Contemporary Visual Art+Culture Broadsheet and Eyeline; Editor of the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (Intellect), 2014-16.

Reuben Keehan is Curator, Contemporary Asian Art at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; has worked on the 2012, 2015 and 2018 editions of the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art; with a long history in the public, non-profit and artist-driven art sectors, he was previously Curator at Artspace, Sydney, 2006-11 and editor of its journal Column, 2008-11.

Una Rey is a lecturer in art history at the University of Newcastle; prior she worked in the Indigenous arts sector in the Northern Territory for over a decade.

Her research and industry experience has generated curatorial projects including Speaking in Colour (2011) and the critically acclaimed exhibition Black White & Restive: cross-cultural initiatives in Australian contemporary art, both at Newcastle Art Gallery in 2016. She has published biographies, art criticism and critical essays on Australian contemporary art in journals, news media and exhibition catalogues for Australia’s leading public institutions; won in 2017 the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art’s annual art writing award; her forthcoming chapter ‘Bardon’s legacy: paintings, stories and Indigenous Australian art’, will appear in Mediating Modernism: Indigenous Artists, Modernist Mediators, Global Networks published by Duke University Press.

Andrew Renton is Professor of Curating, Goldsmiths, University of London; has curated many international exhibitions, including the first Manifesta, Rotterdam 1996, Browser in Vancouver 1997 and Tate London 1998, Total Object Complete with Missing Parts, Glasgow, 2001, Stay Forever and Ever and Ever, South London Gallery, 2007, Come, Come, Come into my World, Lisbon, 2007 and the first ArtTLV Biennial in Tel Aviv, 2008; founding Director of Marlborough Contemporary Gallery, London, 2012-17; author and editor of

articles, books and monographs on art; jury member 2006 Turner Prize; trustee of several arts organisations such as Showroom and Drawing Room; has advised numerous European collections, museums and institutions, including the British Government Art Collection; most recently he has been involved in the establishment of Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art. Genevieve Trail is a PhD Candidate in Art History, University of Melbourne; her doctoral research focuses on contemporary art of Hong Kong, particularly as it relates to conditions of precarity; has contributed to a range of Australian journals, including Art+Australia, Art Monthly Australasia and Photofile.

Murtaza Vali is a critic, curator and art historian based in Brooklyn and Sharjah.

His ongoing research interests include materialist art histories, ex-centric minimalisms, ghosts and other figures of liminal subjectivities and repressed histories, and the weight of colour.

A recipient of a 2011 Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for Short-Form Writing, he contributes regularly to various art periodicals and publications for non-profit institutions and commercial galleries; Adjunct Curator, Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, where he curated the widely acclaimed inaugural group exhibition Crude, which explored the relationship between oil and modernity across West Asia; currently curating a series of exhibitions about “intimate infrastructures” in the Gulf at Warehouse421, Abu Dhabi and is part of the Artistic Team for the 2nd FRONT Triennial, Cleveland in 2022; Visiting Instructor, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, he is also a Lead Tutor of Campus Art Dubai and a Lead Mentor for the Hayy: Learning Curatorial Fellowship.

Andrew Wood is an art writer, independent art historian, curator and critic, translator, and cultural mercenary based in Ōtautahi-Christchurch, AotearoaNew Zealand.

Souchou Yao is a writer and critic based in Port Dickson, Malaysia and Sydney, Australia. He has a PhD in anthropology, and is a former staff member at the Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney. His work deals with the anthropology of Chinese diaspora, and the relation between aesthetics and social and political theory; some previous books are The Malayan Emergency: Essays on a Small, Distant War (2016); Confucian Capitalism: Discourse, Practice and the Myth of Chinese Enterprise (2015) and Singapore: The State and the Culture of Excess (2006). His latest book The Shop on High Street: at home with petite capitalism is forthcoming with Macmillan, Shanghai.

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ALAN CRUICKSHANK

Parergon

At this moment in time I am reminded of a comment made by exiled Iranian artist Rokni Haerizadeh at Art Dubai’s Global Art Forum in 2014, when articulating his quizzical search for new definitions of his art practice—of paintings, their surreal imagery sourced from the globally pervasive media news cycle, where the presence of human beings has been literally wiped out, sublimated by layers of paint and ink negating and corrupting the surface of the printed video still, mutating their human figures into human-animal hybrids in unsettling and savage scenes of the familiar and the bizarre, where both perpetrator and victim have become these cross-beasts, metaphors of a social world turned inhuman—he equated the process and its product to being the “the skin off our time.” The series of artworks in discussion was Fictionville (2009–), rotoscope video works made from thousands of individual paintings, that probed the pervasive normativity of social and cultural models presented by world institutions, society neither upopian nor dystopian, through an interrogatory of picking away at the layers of institutional order. This maxim comes to mind now, mid-point (perhaps) of a globally consuming coronavirus, of Fictionville’s prescient phantasm—of distrust, doubt, of personal and collective human anxiety and disorder at real or imagined fault-lines in society, authority, and history. Whereas Haerizadeh’s focus was of human generated behaviour, of violence to itself—now recurrent, leading to more than cancellation of biennales—and to the animal world, that world is now additionally entangled by an animal, or perhaps human-animal generated contagion that’s effecting the world in toto: the title of the above painting from that series being most apt, Life is Perhaps That Enclosed Moment when My Vision Destroys Itself in the Pupil of Your Eyes.

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I have highlighted elsewhere the latter-day positionings of biennales et al., through their titles and themes, that declare a mutual apriorism of art’s redemptive qualities to rescue humanity from apathy or ignorance, neutrality or complicity, of its many perceived or certain travails; feasibly, art as panacea, remedy or atonement. The 2019 Singapore Biennale, 2020 Dhaka Art Summit, 2020 Biennale of Sydney and 2020 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, collectively the focus of the previous issue, and this, as constituents of the endangered global artistic-industrial complex (Paul Gladston), have both confronted and been confronted by the global pandemic and its ensuing reverberations.

The 2019 Biennale of Singapore: Every Step in the Right Direction, presented a mix of hope and optimism, of placing “faith squarely in the potential of art and its understanding,” querying the “responsibility of the artwork” to “transmute” (mutate?) this “troubled” world, the Biennale escaping the coronavirus but not its concluding conference. Also initiated pre-COVID-19, the Dhaka Art Summit perceptively presented the multiple notions of “seismic movements” (Diana Campbell Betancourt), while the Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN, untimely interrupted at its inception, exposed urgent states of the contemporary condition, evidencing the power of artists to “resolve, heal, dismember and imagine futures of transformation for re-setting the world” (Andrew Renton and Brook Andrew). Fusing such reflections in this issue are others, where history both underscores and accentuates: the year 2020 presents the 250th anniversary of British explorer Lt. James Cook’s Pacific Ocean voyage of “discovery” that claimed the continent of Terra Australis for the British Empire, the consequences of which still resonate (Una Rey); the 75th anniversary of the nuclear bombings of Japan that ended the Pacific War (Reuben Keehan); and an imaginery ’summit’ to Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir’s visionary policy of Wawasan 2020 (Yao Souchou); the long and winding narrative arc of Pepe the Frog meme, from feelgood adoration to alt-right appropriation, to Hong Kong democracy protesters’ mascot (Stephanie Bailey); third world manual labour in age of global capital (Murtaza Vali); the politically-astute, gender-diverse artist representation for the New Zealand pavilion at the COVID-19-delayed 2022 Venice Biennale (Andrew Wood); and diaspora, (trans)nationalism and the plurality of memory (Genevieve Trail).

The 2020 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, broadly the focus of this issue’s compass, presents an equally resolute optimism as per its biennale colleagues, given the criticality and cataclysm of this moment in time. To quote at length curator Shubigi Rao’s note for her 2020 Kochi-Muziris Biennale: In Our Veins Flow Ink and Fire: As a bulwark against despair the biennale as commons may seem an impossible idea. But we remember the ability of our species, our communities, to flourish artistically even in fraught and dire situations, with a refusal in the face of disillusionment to disavow our poetry, our languages, our art and music, our optimism and humour. To envision this biennale as a persistent yet unpredictable murmuration in the face of capriciousness and volatility comes from my unshakeable conviction in the power of storytelling as strategy, of the transgressive potency of ink, and transformative fire of satire and humour… This edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale therefore embodies the joy of experiencing practices of divergent sensibilities, under conditions both joyful and grim. There is optimism even in the darkest absurdity, and this is what leavens the direness of our time… we can imagine the possibility of sustained kinship, and remember that we are not isolated in this fight. And that perhaps all that is required for an impossible ideal to exist is for enough people to live, think, and work as if it already does.

The skin off our time.

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PAUL GLADSTON

Going Over the Edge: COVID-19, the Global Artistic Industrial Complex and NIRIN The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global economy has been profound. In addition to major falls on stock markets across the world there have been dramatic increases in general unemployment as a result of enforced reductions in demand for commodities and services.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average was, for example, on 11 May 2020 nearly 17% lower than its starting point for the year, and, in spite of improved numbers, on 7 August remained some 2,000 points below its year high in February.1 The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in the US for April was up from 3.6% in 2019 to 14.7% in 2020, and as of July remains over the Global Financial Crisis peak of 10%.2 Without a universally available vaccine and/or effective palliative treatments, management of public health in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic will continue to involve, as it has since the first cluster of novel coronavirus infection came to light in the mainland Chinese city of Wuhan on 31 December 2019, societal lockdowns of varying degrees and intermittencies worldwide. The knock-on effect of those lockdowns has already been to stymie human activity and interaction in ways that are massively impoverishing both socially and financially.

Notwithstanding Pollyannish predictions of an immediate post-COVID-19 economic bounce-back (return to normal)—similar to those made erroneously in the midst of the 2008 global economic crisis and upstream of the decade-long period of the austerity subsequently inflicted in many countries—the damage to the world’s economy brought about by the pandemic has the potential to be both deep and lasting. The extent and duration of that damage is impossible to measure precisely at present. Nevertheless, early estimates indicate most major economies will see a decrease of at least 2.4% in their gross domestic product during 2020 with further significant potential decreases in relation to the continuing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.3 Comparisons of the global economic crisis of 2008 and the impact of COVID-19 on the world’s economy show the latter as having greater negative consequences in some sectors.4 Key in this regard is the pandemic’s disruption of the pan-global connectivity upon which the world’s economy in large part now depends, including international air transport and supply chains. Commodities without any means of distribution have been dumped or languish in storage, among them essential foodstuffs. A combination of mass unemployment and scarcity of available resources presents a major, perhaps long-term, challenge to social well-being worldwide redolent of the Great Depression of the 1930s5 compounding the already mounting tragedy of hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by COVID-19. There is also talk of a Cold War 2.0 resulting from China’s perceived failure to contain the novel coronavirus, and the re-eruption of peaceful Black Lives Matter protests in many parts of the world taking place alongside opportunist/criminal rioting and looting, after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis Police on 25 May 2020. The world is, in short, in the midst of significant political and

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economic turmoil marking the threshold of potentially millenarian change.As online and other media commentators have been quick to point out, the pandemic has already impacted significantly on the contemporary artworld both in its international and composite sub-/culturally localised manifestations.6 In addition to the furloughing and permanent laying-off of countless numbers of art workers worldwide (curators, gallery assistants, researchers and public educators among them) and a curtailing of available public and private funding for the contemporary arts, there has been a widespread suspension or cancelling of physical gallery- and museum-based exhibitions and a consequent shift to virtual/online modes of display. In some territories there have been redeployments of grant funding away from public art projects, in some cases towards support for impoverished art workers. Adding to which is a curtailing of the international movement of artists, art workers and audiences for art brought about by COVID-19’s interruption of pan-global connectivity. Employment within the higher education sector supportive of the activities of artists and art workers has also come under threat, not least because of restrictions on the movement of international students and resulting major losses of revenue from course fees.

A contemporary artworld that has called persistently for radical socioeconomic change now has it in unsettlingly large order, albeit outside of its active instigation or control. Without a reinstatement of economic conditions prior to the COVID-19 pandemic it is difficult to see how the contemporary artworld will return to anything like its previous institutional form. This includes the reinstatement of both private funding and financial value generated by the art market in addition to a now widespread public funding of the arts, particularly in liberal-democratic contexts where the cultural sector is not only valued as a source of entertainment but also a means of public education and (supposedly) transformative criticality in the public sphere. Like the global economy more generally, the contemporary artworld is faced by the very real prospect of a lasting depression.

There is therefore a pressing imperative to reflect on the previously established form of the contemporary artworld and its likely future shape in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this text I will pursue two lines of reflection with regard to the potential impact of the pandemic: first, on the vast artistic-industrial complex that has grown up in support of the globalised production, dissemination and reception of contemporary art since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the ending of the first Cold War in 1991; and second, on the institutionalised combination of technê (making and doing) and institutionally legitimated meaning which informs the conferring of cultural and financial value on contemporary art in the globalised context. It will be argued that the former’s seemingly inexorable physical expansion as part of post-Cold War globalisation will necessarily be rolled back in the face of a major decrease in surplus financial value and reduction in physical pan-global connectivity, and that this will result in an entropic heightening of localised hi-context discursive constructions of the purposes and significances of art running counter to the still Westcentric low-context generalising tendencies of the contemporary artworld.

Major paradigm shifts have taken place in the Western(ised) artworld previously in relation to materially changing socioeconomic conditions: for example, the displacing of classical mimesis by avant-garde modernism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in concert with a shift internationally towards industrial capitalism, and the turn toward deconstructive postmodernism during the second half of the twentieth century in conjunction with the emergence of late post-industrial capitalism straddling the ending of the first Cold War.7 There is every reason to expect a cognate shift in contemporary artworld thinking and practice as a consequence of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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PAUL GLADSTON

THE CONTEMPORARY ARTWORLD AND THE GLOBAL ARTISTIC-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX The term “artworld” was initially coined by the philosopher and art critic, Arthur C. Danto in an essay in which he argues that distinctions between art and non-art in light of the combination of the Duchampian readymade and artistic uses of mechanical reproduction, as exemplified in Danto’s view by Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes (1964), are now decided principally by specialists associated with institutions and communities dedicated to art.8 This sphere of specialist activity—defined by a shared acceptance that anything and everything can, in principle, be contemplated as art—is named by Danto as the artworld. George Dickie’s “institutional theory of art” posits the artworld similarly as the locus of the systematic legitimation of art.9 Viewed through the lens of Foucauldian analysis, the artworld is the institutional locus of discursive formations (relations among signs communicating meaning recursively between and among objects, subjects, and statements) that give significance to art qua art and shape the power relations with respect to what can and cannot be enunciated as truthful or meaningful in that regard.

In a later text, Danto elaborates on his idea of the artworld by arguing that art’s historical development can be divided into three successive stages: the first, dominated by ideas of mimesis; the second, involving an ideological contestation of differing styles; and the third, an acceptance that art has no material, ideological or stylistic limitations. On the basis of these divisions—which echo G.W.F. Hegel’s teleological vision of history as developing sequentially towards a totalising consciousness of “spirit” (geist)—Danto argues that art has now entered into a post-historical stage wherein, with certain specialist qualifications, pretty much “anything goes.”10 As such, Danto’s schema is limited to a consideration of the particular concerns and historical developmental trajectory of Euro-American art. Danto’s idea of the artworld is, while intrinsically pluralistic, nevertheless projected paradoxically as universal and within culturally and historically defined limits.

More recent discussions of the artworld have diverged from Danto’s Euro-American-centric endist outlook by drawing attention to differing historical and contemporary cultural constructions of aesthetic experience as well as the sub-cultural interconnectedness of art institutions and communities made conspicuous as a result of post-Cold War neo-liberal globalisation.11 A significant aspect of which is the ever-growing series of international survey exhibitions, biennials and triennials staged over recent decades dedicated to the showcasing of a contemporary post-West” global art/ visual culture, beginning with Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Pompidou and Parc de la Villette in 1989. In this postmodern view there is a multiverse, rather than a universe, of dynamically differing and intersecting (deferring) artworlds without readily definable cultural and historical limits.

At the same time, and in spite of a shifting of the axes of geopolitical and economic power as a result of globalisation, major artworld centres such as New York, Paris, Berlin and London have remained hugely influential in their upholding of established Euro-American economies of production, dissemination and reception as a reproducible standard facilitating the infrastructural workings of what might be thought of as a global artistic-industrial complex connecting the contemporary artworld and the art market. Included in this is the adaptive metastasising of the so-called “white cube” which, in spite of the proliferation of supplementary modes contextualised by postmodernism, has become a reproducible standard for global public museums, commercial galleries and art fairs. Also included are the workings of the international art market rooted in the principles of liberal capitalism first developed in Europe, and modes of critical discourse developed in relation to the Euro-American philosophical tradition. The global artistic-industrial complex can thus be seen as a major contributor to the endlessly positive spectacle12 of contemporary neo-liberalism. l

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Going Over the Edge: COVID-19, the Global Artistic-Industrial Complex and NIRIN

It has therefore become necessary to conceive of a conspicuously diverse post-Cold War worldwide archipelago of individuals, institutions and communities dedicated to the production, dissemination and reception of art that nevertheless shares in an entanglement with the horizons of the Euro-American artworld paradigm referred to by Danto. That entanglement facilitates the contemporary artworld’s pluralistic trans-national productivity while also being open to critical interpretation as a residual manifestation of Euro-American imperialism.

Throughout the nineteenth, and much of the twentieth century successive and intersecting artistic discourses and praxes within Euro-American contexts, associated variously with radical idealism, romanticism, aestheticism, politicised avant-garde modernism, and high-modernism, set out differing interpretations of the aesthetic as a locus of modernising sociocultural transformation categorically distinct from and mediating between scientifically informed practice and ethics.

Late nineteenth century Euro-American aestheticism’s desire to establish an entirely autonomous aesthetic contrasts, for example, with that of the politicised historical and neo- avant-gardes of the early and mid-twentieth century to bring art and the life-world synthetically together as a means of dialectically reworking the disciplining means-end rationality of the latter along the more playful lines of the former.

With the shift within those same Euro-American contexts during the second half of the twentieth century towards postmodernist sensibilities, categorical progressivist-modernist distinctions between tradition and modernity, art and society, and high and low culture were brought deconstructively into question.13 Instituted in their place are modes of artistic criticism that sought to radically expand and diversify artworld thinking and practice, not least in the direction of already receptive post-/de-colonially oriented artworlds within and outside Euro-America. Distinctions within postmodernism have been made between poststructuralist and neo-conservative tendencies, with the former highlighting the profound uncertainty of a supposedly immanent postmodern condition in contrast to the latter’s continued espousal of established Euro-America humanist ideas of coherent subjectivity and agency.14 Any absolute distinction between poststructuralist and neoconservative postmodernism is however suspended from the deconstructivist point of view of the former. The immanence of the postmodern condition has also been brought into question by post/de-colonial discourses which see it as a specifically Euro-American post-industrial phenomenon.15

Although Derridean deconstruction ‘propre’ suspends the rationalising spatio-temporal distinctions underpinning a critically oppositional Euro-American post-Enlightenment modernism, in practice the contemporary artworld has, with a view to its continuing efficiency, continued to uphold those distinctions in conjunction with a general counter-authoritarian sense of deconstructivist uncertainty-lite (a conjunction sometimes referred to as metamodernism16). It has also added a further critical distinction between what are perceived as a colonial-imperial EuroAmerican artworld and resistant de-colonially-oriented others as the revised basis for a diversified socially progressive art. In short, the contemporary artworld can be understood to uphold general traces of the Euro-American post-Enlightenment idea of critically oppositional aesthetic modernity while at the same time overwriting those traces with thinking supportive of its particular expansively diversified outlook; an overwriting buttressed in part by a move away from the profound uncertainties of poststructuralist postmodernism and a return to workable, often simplistic, ideas of dialectical opposition ushered in by the so called “social-turn” within the contemporary artworld during recent decades.17 The contemporary artworld continues to share generally in ideas of critical distancing instituted by Euro-American post-Enlightenment aesthetic modernity even as it qualifies the latter 10 | 11

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through the upholding of a myriad of other cultural outlooks whose conceptions of the significance and function of the aesthetic now intersect but paradoxically do not always entirely accord with those of Euro-American post/modernism; a condition referred to by Peter Osborne and others as “contemporaneity.”18

Crucially, the value conferred institutionally on modernist, postmodernist and contemporary art, both culturally within the Western(ised) artworld and financially on the international art market, has become dependent on durable perceptions of its critically transformative use-value kept distinct in some way or other from sociocultural objects of criticism. This contrasts with Euro-American art in the classical mimetic tradition whose cultural and financial value was attributed conventionally to its perceived worth as a source of aesthetic pleasure, use-value as an adjunct to religious and aristocratic ritual, the preciousness of materials used in its production, and/or investments of skilled craftmanship on the part of artists and artisans. In the case of modernist, postmodernist and contemporary art after the proposal of the Duchampian readymade, none of those classical measures of value necessarily apply. With regard to all of which, it is possible to expand on Danto’s and Dickie’s visions of the artworld by seeing the institutional confirmation of modernist, postmodernist and contemporary art’s value as a locus of transformative criticality in an interactive relationship with the conferring of financial value on the international art market, whereby both impact iteratively /symbolically upon the other.

COVID-19 AND THE CONTRACTION OF THE GLOBAL ARTISTIC-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX Since the mid-twentieth century there has been a prodigious increase in the number of practising artists as part of the development of the contemporary artworld and associated global artisticindustrial complex, initially, in Western(ised) contexts and in relation to the ending of the first Cold War, worldwide. As Brandon Taylor19 indicates, in the US during the 1940s there were “perhaps only a score” of regularly exhibiting modern(ist) artists. This contrasts sharply with an estimated 150,000 professional and quasi-/semi-professional artists working in New York City during the mid-1980s.20 Research published by the National Endowment for the Arts shows in 2011 there were 210,000 fine artists of professionalised standing working predominantly in New York and California.21 An unpublished Gulbenkian Foundation enquiry concludes that in 1977 there were at least 20,000 “professional artists” working in the UK.22 Analysis of access to and take-up of grants from the UK arts councils estimates that in 2011 there were as many as 30,500 working artists, an increase of around 30% on the figure arrived at by the Gulbenkian Foundation enquiry.23 Another study estimates that in 2019 there were around 60,000 artists working in the UK, a 30% increase on an estimated figure of 40,000 for 2011.24 Supplementing those figures for the US and UK would have been numerous practising quasi- and semi-professional artists excluded from the published statistics. While related mostly to those Euro-American artworld contexts, a cursory examination of the vast and growing body of literature and online postings on the subject of contemporary art gives ample indexical evidence of comparably prodigious increases in the number of artists worldwide.

Growth in the number of artists globally since the mid-twentieth century has been accompanied by an exponential worldwide increase in the number of exhibition spaces and in the size of audiences for art. Statistical information for these increases is less partial. As Taylor also indicates, in the US during the 1940s there were only a “mere handful of galleries catering for the new art of abstract expressionism.”25 By the mid-1980s there were some 680 galleries26 and by 2019 an estimated 1,500 galleries27 dealing with art in New York City alone, many dedicated to the showing l

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and selling of post/modern and contemporary art. Over the period 2008-2014 there was a worldwide average 10.2% increase in visitor numbers for art museums that did not undergo renovation and an average 14.1% for those that did.28 Attendances at Tate Modern in London, for example, grew from 4,441,225 in 2004 to 5,868,562 in 2018.29 As the result of its prodigious centrally-driven building program, the number of museums in the People’s Republic of China, including art museums, has risen from 349 in 1978 to more than 5,100 in 2019.30 Audiences for modern and contemporary art in the PRC have grown in recent years but are relatively small by global measures and principally within metropolitan spaces, such as Shanghai. The China Art Museum, Shanghai, one of the biggest museums of contemporary art in Asia, nevertheless reported impressive annual visitor numbers of 2,550,000 in 2018.31 There was a significant and as yet unexplained dip in the number of visitors to some art museums and galleries during the second decade of the twenty-first century, most notably in the US.32 However, prior to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, attendance figures had rebounded in some instances and remained buoyant globally.

Such statistics do not give a comprehensive numerical picture of how large the growth in the number of artists, sites of public display and the size of audiences for art has actually been worldwide since the mid-twentieth century. The contemporary artworld and associated global artistic-industrial complex thus remain in effect mathematically sublime entities. Their Leviathanlike scale and interconnectedness are, nevertheless, beyond any reasonable doubt. The global growth in the number of artists and galleries and in audiences for art since the mid-twentieth century is of course neither autonomous nor accidental. During the same period there has been significant global economic growth, albeit subject to intermittent boom and bust, that has provided substantial public and private finance in support of the production, showing and reception of art; much as New World gold was used to underwrite an expansion of Catholic church art in Spain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The greater majority of that growth has come about as a consequence of post-Cold War globalisation in tandem with wider processes of societal modernisation, including the development of a diverse international cultural sector brought together by increased physical pan-global connectivity and the Internet. With regard to which it is perhaps important to reflect on Taylor’s observation that the productivity of the academic artworld in France during the nineteenth century far outstripped market demand.33 The same, as many artists and artworkers will confirm, is the case today with respect to the contemporary artworld. Art market value is sustained as ever by continuing artworld distinctions between good and not so good art in addition to the perceived rarity of the former, even as the expansive global diversity of art as a whole is supported ideologically by the contemporary artworld.

While it is important not to uphold an entirely deterministic mono-valent relationship between the surplus financial value generated by post-Cold War globalisation and the establishment of the contemporary artworld and related global artistic-industrial complex—wider factors relating to socio-cultural development and localised self-determination are, as indicated above, also in play —it would be misleading to see the latter as detached causally from the former. The damage wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic on the world’s economy, including restrictions on international travel and supply chains, will therefore almost certainly result in a significant long-term physical contraction of the global artistic-industrial complex. As responses to the existing impact of the pandemic on the contemporary artworld by art workers worldwide shows, a likely consequence will be an increased shifting of activities online. Artists as well as commercial galleries and museums have already taken that turn as a means of sustaining the visibility of their practices for global as well as local audiences. l

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A further likely consequence of that contraction will be a greater reliance on the material as well as institutional-discursive workings of localised artworlds both as supports to the making and showing of art and paradigmatic constructions of its functions and meanings. As debates related to the concept of contemporaneity have already recognised,34 the emergence of the contemporary artworld and associated global artistic-industrial complex since the late-twentieth century has been characterised by an increasingly conspicuous plurality of localised sociocultural outlooks intersecting with while diverging from those of Euro-American modernism and postmodernism. If the physical interconnectedness of the contemporary artworld decomposes long-term as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, as seems likely, the siloed plurality of contemporaneity will almost certainly become more entrenched. Still internationally dominant Euro-American artworld discourses, whose global influence was in any case already waning in the context of contemporaneity, will be overwritten in an accelerated way, in the absence of any ready substitute, by a plethora of memetic variations developed in greater isolation from one another.

AESTHETIC POST/MODERNITY, CONTEMPORANEITY AND TECHNÊ By extension, such overwriting may lead to a breaking down of existing institutionalised relationships between technê and meaning that give both cultural and financial value to contemporary art in the globalised context. Those relationships are themselves a kind of connective tissue deriving from Euro-American modernism and postmodernism that identify contemporary art as ‘contemporary’ while at the same time enabling intersections between differing artworlds in the context of contemporaneity. Key in this regard is the use of defamiliarisation, collage-montage and allegory as signature practices of avant-garde modernist, postmodernist and contemporary art.

Characteristically, defamiliarisation, collage-montage and allegory involve re-presentations of texts, images, objects and/or actions within novel settings wherein they take on new and unexpected significances. Defamiliarisation derives principally from the Russian formalist idea of “ostranenie” —presentations of the familiar in strange ways so as to heighten consciousness of the commonplace —considered essential to artistic/poetic expression. The artistic use of collage-montage derives in large part from the cutting out and decorative re-mounting of printed materials and objects highly popular in nineteenth century Europe,35 as well as the accretive visual spectacles of industrialised European towns and cities. The earliest known examples of the former being collages produced by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque circa 1911-12,36 for example, Picasso’s Still Life with Chair Caning (1912), which combines oil cloth overprinted with a photographically reproduced representation of chair caning with newsprint, rope and oil painting on canvas to signify the intoxicating effects of the then in France popular psychotropic drink, absinthe, and by metaphorical extension the similarly disorientating/euphoric effects of modernity as an ecstatic unsettling of tradition by the new.

Allegory is a rhetorical device established since European classical Antiquity whereby texts or visual images are used to symbolise complex spiritual, moral or political significances in addition to their simpler ostensible meanings. Examples of allegory in European art include Johannes Vermeer’s painting The Art of Painting, The Allegory of Painting, or Painter in His Studio (1666-68), a symbolic representation of history and poetry as the chief sources from which classical painting conventionally draws its subjects. Allegory accompanies a comparably ironicising tradition of literary satire initiated in classical Antiquity by writers such as Juvenal, revisited as part of the neo-classical revival in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

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Since the early twentieth century, defamiliarisation, collage-montage and a further revisiting of classical allegory have become staples of artistic production within Euro-American and other Westernised artworld contexts. Widely considered pivotal in this regard is not only Picasso’s development of collage-montage, but also most tellingly Marcel Duchamp’s associated development of the readymade. Following experimentation with impressionist, post-impressionist and cubist /futurist painterly idioms,37 around 1913-14 Duchamp began to toy with the idea of found objects as artworks; early examples of which include Bicycle Wheel (1913) and Bottlerack (1914), kept initially by Duchamp for private contemplation in his studio.38 The idea of the readymade may have originated from Duchamp’s visit to an industrial exposition in Germany in 1912.39 Picasso’s initial development of collage-montage and Duchamp’s use of readymades pointed the way to an expanded field of visual expression beyond established mimetic/naturalistic forms of painterly and sculptural representation in which objects could in effect represent themselves in the context of art.40 Of major significance in this regard is the development of mechanical forms of reproduction including still photography, moving film and mass-printing that share in the dislocating effects of defamiliarisation and collagemontage.41

That seminal shift in artistic languages away from mimesis towards defamiliarisation, collage-montage and allegory has been subject to changing interpretations. The adoption of defamiliarisation and collage-montage techniques by the politicised modernist avant-gardes of the early twentieth century came to be interpreted initially in two significant ways. Progressivist Marxian discourses tended to see both as loci of dialectical struggle42—viz. Sergei Eisenstein’s conception of cinematic montage. Eroded by that action was the categorical status of the aesthetic, signified by the Dadaistic ideas of anti-art and the anti-aesthetic.43 Related Surrealistic conceptions of art, developed

by André Breton and his circle, extended such thinking to a dialectical blurring of boundaries between conscious experience of the material world and the unconscious, given signature expression

by Max Ernst’s surrealist collage-novel Une Semaine de Bonté (1933),44 where dreamwork-like nonrationality is envisaged as a site of expanded un-/consciousness and the revolutionary uncaging of erotic desires otherwise constrained by a socially disciplining bourgeois-capitalist morality.45 In both cases, the ostensible strangeness of defamiliarisation and collage-montage is considered as means towards the revealing of realities masked by the false consciousness of capitalist ideology.

Both interpretations have cast long and, in many respects, misleading shadows over some quarters of the Western(ised) artworld up to the present day.

With the shift from modernist to postmodernist sensibilities in Euro-American contexts from the 1950s onwards, a differing interpretation of defamiliarisation and collage-montage emerged.

This was prefaced by Peter Bürger’s46 assessment of the avant-garde’s dialectical blurring of the boundary between art and life as one that by the mid-twentieth century had been effectively recuperated by capitalism and mainstream culture. Countering the apparent endism of that assessment were readings of defamiliarisation and collage-montage as means towards serially incomplete multiplications of significance. Gregory Ulmer, for example analyses collage-montage as an avant-la-lettre form of “post-critical” deconstructive practice negative of authoritative meaning not through dialectical opposition but, instead, illimitable semiotic productivity;47 a position echoed by, among others, Craig Owen’s identification of allegory as a signature characteristic of a deconstructivist postmodernist art,48 and Hal Foster’s later vision of a post-avant-garde with the capacity to continually shape-shift and diversify beyond the snares of mainstream dialectical recuperation.49 l

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In light of these poststructuralist postmodernist interventions, it becomes possible to rethink Duchamp’s proposing of the readymade beyond Marxian dialectics as an immanent locus of deconstruction avant-la-lettre; including what might be seen as a performative demonstration of the fundamentally Eucharistic basis of artistic economies of production, display and reception within predominantly Judaeo-Christian Euro-American artworld contexts, wherein art is performatively upheld as such in the context of a consecrated artworld with its various specialist initiates and credulous audiences. By putting forward an industrially manufactured urinal for exhibition as the artwork Fountain at the New York Society of Independent Artists exhibition in 1917, signed pseudonymously, “R. Mutt”, Duchamp invited audiences to witness and acknowledge their faith in the transubstantiation of an otherwise ineluctably base object into one that was divinely inspired with the transcendental idea/spirit of art. The resulting deconstructive undecidability of Fountain as both a urinal and a work of art, and consequently wholly neither, revealed art, for those receptive to Duchamp’s intervention, as relying for its significance not on a capacity to represent (an) ideal being more or less truthfully, as classical mimesis would have it, but on a mystical sleight of hand; the latter involving an acknowledgement of art and the aesthetic’s social-semiotic constructions as arbitrary categories of technê and feeling.

The chess-like pin or skewer enacted by the Duchampian readymade is profoundly problematic. As the chess-playing Duchamp knew, in the game of chess a “pin” describes an attack on a defending piece where the latter cannot be moved without exposing another more valuable defending piece to capture. A “skewer” is in effect a reverse pin involving an attack on a valuable defending piece whose movement exposes a less valuable piece to capture. In both cases, the defending player is faced with a dilemma in which the consequences of their next move are dependent on how the game as a whole unfolds; in the wider context of the game, the giving up of a more valuable piece may prove to be shrewd. Fountain presents viewers with a similar dilemma in the institutionalised context of art. To decide Fountain as a work of art or, as non-art sustains the idea of art as a definable category; to give up Fountain as art negatively preserves the valuable status of the latter. The alternative is to witness the deconstructive implications of Fountain as something whose status as art or non-art remains undecidable. In short, one is invited to give up the valued classical ideal of art in favour of something richer and more complex that is also practically impossible.

The dilemma presented by the Duchampian readymade and its derivatives can be understood to have been taken up by Danto and others (e.g. Douglas Crimp50), if not as an end, then an unresolvable suspension of (Euro-American) art’s conventionally assumed status qua art; one that encompasses by il/logical extension the institutionalisation of Duchamp’s intervention as a substitute mise en abyme (viewed retroactively through the lens of Derrida’s writing, the readymade’s deconstruction of art runs to the readymade itself as a supplement to Eucharistic mimesis).

LOW- AND HIGH-CONTEXT ARTWORLDS Although intellectually enlightening, the implications of the Duchampian readymade do not accord with the necessary pragmatism of the artworld more generally, where institutional managerialism and a democratising desire to engage widened public audiences demands something far more clearcut. In practice, an expanded contemporary artworld has continued to deploy readymades as well as cognate forms of defamiliarisation, collage-montage and allegory as standard means of production /representation across a wide and growing rage of artistic media. Even traditional modes of artistic production, such as painting and sculpture, are now conducted beyond the postmodernist critical 16 | 17

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turn self-consciously sous rature. A significant contributory factor to which is the diversification of the artworld to include cultural outlooks and artistic practices divergent from those of Euro-American aesthetic modernity and postmodernity. It is thus possible to view the use of defamiliarisation and related technês as a readily reproducible signature imputing a shared identity to contemporary art, albeit one without clearly definable spatio-temporal limits.

The difficulty with that signature is that its generalising reiteration ultimately reneges on the deconstructive immanence embodied by the Duchampian readymade. Instituted instead is the use of defamiliarisation and related technês as vehicles for the conveying of particular discursive viewpoints and associated truth-claims in accordance with the siloed pluralism of contemporaneity.

In short, contemporary artworks have been made open to interpretation across a spectrum of viewpoints, including those disposed towards deconstructivism and others assertive of resistant essentialisms. That reneging is of course, entirely understandable given the sheer impossibility of an “non-/art” ushered in by the Duchampian readymade. However, it also involves a paradoxical attachment of workable significances to technês that otherwise performatively resist authoritative meaning of any kind. With regard to which, there is a widespread misprision of the implications of deconstruction within the contemporary artworld.51 Consider the following statement issued by the Ronchini Gallery, advertising an Instagram conversation with the artist Berndnaut Smilde: Best known for his Nimbus series, Smilde’s work consist of installations, sculptures and photos. Using his daily surroundings and spaces as motives, Smilde is interested in the temporal nature of construction and deconstruction. His work refers to both the physical state of a building and objects as well as a moment of revelation that depicts either hope or fragility.

Smilde analyses spaces and their appearance and takes them apart to investigate their unique details and features. His artistic point of view often centres on duality.52

Notwithstanding the sweeping assertion that Smilde’s work involves epiphanies of hope or fragility (of what and in what ways?)—whose vagueness is typical of contemporary shopfront artworld discourses more generally—the glaring difficulty of this statement lies in its pairing of construction and deconstruction along a solely temporal axis. The term “deconstruction,” as coined

by Jacques Derrida, not only connotes construction as an aspect of the undecidably negativeproductive (destructive-constructive) consequences of signification but also the interchangeability of the temporal and the spatial (as signified by Derrida’s use of the terms “temporisation” and “trace”).53

To make significances stick, so to speak, the contemporary artworld has in the absence of any shared cultural-discursive legacy given a laboured role to various forms of contextualisation enabling the semiotic anchoring of meanings to artworks as empty signifiers; for example, through the proliferation of meta-texts, such as museum and gallery captions and articles in artworld magazines that surround artworks and to which audiences are invited to refer in readerly pursuit of meaning. Consider, for example, works of “art” produced using waste plastics presented online at the PlasticPollutionCoalition website, claimed rhetorically as putting “the spotlight on singleuse plastic” and having the potential to “inspire action to stop plastic pollution.”54 Setting aside the unimpeachable correctness of the political messages conveyed and questions of aesthetic sophistication—most of the works presented are crashingly obvious and therefore dull in terms of their making and received symbolic significance—those attributed meanings are less technically embodied by the artworks concerned than illustrated by them with regard to the activist stance 18 | 19

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taken by the coalition, whose principal end lies not so much with the promotion of the particularities of art and the aesthetic but an injunction for visitors to their site to “Take the pledge to refuse singleuse plastic” and to “Join our global Coalition”; an accretive co-opting of the aesthetic to the political rather than a Benjaminian politicisation of the aesthetic, if you will. This is not to deny the role that art can play as a vehicle for politicised messaging; artistic propaganda has always done much the same. It is, though, to point out how the use of art in this way is by no means a guarantor of the sort of critically challenging aesthetic complexity exemplified by the Duchampian readymade. A similar problematic exists in relation to critical meanings institutionally legitimised by the contemporary artworld. Institutionalised critical discourses within Western(ised) artworld contexts—downstream of the high-tide of poststructuralist/postcolonialist postmodernism a quarter of century and more ago—remain widely sceptical of all totalising forms of identity: indicative of which is Donna Haraway’s idea of a continuum of “naturecultures” de-centering of colonialist, patriarchal and capitalist agendas.55

The exact basis of such cosmopolitan thinking—whose appeal to diversity echoes earlier trans-nationalisms, internationalisms and trans-culturalisms associated variously with romanticism, anarchism, revolutionary socialism and the counterculture, including a formative embracing of cultural diversity by the progressive Left in Europe as a secular-communitarian substitute for organised religion during the late nineteenth century in the face of the godlessness of Darwinian thought56—is, however, placed persistently sous rature by an ineluctably cacophonous/asynchronous spectrum of divergent views on what rightly constitutes community; culturally, socially, politically, economically and ethically. The dilemma presented by the readymade is by no means exclusive to art in the Euro-American tradition; it can be understood to extend to any exclusory realm of cultural-linguistic representation. Assertions of resistant essentialism do not obviate the demonstrable uncertainties of cultural-linguistic representation, including rationalising conceptions of deconstruction—viz. the statement by the Ronchini Gallery cited above.

To remain coherent, contemporary cosmopolitanism has therefore installed what are now referred to as “politically correct” limitations on acceptability and truthfulness congruent with the unimpeachable prima facie justness of Euro-American liberalism as a basis for the espousal of a generalising culturalist diversity. The difficulty posed by the installation of those limitations, particularly when seen from non-Western discursive positions, is that they can be understood to institute what amounts to a culturally partisan managerialist containment57 rather than a pervasively transcultural upholding of differences in and of themselves.58 A containment—further buttressed by the lingering traces of identarian59 postcolonialist postmodernism’s paradoxically colonising projection of Third Space indeterminacy as an immanent condition of identity,60 as well as related ideas of strategic essentialism61—that arguably resonates with Nietzche’s identification of a moralistic critically debilitating herd instinct. As a statement issued by the journal Third Text in response to the global black Lives Matter Protests of 2020 makes clear, the institutionalisation of postmodernist cosmopolitanism by a still West-centric artworld can, in addition, be understood to have fallen well short of its prima facie goals.

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Decades of liberal demands for ‘diversity’ have failed to change the artworld’s devotion to the civilisational accomplishments of the West or undo the mechanisms of exclusion.

The artworld’s dependency on developmentalist, evolutionist, racial teleology mirrors the propagation of a labour aristocracy in a world ruled by imperialism. This global state of affairs justifies precarity and wages that impoverish, immiserate and expose racially differentiated workers to duress, distress and death. And not least, it recruits workers for fascisms, old and new. We have watched as ‘diversity’ became an emollient for the globalisation of art markets according to geographically partitioned ‘regions’ rather than the basis for ending its reliance upon philanthrocapitalism.62

The critical challenges once posed by postmodernist cosmopolitanism are now institutionalised in ways that not only constantly diffuse criticism but that can also be seen to mask the continuation of systemic prejudice, making them sitting targets of contemporaneity’s cacophonous criticality. Meta-textual attachments of meaning to art are by no means new or in any way aberrant.

As the Duchampian readymade performatively demonstrates, the significances of art, including that of its categorical standing qua art, are never inherent or given but always-already socioculturally constructed. Art of the past or, of another culture, no matter how seemingly culturally familiar, are always dislocated from the immediate sociocultural context(s) of their production. The significance of art, or perhaps more accurately, visual culture, is thus made persistently open to unsettling spatiotemporal diffractions. The meta-textual anchoring of meaning by the contemporary artworld is a largely low-context form of signification exercised as an expedient for multi-cultural audiences with only a generally shared sociocultural outlook. In contrast to high-context cultural settings where there is significant sharing in discursive outlooks and therefore little necessity for additional anchorage of meaning, low-context cultural settings require constant reinforcements of meaning. in practice, cultural significance is not divided categorically between the two but takes place variously over time along a spectrum running from high- to low- contexts ultimately commingling of both.

Within the contemporary artworld, the expedient of low-context meta-textual anchoring has displaced/eclipsed the culturally located embodiment of meaning by technê usual in highcontext cultural settings. Consider here with regard to the latter Duchamp’s use of the readymade to performatively reveal the transubstantional sleight of hand constitutive of art in the classical European mimetic tradition. Or, Masaccio’s prior, classically mimetic embodiment of a Eucharistic state of communion between the earthly and the divine in the fresco painting known as the The Trinity (1427-28), whose innovative use of geometric perspective supports the depiction of a transcendent heavenly state behind the picture plane made seemingly contiguous with an illusory materiality projected virtually in front (notionally) as part of the physical space occupied by viewers. Or indeed, to shift the cultural register, a shared understanding of literati-Confucian shan-shui (mountains and water) ink and brush painting within Chinese cultural contexts as an enactment of the capacity of its makers to bring the otherwise chaotic human mind into spontaneous accord with nature and therefore to administer society harmoniously, and contemporary neo-futurist media art in the context of Japanese culture which seeks to enact notions of reciprocity between the artificial and the natural redolent of historical East Asian Zen Buddhist aesthetics—viz. the work of Yoichi Ochiai.63 That is not to accept those signified meanings hypostatically as fundamentally real or authentic, but rather to acknowledge their perceived embodiment as discursive réalités by technês within localised highcontext cultural settings, wherein little in the way of recursive semiotic anchorage is required.

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In the case of a post-Duchampian contemporary art, it has become normal to uphold artworks, physical or otherwise, that have little or no embodied connection to their imputed meanings. Anchorage, rather than embodied technê, has become a principal vector of messaging.

Anything goes, as long as it accords meta-textually with the meanings legitimated institutionally by the contemporary artworld, which have in many cases become, as the PlasticPollutionCoalition website shows, more important than the artworks themselves. With the contraction of the physical infrastructure and connectivity of the globalised artworld in the face of COVID-19, contemporary art’s generalising low-context presentation on the international stage will most likely be subordinated to artistic economies of production, showing and reception within localised high-context artworlds.

The latter are of course, as contemporaneity acknowledges, already operative. The advent of COVID-19 does not of necessity mean the end of the low-context contemporary artworld (its perpetuation is insured, at the very least, online), but instead a tilting towards an entropic state of high-context localism. That tilting may be, by no means, an entirely bad thing. It does though indicate the necessity of a just attention to rather than managerialist containment of differing constructions of community and the aesthetic, some of which will be distasteful to an established and generalising Euro-American artworld cosmopolitanism. Exemplary in this regard is the historical prevalence of Confucian aesthetics in high-context Chinese cultural settings supportive of an oblique criticality reciprocally immanent to rather than distant from social governance established centuries prior to Euro-American aesthetic modernity.64 NIRIN A possible marker of the transition to high-context localism in relation to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic are events surrounding NIRIN, the 22nd Biennale of Sydney: a major international showcase of the work of 101 artists and collectives scheduled to take place in major venues and public spaces across the city from 14 March to 8 June, 2020. The 22nd Biennale of Sydney is the first to have been organised under the stewardship of an artistic director of Australian-aboriginal heritage, Brook Andrew. As a nation-state born out of and still heavily impacted upon by the legacy of British colonialism-imperialism, Australia has yet to establish an entirely just relationship with its indigenous people. Andrew’s appointment as artistic director is therefore of enormous social, political and cultural significance, both within Australia and internationally, not least in the emerging context of renewed Black Lives Matter protests worldwide; a status further confirmed by the sheer diversity of the individuals and collectives invited to take part in an avowedly artist-led survey exhibition, including, among others, artists from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Brazil, Madagascar, Canada, and Japan, as well as Australia.

As part of the general social lockdown enforced by the Australian government in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, NIRIN was closed to the public on 24 March. Like many other exhibitions curtailed by the impact of the pandemic, NIRIN’s was represented virtually after its initial closure through images and texts online.65 NIRIN was reopened to the public in stages in June and its run extended following a nationwide lifting of the COVID-19 lockdown. An impromptu satellite exhibition, NIRIN NAARN was programmed to be installed at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne but was abruptly postponed after the reimposition of lockdown restrictions in the state of Victoria during July.

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The title NIRIN, is a word derived from the language of Australia’s indigenous Wiradjuri that can be translated into English as “edge”. In an introductory press release, Andrew describes NIRIN as proposing “that creativity is an important means of truth-telling, of directly addressing unresolved anxieties that stalk our times and ourselves,” and as marking out “a place from which to see the world through different eyes, to embrace our many edges and imagine pride in ecologically harmonious and self-defined futures”; sentiments open to interpretation by turns as being in accord with those of an established globalised artworld cosmopolitanism and a more factional contemporaneity. Giving additional direction to the staging of NIRIN are a constellation of inspirational themes referenced by its organisers from aboriginal culture that indicate an intended intervention with the dominance of Euro-American artworld principles. These include: Dhaagun (Earth: Sovereignty and Working Together); Bagaray-Bang (Healing); Yirawy–Dhuray (YamConnection: Food); Gurray (Transformation); Muriguwal Giiland (Different Stories); Ngawaal-Guyungan (Powerful-Ideas: The Power of Objects); and Bila (River: Environment).66 In the context of Australian aboriginal culture such ideas inform the use of visual representation as something embedded within communities as part of a ritualised coexistence and identification with land/nature in ways that do not coincide with rationalising Euro-American categorisations of art and the aesthetic, as well as related economies of artistic production, display and consumption/reception.

In the wake of the colonisation of Australia, traditional aboriginal visual culture (for want of a better term) has been drawn into an entanglement with the Euro-American artworld through its display within the context of museums and galleries as a set of aestheticised objects of both cultural and financial value.67 This includes the commodification of aboriginal painting by commercial galleries and implicit/explicit engagements with aboriginal culture and history by Australian modernist, postmodernist and contemporary artists locally and on the international stage.68 An effect of that entanglement has been to diffract the significances of aboriginal “art” towards meanings and modes of feeling readily recognisable by Western(ised) audiences in ways that bely their historical uses and significances in relation to high-context aboriginal cultural settings (the latter only being retrievable imperfectly for others through explanatory anchorage of one sort of another). Andrew’s intervention can be understood as an attempt to draw artworks from across the globe onto aboriginal cultural ground, and in doing so diffract their significances away from institutionalised EuroAmerican dominated contemporary artworld expectations.

The impact of Andrew’s intervention is impossible to assess with any degree of finality at present (if ever). It is though arguably immediately undercut, to some extent at least, by a continued reliance on the standard format of the recurring international survey exhibition. Both in actuality and when viewed online, NIRIN is experienced much like any other international survey exhibition as a bringing together of institutionally legitimised, information-conveying artworks under the now dubiously shared techné of post-Duchampian defamiliarisation/collage-montage/allegory. Amid such circumstances, low-context meta-textual semiotic anchorage as a means of imputing meaning to NIRIN and its collected artworks remains paramount and problematic, and the promise of a significantly diffractive critical intervention into established contemporary artworld conventions consequently only partially realised. Andrew’s proposed intervention is critically laudable as a way of pointing to a multi-dimensional poly-cacophonous ontology of possible artworlds (again for want of a better term). However, one is left wondering whether its critically inverse entanglement with the contemporary artworld has been entirely efficacious (inversion only gestures in the direction of a pervasive, mutually assured deconstruction). Does the particular realm of cultural expression and 22 | 23

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feeling indicated by NIRIN require such close liaisons (dangereuses) with the contemporary artworld and global artistic-industrial complex, not least their recuperative connections to the endless positivity of spectacular national/city brand-building and cultural tourism/dilettantism? Is it not possible to develop something that is more critically challenging? While the contemporary artworld and global artistic-industrial complex are connected in no small part by a seemingly unimpeachable (and, from a Nietzschean perspective, crypto-religious) cosmopolitanism, that sharing is arguably in its present form, as indicated above, a continuation of rationalising Euro-American imperialism by the back door and, as such, by no means entirely agreeable to all. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic may precipitate a more negative-productive serially incomplete state of post-West dis-/entanglements commensurate with a paradoxical reciprocity/différance between continuing, albeit shifting, cultural differences identified by contemporaneity.

The impact of the pandemic presents a doubly-enforced injunction to embrace the virtual and/or high-context localism as a response to the potentially long-term physical waning of artworld globalism. This is, of course, yet another unavoidable pin/skewer for the globalised contemporary artworld and its constituent localised artworlds to contend with. The virtual keeps global and local artworld connectivity going while holding out the promise of novel forms of aesthetic(ised) experience. Although NIRIN WIR, the 22nd Biennale of Sydney’s program of public events, was suspended during and after lockdown until “further notice”, digital programming engaged more than 600,000 people world-wide in purportedly “new ways”, over 45% of whom were international and 25% under 35.69 This compares very decently under the circumstances with record physical audience numbers of 850,000 for the 21st Biennale of Sydney in 2018.70 Virtual connectivity can, however, only ever be a (potentially deconstructive) supplement to and not a complete substitute for materially shared aesthetic experiences; indeed, in its present recuperated form it may continue to serve largely as a conduit for the reproduction/reinforcement of low-context artworld generalisations. A recourse to localism places a renewed emphasis on the high-context embodiment of meaning by technê. It does, though, run the risk of retreats into essentialism/exceptionalism.

Institutional-managerialist artworld decision-making will no doubt be pragmatic in addressing those dilemmas; whose vexing implications were always-already spectrally immanent to the contemporary artworld—viz. contemporaneous critical responses to the staging of Magiciens de la Terre71—and brought back unsettlingly to the fore by the impact of COVID-19 in the context of contemporaneity.

How successful that decision making will be, and on what terms, is another matter.

Notes 1 Macrotrends, ‘Dow Jones-DJAI-100 Year Historical Chart’; https://www.macrotrends.net/1319/dow-jones-100-year-historical-chart; accessed 2 May 2020 and 7 August 2020 2 Statista, ‘Monthly Unemployment Rate in the United States from April 2019 to April 2020’; https://www.statista.com/statistics/273909/ seasonally-adjusted-monthly-unemployment-rate-in-the-us/; accessed 2 May 2020 and 7 August 2020 3

Statista, ‘Impact of the Coronavirus Pandemic on the Global Economy: Statistics and Facts’; https://www.statista.com/topics/6139/covid-19impact-on-the-global-economy/; accessed 2 May 2020

4 Ashutosh Pandey, ‘Corona Virus Shock v. Global Financial Crisis-the worse economic disaster?, Deutsche Welle; https://www.dw.com/en/ coronavirus-shock-vs-global-financial-crisis-the-worse-economic-disaster/a-52802211; accessed 28 May 2020 5 Graeme Wearden and Jasper Jolly, ‘IMF: Global economy faces worst recession since the Great Depression-as it happened’, The Guardian; https://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2020/apr/14/stock-markets-china-trade-global-recession-imf-forecasts-covid-19-business-live; accessed 28 May 2020

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6

See for example, numerous articles posted at Hyperallergic; https://hyperallergic.com

7

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London: Verso, 1991

8

Arthur C. Danto, ‘The Artworld’, Journal of Philosophy LXI, 1964, pp. 571-584

9

George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1974

10

Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998

11

See Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds, Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1982

12

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, New York NY: Zone Books, 1994

13

Jameson, op cit.

14

Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Benjamin Buchloh and Yves-Alain Bois, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Anti-modernism, Postmodernism, London: Thames and Hudson, 2004, p. 597 15

Ibid., p. 599

16

See Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, ‘Notes on Metamodernism’, Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 2(1), 2010, pp. 1-14

17 See Gregor Jansen, Matthias Hübner, Alain Bieber, Pedro Alonzo and Robert Klanten, Art and Agenda: Political Art and Activism, Berlin: Die Gestatlten Verlag, 2011 and Peter Weibl (ed.), Global Activism, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2015 18

Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: The Philosophy of Contemporary Art, London: Verso, 2013

19

Brandon Taylor, Modernism, Post-Modernism, Realism: a critical perspective for art, Winchester: Winchester School of Art Press, 1987, p. 77 20

Ibid., pp. 77-78

21 National Endowment for the Arts, ‘New Research Note on Artists in the Workforce’; https://www.arts.gov/news/2011/nea-announces-newresearch-note-artists-workforce; accessed 20 April 2020 22

Padwick Jones Arts, ‘Are Their Too Many Artists?’; http://www.padwickjonesarts.co.uk/are-there-too-many-artists/; accessed 20 April 2020

23

Ibid.

24

Statista, ‘Total number of artists in the United Kingdom (UK) from 2011 to 2019’; https://www.statista.com/statistics/319264/number-of-artistsin-the-uk/; accessed 20 April 2020 25

Taylor, op cit., p. 77

26

Ibid.

27 Howard Halle, ‘Best art galleries in New York City’, Timeout New York; https://www.timeout.com/newyork/art/best-art-galleries-in-newyork-city-galleries; accessed 21 April 2020 28 Julia Halperin, ‘If you build it, they will come–at least for a while’, The Art Newspaper, Special Report 278, V; https://www.museus.gov.br/ wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Visitor-Figures-2015-LO.pdf; accessed 22 April 2020 29 Association of Leading Visitor Attractions (UK), ‘2008 Visitor Figures’; https://www.aecom.com/content/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/ Theme-Index-2018-5-1.pdf; accessed 22 April 2020 30 Many Zuo, ‘China has opened thousands of new museums, but who wants them?’, South China Morning Post; https://www.scmp.com/ news/china/society/article/2182876/china-ordered-thousands-new-museums-they-were-built-exhibits-and; accessed 21 April 2020

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31

Theme Index Museum Index; https://www.aecom.com/content/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Theme-Index-2018-5-1.pdf; accessed 22 April 2020 32 Seph Rodney, ‘Is Art Museum Attendance Declining Across the US?’, Hyperallergic; https://hyperallergic.com/421968/is-art-museumattendance-declining-across-the-us/; accessed 25 April 2020 33

Taylor, p. 77

34

See Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, op cit. and Paul Gladston, Contemporary Chinese Art, Aesthetic Modernity and Zhang Peili: Towards a Critical Contemporaneity, London: Bloomsbury, 2019 35

Eddie Wolfram, History of Collage: an Anthology of Collage, Assemblage and Event Structures, London: Studio Vista, 1975, pp. 7-14

36 Brandon Taylor, Collage: the Making of Modern Art, London: Thames and Hudson, 2004, pp. 11-15; Diane Waldman, Collage, Assemblage, and the Found Object, London: Phaidon, 1992, pp. 16-23 and Wolfram, ibid., pp. 15-18 37

Matthew Affron, The Essential Duchamp, New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2018, pp. 7-53

38

Ibid., pp. 54-59

39

Thierry De Duve, ‘Resonances of Duchamp’s Visit to Munich’, in Rudolf E. Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann eds, Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1989 40

Gregory L. Ulmer, ‘The Object of Post-Criticism’, in Hal Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture, London: Pluto Press, 1985, pp. 83-110

41 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Harry Zohn trans., Illuminations, London: Fontana Press, 1973, pp. 211-244 42

Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-garde, Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984

43

Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-art, 2nd revised ed.; London Thames and Hudson, 1965

44

Max Ernst, Une Semaine de Bonté: a Surrealistic Novel in Collage, Mineola NY: Dover Publications, 1976

45

Alyce Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros 1938-1969, London: Thames and Hudson, 2005

46

Bürger, op cit.

47

Ulmer, op cit.

48

Craig Owens, ‘The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism, Pt 1’, October 12, 1908, pp. 67-86, and ‘Pt 2’, October 13, 1980, pp. 58-80 49

Hal Foster, Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1966

50

Douglas Crimp, ‘The End of Painting’, October 16, 1981, pp. 69-86

51

One has grown used to unintentional abuses of the term “deconstruction” in the context of the culinary world, where it is now used widely to describe dishes disassembled into their constituent elements on the plate. Artists and art workers actively aligned with critical discourses should know better 52

Ronchini Gallery, ‘In Conversation with Berndnaut Smilde’, email announcement 23 May 2020

53

Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, pp. 1-27

54

Plasticpollutioncoallition, ‘12 Inspiring Works of Art on Plastic Pollution’; https://www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org/blog/2017/5/2/10inspiring-works-of-art-about-plastic-pollution; accessed 20 May 2020

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55

Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, Chicago Il: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003

56

Norman MacKenzie and Jean Mackenzie, The First Fabians, London: Quartet Books, 1979

57

Sarat Maharaj, Chang Tsong-Zung and Shiming Gao, Farewell to Post-Colonialism: The Third Guangzhou Triennial, Guangdong, Guangdong Museum of Art, 2008 58

See for example, a recent (2020) call for papers by the journal Art+Austalia towards a special edition on ‘Multinaturalism’: “This issue of Art+Australia is dedicated to non-anthropocentric perspectives and practices that exist within a continuum of naturecultures (Donna Haraway), whether from Indigenous or other epistemologies which de-centre colonial, patriarchal and capitalist agendas. In what has also rightly been called the Plantationocene (Anna Tsing), we are wary of reproducing ‘monocultures of the mind’ (Vandana Shiva) and seek a ‘polyculture of complementary knowledges’(Kimmerer).” [our emphasis]. Here, there is a typically glib contemporary artworld combination of discursive exclusivity (anthropocentrism is peremptorily dismissed) and an assumption of remaining complementarity (polyculture). While anthropocentrism is, with justification, upheld critically, there is no reciprocal questioning of the residually romantic-Rousseauian ideal of the Plantationocene. As scientific studies show, pre-modern cultures do not always live definitively in accord with nature; see for example, Smithsonian Insider, ‘Study reveals environmental impact of American Indian farms centuries before Europeans arrived in North America’; https://insider.si.edu/2011/05/native-americans-were-changing-environment-in-north-america-long-before-european-settlers-arrived/; accessed 26 April 2020

59 A qualified distinction should be made in this regard between Third Space postmodernist identarianism, as supportive of the idea that identity is constructed performatively and is therefore both indeterminate and dynamic, and identitarianism, as an essentialist political ideology asserting the rights of particular ethnic or racial groups to land and culture 60

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994

61 Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, Laura Chrisman and Patrick Williams eds., Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: a Reader, New York NY: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993, pp. 66-111; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 1995, and Anthony Appiah Kwame, ‘Philosophy and Necessary Questions’, in Safro Kwame (ed.), Readings in African Philosophy: An Akan Collection, Lanham MD: University Press of America, 1995, pp. 1-22 62 Third Text, ‘Statement from the Editors of Third Text: On the Murder of George Floyd and the Demand for Racial Justice’, issued by email 23 June 2020 63 NHK World-Japan, ‘We, in the Time of Corona: Yoicji Ochiai, Media Artist, Computer Scientist’; https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/ ondemand/video/6033002/; accessed 29 May 2020 64

See Paul Gladston, Contemporary Chinese Art, Aesthetic Modernity and Zhang Peili: Towards a Critical Contemporaneity, op. cit.

65

22nd Biennale of Sydney, NIRIN; https://www.biennaleofsydney.art; first accessed 1 April 2020

66

Brook Andrew, ‘Curatorial Statement’; https://www.biennaleofsydney.art; accessed 1 April 2020

67 For example, the exhibition of the work of the aboriginal artist John Mawurndjul staged at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, in Sydney in 2018, which displayed works by Mawurndjul in largely unadapted white cube settings. Clothilde Bullen, et al. eds, John Mawurndjul: I am the Old and the New, Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2018 68

Penny Coleing, Venice Biennale 1980, Australia Art from 1968-1980, Sydney: Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council, 1980

69

22nd Biennale of Sydney, ‘eNEWSLETTER’, 27 May 2020

70 21st Biennale of Sydney, ‘Superposition: Equilibrium and Engagement’; https://bos-prd.s3.amazonaws.com/media/dd/documents/ 51003085b18847c856588d5f6a0d857e.pdf; accessed 25 May 2020 71

Julia Friedel, ‘Exhibition Histories: Magiciens de la Terre’, C&; https://www.contemporaryand.com/magazines/magiciens-de-la-terre/

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No Centre or Periphery: Powerful Objectives

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ANDREW RENTON NIRIN inherited considerable impedimenta in relation to the history of the Biennale of Sydney.

Your appointment changed the rulebook in terms of being not only the first Australian Indigenous Artistic Director but also the first artist to take on the role, presenting a huge responsibility and expectation. It begs the question, for whom, and by whom? We can break down these distinctions later. But I wanted to begin by offering an impression of how the Biennale of Sydney appeared, from the perspective of someone who is not Australian, but has been regularly engaged as an art critic and curator for thirty years and observing the Biennale both from close up and afar.

The remit of the Biennale has inevitably changed over the decades. Perhaps one way to understand that legacy is to see the early editions given the job of importing culture from afar. With much heavy lifting, but rarely an attempt to disrupt any hierarchies, the Biennale nevertheless served to bring the ‘stuff’ of art, and all its materiality, into Australia. Of course, there was always contextualisation and a strong local presence; an ambitious gathering and internationalism. But the model is inherently fraught with problems. Even adopting the Italianate styling of the event reveals deep-seated agendas. Biennale of Sydney Board Chairman Franco Belgiorno-Nettis was clearly more than nostalgic for his homeland when formulating the first edition in 1973. John Coburn’s poster for the opening edition, for example, was symptomatic of an indebtedness to European modernism (Matisse?). And by 1976, the title of the Biennale was ‘Recent International Forms in Art’, where the word “international” seems to be trying too hard. In 1979 the agenda was ‘European Dialogue’.

Artistic Director Nick Waterlow’s bold decision was to exclude the over-represented—North America—in favour of prioritising Aboriginal painting in context. ‘European Dialogue’, here, was almost ironic, and conscious of a need to map out complex versions of the contemporary as they would be read in Australia.

Although early Biennales of Sydney were Australia-centric, often for pragmatic reasons, there was an anxiety of ‘the elsewhere’. The Biennale archives reveal tireless efforts in a pre-digital moment to recontextualise established work, commission new work, and crucially, bring artists into the Australian art milieu, however briefly. For me, the question with biennials or large scale projects of any kind, is not what you managed to ship from A to B (although getting things to Sydney was always going to be a huge achievement), but more importantly, what you are able to leave behind after the party. The Biennale of Sydney certainly has a cumulative legacy, but it retains that structural challenge of all such events where the wheel has to be reinvented every two years.

With NIRIN, I feel you were attempting to do something quite different and you changed the rules. Beginning with the Welcome to Country1 on Cockatoo Island, where Muggera dancers performed in front of Australian Indigenous artist Tony Albert’s Healing Land, Remembering Country (2020), I perceived a strong sense of the exhibition as host. It’s an obvious enough point and such opening ceremonies are the norm for Australian cultural events today. But large-scale international events aren’t necessarily seen through such an ethical act of hosting, accommodation and hospitality. The historical agenda might have been to expand and consolidate a canon, which is infinitely accommodating, nevertheless ending up with a display built up from quite a narrow set of perspectives, however fashionable. This isn’t so much a criticism of the curatorial positions taken but is a persistent reminder of structural constraints.

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NIRIN, meanwhile, opened itself up to the way it looks further afield. Its international perspective began from a grounding, a definition of local terms, defining territories and their limits, while simultaneously mining both ancient and colonial histories. This felt politically and conceptually new. And it looked different. There was an engagement with international expectations and the languages of contemporary practice, while simultaneously recognising a complex set of expectations for local audiences and newly constituted viewing communities. There were new locations with which to engage and artists moved from one location to another, redefining their practice in relation to the challenges and rewards of context. How did you develop your ideas for what you believed the Biennale should be?

BROOK ANDREW NIRIN was always going to be artist and First Nations led, underpinned by a strong advocacy for a First Nations philosophical context, initiated by the word “NIRIN”, which means ‘edge’ in my Wiradjuri language. This doesn’t mean that non-Indigenous artists in the Biennale couldn’t understand or embrace the themes. First Nations philosophy draws from deep history and connection to place and more recent manifestations like the terminology “blak/blakness” coined by Australian Indigenous artist Destiny Deacon; blak is a self-empowering self-labelling action of pride.

Being artist and First Nations led meant that things became simultaneously easier but also just as wild and complicated. Artists such as Arthur Jafa and Gina Athena Ulysse were curious about the Australian Indigenous context and experience, but they didn’t enter it through a singular Eurocentric vision. Most perceptions of Australia from international artists’ experience were different to conventional ideas about what an artist and Indigenous or First Nations person is. The politics of colour and representation will always be there. During installation, there was even one artist of colour who expressed that NIRIN was just like other biennales, a ‘white’ biennale, while simultaneously revelling in the Australian Indigenous ceremonial experience. This comment reflects the legacy of the biennale model embedded in the colonial world exhibition. NIRIN wasn’t about fixing things, it was about exposing and complicating and giving renewal and healing, making space for change that also highlighted urgent issues of the environment and sovereignty.

In regard to how I developed my ideas, it was definitely from a place of handing over the process of exhibiting in NIRIN to the artist, but to also inform the Biennale staff about this process.

There were deep and lengthy conversations about the right place for their artworks, the right ceremonial or cultural considerations, the fact that some artworks could only be activated through song or private ceremonial activities, such as works by Eric Bridgeman, FAFSWAG and Blacktown Native Institution.

How a work was placed within historical collections, such as in the Art Gallery of New South Wales Old Court Galleries, necessitated a discussion with artists and venue curators to consider how to challenge the European and colonial Australian paintings and sculpture on permanent display, and the architecture of the Gallery. I invited Emily Karaka to reflect upon the juxtaposition of her paintings with those of nineteenth century artist, Eugene von Guérard (best known for his large-scale romantic paintings of Australian landscapes). When she saw this placement ‘in the flesh’, her eyes widened, and she felt ‘heard’. As senior elder and leader of the land rights movement in Aotearoa (the Māori name for New Zealand), her paintings are metaphorical x-rays of the von Guérards. With Arthur Jafa’s video installation White Album (2018-19) placed in the Schaeffer Gallery, the juxtaposition links the past with the present, creating a formidable connection with l

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history paintings such as Sir Edward John Poynter’s The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon (1890). Similarly, Bronwyn Katz’s beautifully haunting sound and sculptural work (based on her family’s South African First Nations language) adjacent to numerous European paintings, including one of King Henry VIII from the Anglo-Netherlandish workshop. There is a sense of new and clear lines of connection through time that are not drawn by the eye of the ‘Colonial Hole’ (the authority of History Paintings or European landscape conventions). These new connections were made in collaboration with the artists and assistants, the Biennale and venue staff; my agenda was always about dismantling and shifting the gaze. Artists such as Laure Prouvost and Joël Andrianomearisoa created site-specific works that even challenged their own practices—everyone was ready and worked like demons, they were inspired by their own limitations and new possibilities. With great gusto, Laure Prouvost said to me that the space on Cockatoo Island was the hardest she has ever created in, and this is saying something after her presentation at the 2019 Venice Biennale.

Artists and collectives who were new to the biennale circuit and are driven by cultural responsibilities, such as the Tennant Creek Brio Collective, Mayun Kiki, BE Collective and Shaheed /Witness/Kashmir Collective, were determined to ensure their artworks were presented, maintained and experienced in ways that they were proud of—I was there to assist them and be their advocate to make sure their artworks were produced and presented in ways they had not experienced before.

Ibrahim Mahama and Nicholas Galanin took on the challenges that biennales often throw at artists, gracefully and thoughtfully shifting and adapting in ways that were very respectful, attributes I would say reflect their personal cultural lives just as much as being well-known artists.

This flexibility and adaption were inspiring, with Nicholas Galanin ultimately creating Shadow on the Land, an excavation and bush burial (2020) which transplanted the shadow of the Captain Cook statue at Hyde Park in central Sydney into the grass landscape of Cockatoo Island.

Initially, he wanted to dig into the grass at Hyde Park to directly challenge the historical monument.

However, we were unable to secure permission. He then adapted the work for Cockatoo Island, and this actually deepened the concept, as the island is a fitting graveyard for the monument. Now this work is receiving international success, complementing the current activism around colonial and imperial statues. We also collaborated with other creatives, including poets Melanie Mununggurr and Elicura Chihuailaf Nahuelpan, whose words enhanced the rockface of Cockatoo Island and the façade of the AGNSW, respectively. The process-driven outcomes of NIRIN were informed by a Wiradjuri sensibility just as much as the cultural flexibility and openness from the artists and collectives; their messages were urgent and powerful. This was my aim, by fighting for a biennale structure that allowed all of the artists to self-represent. Some within the Biennale organisation didn’t agree with or like the way I pushed this, but the Biennale wasn’t theirs: it was the artists’ and people’s biennale.

When I was invited to become the Artistic Director of the 22nd Biennale of Sydney I thought this was an opportunity to look at the connections between the colonial legacies of the biennale structure and the trade in human remains and cultural objects. The so-called World Expositions, which were the precursor to the idea of ‘the biennale’, put on display, in often purposebuilt grand structures, objects and remains looted from many locations around the world as augmented realities of societies from elsewhere. In most cases these displays, which at times even included living peoples, sustained racist theories of primitivism, the legacies of which I believe need to be smashed. The artists and collectives who I chose for NIRIN have been smashing it! This is apparent in many of the biennale works that focus on how bodies are represented, for example: 30 | 31

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in the artworks of Zanele Muholi; the 15 Screens presentation which featured video artworks by Moara Brasil and Ana Beatriz Domingues including intimate footage of Brazilian Indigenous women meeting and rallying for human rights; and Sammy Baloji’s X-ray scans of museum cultural objects printed on mirrors that reflect the bodies of viewers. Léuli Eshrāghi, Colectivo Ayllu, S.J. Norman, Lhola Amira and Jota Mombaça also focused on the body in different ways: on its future and the self-empowering and collective healing of the queer and spiritual Indigenous and blak body, through ceremony and protocol. These kinds of representations and expression are important to reflect on when in the Western artworld, the body is often colonised and very gendered.

ANDREW RENTON I like what you say about “dismantling and shifting the gaze.” You’ve mapped out several overlapping strategies at work in the Biennale. Maybe we can dig a little deeper into some of these, for example, Londel Innocent’s polemical t-shirt as touchstone, which read, “The Only Primitavism is Eurocentrism.”

As an aside, from where I’m writing, at my locked-down, post-Brexit British desk, a Eurocentric vision has a different resonance today, and many of us are mourning a separation that highlights another layer of unresolved complexities. At this time of writing, we are beginning to see a formal undoing of centuries-old presumptions as colonial monuments are toppled and rolled away; for example, the statue of the seventeenth-century slave trader Edward Colston, in Bristol.

Nicholas Galanin’s proposal for Captain Cook’s monument, Shadow on the Land, an excavation and a bush burial (2020) sets an agenda in terms of what could be done with these things once they’ve been dismantled. This in turn inspires consideration of some of the immutable artefacts that might have needed to be set aside if the Biennale was to be viable as a format again. Your critique of that Eurocentrism begins with the infrastructure itself, where and how art gets seen. Site is always an issue, location always political, and you move seamlessly between those established venues, such as the AGNSW in the city centre and the one-hour journey to Campbelltown Art Centre located in Western Sydney, far from the downtown Sydney culture trail.

It begins for me outside the AGNSW, setting the agenda with Elicura Chihuailaf Nahuelpán’s poem2 and moves inside to dismantle assumptions of the museum’s legacy. The building was always a challenge waiting for you to do this. There is this greatest-hits name checking on the facade of the building: Giotto, Raphael Titian, Rembrandt, Murillo, etc. All the more ironic, problematic, when we observe that the building opened in 1897 with the title The National Art Gallery of New South Wales over the door. Nationhood then, defined in a puzzling allegiance to an already appropriated culture, very far away indeed. And even more extraordinary, the artists’ names lettered in bronze are far from a celebration of British colonial legacies, but rather a manifestation of colonial ability to absorb histories within its canon, assuming ownership through some form of connoisseurship and the mediation of ‘Grand Tour-ism’. But why rearticulate them here? What anxiety sets this abstracted gaze back towards a cultural authority over the seas towards Europe? Whose culture is prized?

I’m focusing on the building because I think the achievement of NIRIN disrupts that anxiety, which is deep-seated, interrupting its histories and formalities by inviting work temporarily into its context. For the duration of the exhibition, things aren’t quite where they are supposed to be.

For the artworks you and the artists have integrated, this is obvious. Their installation is designed to cut across the permanent collection. But the artworks that have remained in place, unquestioned, for decades, now also start to feel out of place. Don’t get me wrong, there’s something reassuring l

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about knowing where to find that great Picasso in the AGNSW. The reiterated encounter is part of the experience of the museum. You experience it, remember it, with all its accrued surroundings.

It consolidates the history, for better or worse. National collections of this type are as much about where they are collected as the sum of the individual works. But that Picasso is permanently changed when paintings by Emily Karaka, for example, are installed in the gallery. The intervention isn’t about offering comparisons like for like, but obviously asserts difference. But in so doing these interpolations politicise every work in the space as well as the space itself. In this instance there’s a double hosting, where you are engaging in a dialogue with artists, and at the same time collectively being hosted by the Gallery. It’s courageous on the part of the museum, because it upsets its equilibrium. And while you might take for granted that the museum will revert to a prior order, there’s an exchange which has taken place and the absence at the end of NIRIN will be, quite literally, marked.

This presents the question, which I think too few large-scale projects have as part of their remit: what happens next? It is especially relevant for the continuity of the Biennale of Sydney and its relationship with major institutions such as the AGNSW, and all venues for that matter.

Is there something left behind cumulatively, that enables, or must it always be a case of reinventing the wheel? I’m engrossed with this because context is everything. Arthur Jafa’s The White Album (2018-19), for example, becomes a different work in the AGNSW. Jafa might not have anticipated it, but his video installation agitated a mutual distraction in the space. More than re-articulating space, the surrounding collection is put under the microscope, because everything that enters this space is a form of critique. Even the light touch textile interventions of Joël Andrianomearisoa, There Might be no Other Place in the World as Good as Where I am Going to Take You (2020), are about marking the territory, temporarily veiling in order to make visible again. It’s such a simple move, revealing the politics of motion through these spaces. What stops you in your tracks, what makes you look again at the over familiar, or makes you retrace countless journeys that have been made here before; marking, demarcating, the space?

The exhibition space is always fraught, more than ever. The AGNSW, for example, has been a regular venue for the Biennale since 1976, but I wonder about relationships. What type of hosting is at work here? I’m thinking about the ethics of hospitality that Derrida sets out, that it must be an unconditional hosting—in this instance, the yielding up of a small part of the institution’s authority. I see this at work also at the Museum of Contemporary Art, but in a different way. Here, even the contemporary is always, already historicised—all about conjunctions, an honest and, here, confrontational, curatorial strategy—things that shouldn’t go together questioning where the contemporary is located.

One of the most beautiful moments in the Biennale for me is Frederick McCubbin’s painting A bush burial (1890) in its gold period frame, set into the wall work by Eric Bridgeman, adjacent to floor works by Kulimoe’anga Stone Maka. There’s an economy to this, that doesn’t require complex sets of knowledge or annotation to reveal itself. Negotiations of place, incompatible genres invested in landscape, where everything is out of place, here temporarily find a home. And Luca Giordano’s baroque blockbuster, The Rape of the Sabine Women (1672-74)—a key stop on that problematic Grand Tour, when it was in its former home in Vicenza—it knocks you out, in this context. You first see it through the projections of Aziz Hazara’s Bow Echo (2019). All about place again—time, travel and place—both in terms of subject matter and the more challenging notion of where the physical work belongs. Here we can consider some of these strategies of conjunction and disruption, perhaps through your selection of Powerful Objects, which punctuate every venue, like stealth weapons.

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BROOK ANDREW Powerful Objects is a selection of ephemeral and cultural objects and documents from private and public collections shown across the many venues of NIRIN, including the McCubbin and Giordano paintings as well as a 3D print of a carved tree section or dendroglyph (grave trees) from Wiradjuri Country, scanned from the original object which continues to be housed at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. I conceive of these archives being in conversation with each other and the contemporary artworks in NIRIN, to invite new perspectives on intersecting histories. Powerful Objects have the power to shift history and our understanding of time when they are not contained or framed by the prevailing narratives but are rather presented through new juxtapositions of objects and artworks.

I used this method in NIRIN as a way to pull apart certain objects from their supportive, dominant narratives, such as The Rape of the Sabine Women which is considered a quintessential Baroque painting.

Rather than a regular museum display which emphasises periodisation, I wanted to experiment with how objects, and in this instance a painting, have their own power that cannot be contained by a museological framework. Placing this painting adjacent to Aziz Hazara’s epic video Bow Echo (2019) re-moulds and sets a different narrative, bringing into combined focus what are usually considered disparate histories and cultures, but are in fact interconnected.

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Western concepts of time, that are so familiar through modes of science-fiction, deep space research and of course art history, need to be challenged, to open up to a multitude of other possibilities. Even unpacking ‘does time travel really exist’? Can a worm hole or a black hole take us somewhere else at the speed of light, or faster? How are such questions answered through nonWestern understandings of history and time. The Wiradjuri concept of time is ruled by a different set of pragmatic, spiritual, kinship and scientific cycles such as weather, seasons and ceremony, that synchronise human responsibilities to the earth and each other, and which are embedded with spiritual manifestations and beings (which includes song and dance) that interconnect us. Hence a corroboree ceremony3 could continue for three or more days. The corroboree might seem for those who have experienced it, untimed, unreliable or exciting, for the fact that it is flexible, i.e. it doesn’t necessarily begin immediately at 4pm and finish three hours later. The cycles set here are managed by, for example, the gaalmaldhaany (composer/song maker) who is responsible for the ceremony.

We have a saying in Wiradjuri (and many First Nation cultures) that “there is no time.” A Western interpretation of this cultural philosophy is the belief that time has frozen First Nations peoples as being in the past, in a prehistory, that we are so uncivilised that we don’t even understand feudal systems. This interpretation cannot grasp another mode of time that is not linear, and it can be so pervasive, or ideological, that regardless if one has mixed heritage, we can be tarnished by the same righteous condemnation as being primitive and hence incapable of functioning in the Western world.

NIRIN challenges this, and some of its audience were threatened by this notion of difference and alternative model of time and history.

You mention Londel Innocent’s polemical t-shirt ‘The Only Primitavism is Eurocentrism.’

This work was a surprise collaboration between Londel, Leah Gordon (co-curator of the Ghetto Biennale, Haiti) and myself. I coined the phrase when I was in Haiti doing research for NIRIN. Leah and I mused upon it and she secretly commissioned Londel to paint it as a gift to me. Londel spelt “primitivism” incorrectly which further, for me, disjointed the paradigm of colonialism, ripping the language root out. This process was a powerful example of how many artists and communities worked within NIRIN.

Elicura Chihuailaf Nahuelpán’s poem banners between the pillars at the front of the AGNSW was as a gentle reminder (maybe most would have missed this) of the connection and intertwined responsibilities between humanity and the earth (all objects and living creatures, including stones), sited adjacent to the “greatest hits name-checking… Giotto, Raphael Titian,” as you say “everything is out of place, temporarily finding a home.”

This intervention continued inside, and in this sense, in the entire AGNSW building.

The permanent collection was dismantled and re-mantled in shifting modes (it was like an enduring blur—it did not settle—it was aggravated and refused to be compliant). This is what I believe many of the artists in NIRIN are doing in their practices, they shift and move about, it is not anarchy, it is their world view. And if one comes from a dominant power, this shifting will terrify you. If anything, Nahuelpán’s banners were a gentle warning of this structural delusion. As you say, “everything is out of place, temporarily finding a home.” Absolutely! My aim was to dismantle in ways that were seen but also unseen, invisible, until one walked in and unravelled it in their own mind’s eye.

Some viewers understood it immediately and others only saw what they didn’t want to see: that in this disturbance, disruption and disgruntlement the colonial order was being dismantled and ‘disrespected’.

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There is a real fear that the colonial powers that systemically exist within institutional structures, and those that hold the financial power, will somehow become irrelevant and collapse if such structures are overly challenged. This can be seen in the current global BLM movement reaching into Australia, where many see this as a human rights issue as well as wanting to unveil this systemic institutional control over ways of seeing, of being, and the denial of other cultural roots and histories that actually form, very powerfully, who we are as individuals and collective identities today.

Powerful Objects can be active in this process. They have their own memory, their own provenance and bound in ways that far exceed our understanding. This is because most of them are older than us, they were often created hundreds of years ago. Powerful Objects can change, they can change their minds and how they relate to us and what they mean in history, and we can change our minds about them. The challenge here is: are we allowing them to do this? Are they doing it anyway but most of us don’t see it, or refuse it? Many people want objects in museums, especially those that were stolen during colonial exploits to be returned to their communities of origin. Recently the protest group, Les Marrons Unis Dignes et Courageux, led by African activist Mwazulu Diyabanza attempted to seize a nineteenth-century African funeral pole from the Musée du Quai Branly –Jacques Chirac in Paris. The group saw this as an act of “justice” because “most of the works were taken during colonialism.”4 The group was arrested by security before it could leave the building with the pole, and the activists will appear in Paris court September this year.

One interesting aspect of this event is that some may see Mwazulu Diyabanza as a vigilante.

Yet, encasing these Powerful Objects together in a museum is part of the disenfranchisement of people like Mwazulu who have been systematically ignored and romanticised. The objects speak to the cultures they belong to and some believe they are saying ‘we want out, we want return’. It is this undeniably contested history that we need to reckon with in the contemporary moment. It is acts of bravery that these Powerful Objects demand from all of us. Slowly, institutions are taking this on, and the new director of the Musée du Quai Branly–Jacques Chirac, Emmanuel Kasarhérou faces the challenge of honouring the 2017 promise by President Emmanuel Macron to return sub-Saharan Africa’s cultural heritage, of which Quai Branly holds some 70,000 pieces. Kasarhérou is a Kanak man who brings his background to this task and an understanding of both sides of the restitution debate: “I feel as much the descendant of people who were colonisers of a certain place as of people who were colonised.”5

NIRIN is about a level playing field and the activation of all Powerful Objects from many parts of the world, including European paintings and First Nations cultural objects, to break the silence of what we feel inside, in our guts. The intention of presenting Powerful Objects alongside what is seen as more conventional arts such as video, painting and architecture is that they often reveal probing questions which confront the current state of play: why are many cultures not recipients of colonial institutional wealth? Why is there silence around particular traumatic histories? You mentioned the “anxiety of elsewhere” in Australia. Powerful Objects can highlight the problems of systemic racism still imbedded within the intergenerational psyche of many Australians and the institutions inherited from Britain. One of the Powerful Objects on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art gives evidence to a massacre event in Australia, hundreds of which occurred on the frontiers when the British invaded. This object is a letter to a friend and describes a massacre of Aborigines in Victoria’s Western District, penned in December 1854 by James Dixon: “We had a great battle with them a month ago, there was eighteen killed and two of our men.

They throws [sic] spears that penetrate right through you which is verry [sic] dangerous.” l

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This letter was identified in my research on the Frontier Wars6 and also links to the human remains trade that still haunts many Aboriginal peoples today. There is evidence of ancestral remains being collected in the aftermath of massacre events, and such remains were collected and studied as part of then pseudo-scientific studies of race and eugenics. The anatomist W.L.H. Duckworth dissected the brains of Aboriginal people to compare them with those from apes. Thousands of remains are still in many institutions overseas, such as the Duckworth Collection in the UK.7 It was these theories that justified barbarous acts and led to government policies that continue to impact on Aboriginal lives, as seen in disproportionate rates of incarceration and child removal. It needs to be understood that these primitivist values and forms of prejudice and racism found early expression in the intercolonial and world exhibitions that ‘trooped around’ Aboriginal and other Indigenous peoples’ remains and wrote a narrative that justified land exploitation and dispossession. These are not histories or realities that institutions or governments are proud of nor even properly educated about. You have asked me about the “strategies of conjunction and disruption, perhaps through your selection of Powerful Objects, which punctuate every venue, like stealth weapons”. I see the entire biennale structure, imported to Australia as a Powerful Object. I just climbed inside it, tinkered with it, set the time again, re-evaluated its operating systems, wound it up and let it go.

ANDREW RENTON NIRIN seemingly anticipated the crescendo of decolonising, decentring and dismantling interventions which are questioning hundreds of major collections and public display strategies across the world. It set an agenda, which prefigured some of the dismantling, decolonising discourses, played out in public spaces and institutions throughout the world during lockdown, while it was closed. And perhaps, at the time of writing, there is now a new climate to receive the project given that it has reopened following the initial COVID-19 lockdown. I’m wondering what it looks like to you now with the benefit of an internal nostalgia and hindsight? Its issues haven’t changed, and they are consistent with the concerns which have always been visible in your own practice as an artist. But while it’s obvious to say that curating is a different practice from that of an artist, do you think that there’s a curatorial space that only an artist can establish? Is it an extension of art practice or are you presenting a quite different discipline?

I’m thinking about this because I want to explore the aesthetics of the exhibition within its political framework. It wouldn’t have the force without it, not just in the disrupting of spaces, but also the disrupting of established genres. The aesthetics lie somewhere between the works themselves which are always, by definition, dislocated, and the spaces you established for the installations. I’d like to know more about what could be “inverted” to use your phrase, in relation to many of these spaces? It’s clearly not a case of completely stepping outside of these sites. Is that even possible? My experience of moving through these locations was to be constantly reminded of where I was standing. It made viewing a political act. Nothing, nowhere, is without history. Perhaps the exception, institutionally, at least, was Campbelltown Arts Centre—that seemed to be a huge gesture, becoming a densely articulated site for learning. But what about Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour? I’ve always been troubled by it as a Biennale venue. It has the space and the ingredients for an ‘experience’, but it feels more charged than anywhere on the Biennale trail. As a consequence, it feels doubly problematic, as a site of sacred significance for the Eora peoples, but also one with a strongly colonial aesthetic embedded within the architecture itself. Did you find it problematic to work in these spaces, or was there some sense of reclaiming contested territory? l

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In relation to the aesthetics of the space, there’s always a sense of works having to negotiate layer(s) of these histories. Does the negotiation get in the way of the artwork or offer new context?

One remedy, in aesthetic terms at least, was the encounter of artists in more than one location.

You’ve talked about this a little. I wonder if you could elaborate on the practicalities. You rarely see artists inhabiting more than one location in such large-scale projects. It’s such a simple strategy, is useful in aesthetic terms, but in NIRIN’s case, it reads politically.

BROOK ANDREW Now that NIRIN has reopened (it closed in March due to COVID-19) and with the current situation humanity finds itself in, urgently and feverishly confronted with re-setting human connections or exposing them, albeit via a virus or damaged histories that are being confronted and dismantled, the mess, as I have always called the fallout of colonialism and the mass destruction of the environment, is intensifying. I am not sure we are even near the eye of the coming storm. I say this because many are still in denial that humans have created this mess. NIRIN therefore is more confronting, more divisive and requires more healing and compassion. It is a time where people are visiting NIRIN and learning or being challenged or are feeling safe in its space. Artists are expressing their deepest and contentious thoughts for change or reflecting on present and future ways of building a better world.

This is confronting to dominant cultures, no matter where they are in the West or East, it does not matter. Regarding my role as an artist, am I doing anything different to a curator? I see myself as a conduit and this is not bound by convenient terminologies. I am not expressing this to create a sense of smokescreen or moral positioning, I believe that not everything fits into a perfect translatable answer for one system. We need to be malleable and the more we bend and allow others to bend will create better systems that allow strength and greater responsibility; we cannot do this alone. I was not alone, though I did push the biennale bureaucratic system. It needed to be created through a First Nations philosophy of connection, and the Biennale of Sydney took on that challenge, even though there was some push back.

I was very conscious of the power of space too, of the venues’ cultural, historical and architectural dimensions. This information was relayed to artists and communities involved in NIRIN. Many of them openly explored these aspects. It was always noted publicly and on the Biennale website and printed matter whose Aboriginal land the venues are on and that the spaces are safe spaces for people to be in. These principles, along with artist-led events, from openings to public programs drove a cultural and intellectual approach or methodology. At times this would challenge the bureaucracy of the venues and partner organisations. Many were surprised when we challenged the formalities that derive from British ceremony. For example, artists spoke before the Governor of NSW, in Government House, as well as across all venues. This imbedded sensibility also applied to the display of artworks. For example, I decided not to use plinths or regular museum furniture like ropes to separate the public from artworks or delicate objects. We used metal street barricades to protect the tapa by Kulimoe’Anga Stone Maka, and the installations by Nicholas Galanin and Latai Taumoepeau on Cockatoo Island. I employed hessian textile to create spatial divides across all venues, which was a way to reduce the use of painted or built walls. This worked environmentally but also softened the space and reduced the usual museum treatments. The hessian created a maze at Campbelltown Art Centre, and the only plinths was one employed as an art aesthetic with Sammy Baloji’s installation which spoke to this museological practice, or for objects of great value and size such as the epergne created by colonial silversmith J. Henry Steiner (1835-1914) exhibited at the MCA. 38 | 39

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Similarly, the presentation of large-scale videoworks by Erkan Özgen, Victoria Santa Cruz, Aziz Hazara, Denilson Baniwa and the Balfour footage (the 1949 removal of Aboriginal ceremonial trees in western New South Wales) were immersive and mostly unattached to the venue walls but configured through the interior space. This was the same for the presentation of videoworks by Barbara McGrady at the Campbelltown Arts Centre. Aesthetically speaking, I aimed for people to experience the bare bones of the venues’ architecture where the artworks could be independent from the venues’ structure, but also firmly placed within the interior spaces so as to make comment on the venue. The movement of people around these interventions was also important, to have different views and responsibilities to not only the artworks but to the spaces and also other people. It created a more complex relationship than the traditional art viewing experience of Western museums.

Together, the artists and I embraced the complexity of loaded venues and cultural spaces.

It was an opportunity to discover how often set narratives can be re-read and re-configured through collaboration, exposure and exploration. Artworks by Lisa Reihana, Laure Provost, Anna Boghiguian and Gina Athena Ulysse at Cockatoo Island for example, were deep investigations of the island’s spaces, both historically and architecturally. While other artists, like Paulo Nazareth, ArTree Nepal, Shaheed/Witness/Kashmir, Melanie Mununggurr, BE Collective, Jota Mombaça and Adrift Lab used the complex historical spaces on the island to connect with other historical and urgent contemporary understandings of the world. All venues were deep conduits to an international web of connections.

Meandering around the island and making these connections through aesthetic moments that related to places such as Australia’s Tennant Creek to Ghana to Brazil to Nepal, to Lord Howe Island and Kashmir assisted in a grounding of these collective aesthetics and histories.

The repetition of some artists works in multiple venues was a strategy to pull the experiences of each venue closer together, but to also make a firm statement that each artwork was not just a singular linear statement. For example, the issues bought up in Eric Bridgeman’s work at the MCA and Cockatoo Island, Barbara McGrady at the AGNSW and Campbelltown Art Centre, or the work of Nahuelpán on the façade of the AGNSW and inside the MCA are echoes. They are different artworks but the echo effect assists in stitching the experiences together. I would say this is a more visceral than aesthetic responsibility—I like putting the audience under this pressure for after all, artists are constantly under this pressure.

Notes 1 A Welcome to Country is a ceremony performed by traditional owners to welcome visitors to their country. The protocol acknowledges the specific Indigenous nation or language group on which an event takes place. There are over 250 Indigenous nations or language groups across Australia. See https://www.reconciliation.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Welcome-to-and-Acknowledgement-of-Country.pdf 2

See image page 28 for the poem text

3

An Australian Aboriginal dance ceremony which may take the form of a sacred ritual, festive celebration or an informal gathering

4

See https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/quai-branly-protest-african-artifact-seized-activists-1202691064/

5

See https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/arts/design/emmanuel-kasarherou-quai-branly-museum.html

6 The Australian Frontier Wars is a term applied by some historians and others to violent conflicts between indigenous people and white settlers following the British colonisation of Australia 7

See https://www.smh.com.au/national/notes-on-aboriginal-remains-on-ebay-20090529-bp6h.html

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Seismic Moments

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There is no better place to sense the Earth than from a place of elevation. We are able to stand straight and walk on land without grasping onto anything. Even if we fall at any instant, we will not fall any greater distance than our own height, so we do not need to grab onto anything in particular to sustain our body.

Kishio Suga, Existence Beyond Condition (1970) It is surreal to think about 14th February 2020, a day when 111,000 people entered the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy to be a part of Seismic Movements: Dhaka Art Summit 2020. Neither my colleagues nor I had ever experienced crowds like this in an art exhibition before, and my day was spent working with art mediators, volunteers and security staff to ensure the safety of the artworks in the face of throngs of enthusiastic visitors, most of them youths celebrating the first day of spring at the Dhaka Art Summit. We knew that this day marked a ‘seismic shift’ in how we could realise exhibitions in Dhaka—the local embrace of our platform meant that we would have to reconsider how to curate exhibitions that could have the capacity to host so many visitors. The total audience number of DAS 2020 was over 477,000 people, overwhelmingly young and Bangladeshi, enjoying the artistic and intellectual contributions of our five hundred plus team of collaborators.1

Swept away with the joy of success we had no inkling that a virus associated with China at that time would soon envelope the world after DAS closed in mid- February 2020. As a result, many artworks were stranded in Bangladesh, and the challenges of moving them, people and funds kept us from being able to say that DAS 2020 was over. While we had to re-route several flights during installation, there was only one artist who could not make it to Dhaka due to COVID-19. Many of our visitors from Hong Kong, Taiwan and China were unable to attend as Bangladesh denied visas to passport holders from these countries just before the exhibition opened. We had no idea that I would be unable to travel to Bangladesh and that my Bangladeshi colleagues would be unable to leave the country, as we had no idea that being in a room with large numbers of people as we had just done would become something unfathomable to consider in a world with a ‘new normal’ of social distancing.

Referencing Kishio Suga’s 1970 text ‘Existence Beyond Condition’, this text explores DAS from the elevated place of the seventh to the fifteenth of February 2020, where years of preparation and work since the platform was founded in 2012 by the collector-couple Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani reached a metaphorical peak, with Seismic Movements. It will delve into the many strata of the platform and what makes it unique from other platforms that produce exhibitions that occur every two years.

Seismic Movements was a response to what I considered to be the gaps and voids of the Dhaka Art Summits between 2014 and 2018, and how I had situated those editions in relation to other large scale recurring events since relocating to South Asia from New York in 2010 (eg. The Asia Pacific Triennial, documenta, Venice Biennales, Munster Sculpture Project, Kiev Biennale, Sharjah and Istanbul Biennials, Kochi Biennale, Global Art Forum in Dubai, Manila and Thailand Biennales, amongst others). I perceived these “gaps and voids” as portals for potential—ways to differentiate what DAS does relative to other events, to be increasingly locally and internationally relevant, and to maximise the impact of bringing together so many people from diverse backgrounds—for three days in 2012 and 2014, four days in 2016, expanding to nine days by the 2018 and 2020 editions.

The short duration of DAS was a solution to managing the expenses of running such an event, and also one that inspired people to come together in a concentrated and intense way.

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The title Seismic Movements emerged from my questioning, what is a summit? Between the 2014 and 2020 editions I registered the existence of many other art summits. Other than the India Art Summit, I was not aware of another that included the physical exhibition of artworks.

In contemplating the word, I thought about the top of a mountain, and subsequently how Bangladesh has no mountains. I thought about how mountains are formed, and how the borders we see as so strict were geologically forged. Prior to conceiving the title and meta-theme for DAS 2020 I happened upon Dr. Zahia Rahmani’s research project ‘The Seismography of Struggles’ and Adrian Villar Rojas’ work with fossils from Morocco, in his 2017 exhibition The Theater of Disappearance, at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, in Austria—the idea of humans creating seismic change and geological tectonic shifts, clicked in my head, and so this meta-theme was born.2

I don’t conceive a theme first and then scour the world for artworks to illustrate it, that is far too literal; the emergence of a theme came from thinking about artworks with their makers.

The previous paragraph speaks to my process—as a curator I begin without a theme in mind, and I consider artists and intellectuals in open ended ways before engaging that theme—reacting to ideas and situations that we all experience dynamically in time—DAS 2020 very much reflected the struggles and debates pulsing through our consciousness, and the protest movements that people contributed their bodily presence to, from 2018 to 2020. DAS arguably hinted, once the exhibition ended, at the seismic shifts to come with the global COVID-19 pandemic, and structural racism.

The meta-theme was born from a locally rooted but international set of conversations, letters and emails that coalesced into the sub-movements found across the Summit: ‘Geological Movements,’ ‘Colonial Movements,’ ‘Independence Movements,’ ‘Social Movements/Feminist Futures,’ ‘Collective Movements,’ Spatial Movements,’ Modern Movements,’ Moving Image,’ etc.

SEISMIC MOVEMENTS: THINKING AT THE EDGES OF LANGUAGE One of the many tactics of colonialism is imposing rules and standards from elsewhere and expecting people with no previous connection to these concepts to adapt their lives to them. In the case of Bangladesh’s history, West Pakistan was trying to claim the need to ‘purify’ Bangla as it originated and evolved from Hindu influences of an ancient Sanskrit language. “Bengali alphabets are full of idolatry. Each Bengali letter is associated with this or that god or goddess of Hindu Pantheon.

Pakistan and Devanagri Script can’t co-exist,” said Fazlur Rahman, Central Minister for Education, in a statement on 27 December, 1948, explaining why it was important to introduce Arabic script in East Bengal. “Every Bangla Alphabet Narrates a Bengali’s life” reads one of the many posters from the 1952 Language Movement in Bangladesh.3 The Language Movement was seismic. It led to Bangladesh becoming the first country in the modern world whose independence is directly tied to a desire to think, speak and act in its mother tongue.4 Every February, most of the country celebrates its victory in overthrowing foreign attempts to control how its people express themselves, embracing the plurality embedded in their culture.

Language has the ability to program and shape how we see and experience the world; we can be different people in different languages. I like thinking at the edges of languages, finding new cognitive possibilities when trying to translate something that does not fit into the logic structure of another language. Most of the people experiencing DAS do not speak or read English as their primary language, and we celebrated this and developed our tone of voice with this in mind. English is a tool that allows us to communicate with each other and provides a portal for non-Bangladeshis to understand our unique context, but it has many limits. My team and I were very happy with our l

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English title ‘Seismic Movements’, but it has no direct Bangla equivalent, so we initiated an informal think-tank with colleagues to endeavour to create a Bangla title that built upon the poetic meanings opened up by the combination of these two English words.

স_চারণ/Seismic Movements is one example of what is possible when thinking across and between languages—where the theme of the exhibition cannot be fully expressed by understanding only the English or the Bangla title. The Bangla title confused the clear organisational structure of ‘seismic movements’ by introducing the Bangla concept of স_চারণ (pronounced shon-cha-ron).

A moving stereoscopic view of the exhibition and the works within it opens up when we consider the meaning embedded in both titles and ponder their slight differences. While seismic movements tend to be big, external and very visible, causing land and power structures to quake, স_চারণ is subtler and connotes a continuous flow (in no particular direction) of movement on both micro and macro levels. স_চারণ cannot be contained, and it is never linear. স_চারণ can be applied to blood or emotions circulating within the body, or to the wind outside, or to concepts that move across generations, like wisdom. The neural connections made in the process of translation are another form of স_চারণ.

The circulation of visitors through the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy is a form of স_চারণ, as is the ideating process of building DAS as its core concepts develop across editions. It could be said that the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic is both a form of স_চারণ and a seismic movement.

Bangladesh is the country with the most rivers within its borders and their স_চারণ creates the mud, sediment and soil that is transformed into the bricks that build up Bangladesh’s celebrated architecture and the earth and clay transformed by Adrián Villar Rojas, Bharti Kher, Damián Ortega, Héctor Zamorra, Korakrit Arunanondchai and Otobong Nkanga in their projects.

The dust circulating the atmosphere speaks to another form of স_চারণ in the artwork of Peruvian artist Elena Damiani (As the dust settles, 2019-20). The Hilsa fish navigating the borders of East and West Bengal would be another form of স_চারণ, as would the experience of tasting this staple of the Bengali diet, and the pursuit of knowledge about this fish by Pratchaya Phinthong and his collaborators Dr. Arnab Biswas and Md. Sajedul Haque. The convergence of scholarly minds considering Modern Art Histories in and Across Africa, South and Southeast Asia (MAHASSA), changing the circulation of knowledge connecting scholars outside traditional North American or European centres (convening emerging scholars and a team of faculty and advisors from these regions in Hong Kong and Dhaka, in collaboration with the Asia Art Archive, Getty Foundation and Cornell’s Institute for Comparative Modernities) can be seen as another form of স_চারণ, as does the transfer of skills, from teachers to students, that built the art history of Bangladesh as chronicled in Dhaka-based artisteducator Bishwajit Goswami’s exhibition Roots.

The idea of স_চারণ doesn’t have a fixed centre. Politics today reminds us of the dangers of only paying attention to life in cities, and the works of art in DAS 2020 speak to experiences across all walks of life, especially those in rural contexts. The connection of culture and agriculture was especially evident across the Summit as artists sowed the seeds of ideas, watched them germinate in the research and production process, to reap and share the results with one of the largest art-going publics in the world. Weaving, stitching and sewing were other subthemes found across the DAS. The Wounds Series (1979) by Somnath Hore, is a moving testimony to the scars of violence that British and Pakistani colonialism left on these lands (connecting deeply to Walter Mignolo’s 2013 writings on “Colonial Wounds/Decolonial Healings”). These haunting works on paper also are reminiscent of aerial views of a landscape. The concept of scars and wounds ties together the bodily reading of স_চারণ and the geological reading of Seismic Movements. While scars are reminders of the healing l

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process of the body as it repairs damaged tissue, fault-lines and mountains are scars of terrestrial collisions, joints between moving plates. Religions from all over the world reference soul-searching and spiritual journeys to mountains as part of the quest for enlightenment beyond the confines of the human body. Works by numerous artists, including those of Karan Shrestha, Minam Apang, Liu Chuang and Zhou Tao spoke to this overlay of spiritual and bodily experience found in the mountainous regions connecting East, South and Southeast Asia, known as Zomia, chronicling the violence found in these highly charged locations.

Like most architecture in Bangladesh, DAS also exists on unstable foundations—its institutional history shows the shifting lines of what is and what is not possible. The American choreographer William Forsythe speaks to the potential for failure as being a catalyst for active forms of thinking. While it can be trying on the patience of our team of collaborators, I would argue that it is the vulnerability, malleability and instability of DAS that makes it such a powerful site for artistic production. Metamorphosis and adaptability are sources of power in contexts such as Bangladesh. We reinvent ourselves in every edition, building on the fertile sediment of ideas accumulating since 2012.

DAS is a kind of joint, a metaphorical fault-line connecting diverse histories and allowing for the circulation of ideas and generation of new structures to hold these ideas and histories together. We were pleased to be able to bring together artists, thinkers and importantly institution builders from the ‘Global Majority World’ (ie. outside North America and Europe) to consider how to build empowered movements through a collaboration with RAW Material Company in Dakar and Gudskul in Jakarta. Like fault-lines, the best ideas are generated through friction, through coming into contact. This ‘coming into contact’ also allowed us to develop new forms of solidarity as initiatives before us have done, including the Festival of Arts Shiraz-Persepolis (1967-77), The World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar (1966) and FESTAC in Lagos (1977), which have been referenced in past and present DAS editions.

THE BASE OF THE SUMMIT, VISION, ACTION AND PATRONAGE We were only able to achieve this peak of DAS 2020 due to the solid base of support and commitment of the founders of Dhaka Art Summit, the Dhaka-based collector couple Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani.5 My experience of the first Dhaka Art Summit in 2012 was digital, via the extensive media coverage and social media posts that this new art platform in Bangladesh was receiving. So many Indian gallerists and journalists on my Facebook feed were suddenly in Bangladesh, a country that I had heard previously very little about in relation to contemporary art. I had already met artists Mahbubur Rahman and Tayeba Begum Lipi at a conference in London and heard about their Triangle Network affiliated organisation Britto, which had years of experience catalysing international exchange on an artist residency level. Beyond that, Bangladesh had little presence in the international institutional or market circuit in an increasingly globalised art world. Looking at DAS as a young curator living in India at that time, it seemed like a market-oriented platform hosted by a local enthusiastic young collector couple. Externally, it seemed to be a place where the Samdani’s gallery and auction house specialist friends and curators from the Tate Museum convened to learn more about art in Bangladesh, and possibly to sell art to the Samdanis and other Bangladeshi collectors who might be emerging along with them. It seemed to be a place where Bangladeshi talent could be discovered by the world, and also promoted through two sizable cash art prizes (the $6,000 Samdani Young Talent Award, and the $12,000 Samdani Artist Development Award, which were transformed 46 | 47

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into what is now the Samdani Art Award). Unlike the India Art Fair, it seemed to be a place that contributed to the development of new talent and research, rather than just being an art marketplace much like any other. Of only three days duration, and with a program developed from many sections, the format resembled an art fair (Flash Art magazine’s pre-event coverage stated that it was modelled on the India Art Fair).6

I was impressed, as was the rest of the ‘South Asia-interested’ art world, and curious to learn more, at how this couple could bring so many people together so quickly. The reach of the first DAS made it clear that Bangladesh, in considering South Asian art, was not a place one could ignore. A gallerist friend put me in touch with Nadia Samdani who sent me some Bangladeshi artists’ portfolios. When artist Jitish Kallat brought us together in Mumbai I discovered that DAS actually had nothing to do with the art market, of buying and selling of artworks, and everything to do with creating opportunities for artists to develop outside the very limited possibilities available to them in Bangladesh. The Samdanis firmly believed that the artists in Bangladesh are as good as those from India and Pakistan they had seen during their international art world travels. Bangladesh lacked a gallery representation and market system that would allow artworks to travel internationally, Bangladeshi artists were held back from reaching their full potential. As collectors keenly interested in South Asia, the Samdanis didn’t know where to begin researching South Asian art beyond India and Pakistan, so they decided to create a platform to allow this kind of knowledge to be produced and to be amplified around the world. While the initial press stories on the first Dhaka Art Summit quoted Nadia Samdani and spoke about the platform being modelled on the India Art Fair and referenced the economic booms of India and China,7 the Samdanis knew that Bangladesh had no market for contemporary art, and that any kind of art fair would not work. They also knew that looking at an isolated Bangladesh would not serve the purpose of developing the infrastructure for Bangladeshi art domestically and internationally, and soon after the first DAS they searched for a curator to help them expand their vision. I was approached as the ‘international curator’ with Mahbubur Rahman appointed as the Bangladeshi curator to oversee the program of DAS 2014. By this time they had already formed the event’s overall shape by inviting local and international galleries (which were given their spaces free of charge) to make presentations of their South Asian artists, with Ambereen Karamat (an art consultant from Pakistan) curating a group exhibition of Pakistani art; Veerangana Solanki curating a group exhibition of Indian Art; Deepak Ananth, an exhibition of Bangladeshi art; and Rosa Maria Falvo, an exhibition of Bangladeshi photography. l

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SHIFTING DAS OUT OF A SPACE ASSOCIATED WITH THE MARKET AND INTO A SPACE ASSOCIATED WITH THE CURATORIAL Looking to break a structure that deceivingly made DAS look like an art fair I commissioned ambitious projects (as well as presenting the kind of work that had not been seen in the region before, and at international standards) that would highlight the real work that DAS was doing by supporting art outside commercial channels. Artworks were produced and exhibited in manners typically unseen in an art fair; we gave the kind of production support that was rare to experience anywhere else in the region. The Kochi-Muziris Biennale had yet to be initiated when DAS began and had only realised one edition when I began developing DAS 2014: even there the onus on producing artworks was placed upon the artists and their galleries for the first edition (and subsequently), not on the Biennale foundation. We enabled Rashid Rana to expand his work to architectural scale for the first time, and also made the first ambitious presentation of Shahzia Sikander’s moving image work in South Asia (the Lahore Biennial and Karachi Biennial later presented her work in Pakistan using the logistics strategy developed for DAS, and borrowing equipment from the Sharjah Art Foundation). Additionally, I had to create an infrastructure to insure and exhibit artworks in an environment devoid of such a framework and places to rent high-tech equipment. These solutions, resolution of methodologies and establishing international partnerships, were how we were able to create the platform that DAS is known as today.

While beginning work on the Dhaka Art Summit early 2013, it was not until October of that year that I became Artistic Director of the Samdani Art Foundation, taking over the Summit as Chief Curator. I then began to contemplate what DAS 2016 might be (predating the realisation of DAS 2014)—this continuity of vision across editions allowed the institution to grow quickly, building on previous relationships, knowledge and insights, rather than starting fresh each time.

One of the first things implemented post-DAS 2014 was to eliminate medium-specific elements, such as the Bangladeshi photography exhibition, as photography was not considered to be fine art. Art consultants and others who had financial interests in the exhibited artworks would also not be involved in future DAS programs, and while DAS 2012 had gallerists and auction house staff speaking on panels, future editions would not (with the exception of panels on artist estates).

Given my American-trained background I’ve always considered scholarship and the market should be separate, but the Samdanis envisioned the need for galleries to support Bangladeshi artists in order for an international ecosystem for Bangladeshi art to truly grow. That international galleries 48 | 49

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exhibited without site fees was a brilliant strategy by the Samdanis as they could see first-hand the kind of people that DAS could attract through its curatorial and scholarly platforms, while simultaneously getting to know artists and their work within the Bangladeshi context. Just a few of many success stories catalysed by DAS, which lead to long-term meaningful working partnerships, were Experimenter, which signed on Ayesha Sultana (their representation of the Bangladeshi artist Naeem Mohaiemen predated their relationship with the Samdanis), Project88 signed on Shumon Ahmed and later Munem Wasif, Jhaveri Contemporary began working with the work of the late Bangladeshi modern sculptor Novera Ahmed (their representation of the British Bangladeshi artist Rana Begum pre-dated DAS), Exhibit320 began working with Mustafa Zaman and Yasmin Jahan Nupur, Galerie Krinzinger began working with Shumon Ahmed and Rafiqul Shuvo.

In 2014 it was decided to cease international gallery participation from subsequent Summits, but in order to keep local galleries invested we continued to give them exhibition spaces in 2016.

This ceased from 2018, as it was evident that visitors could visit Bangladeshi galleries directly rather than encounter them within DAS.

It is important to note that when we started working together Nadia Samdani and I were in our twenties and Rajeeb Samdani in his thirties; we advanced together through our experiences with DAS and the Foundation over these years. The platform we developed to assist Bangladeshi artists gain visibility in 2014 was not the same that was needed in 2020, or that might be needed in 2022. Each edition responded dynamically to the one before it, and to the ways we thought that Bangladesh needed to be presented for visitors to understand it outside of the heavy shadow of India, and how we in Bangladesh could set an example globally for how an art institution could be. As I was living in India at the time and that was my central reference point to South Asian art, the international arm of the 2014 program was India-heavy, and our international visiting friends were primarily from India. The more time I spent in Bangladesh the clearer it became how distinct Bangladesh is from India, and the more I worked to distance the misguided surface reading that Bangladesh was the smaller, denser, poorer cousin of India.

While DAS 2012 was not a curatorial platform and the 2014 edition was considered weak due to the nascent Bangladeshi experience of the international curators involved (including myself), I perceived the enormous potential for DAS becoming a site for curatorial acumen and invention of new exhibition and discursive formats—the curatorial, paired with the inspirational potential found in the creative wealth of the local art and architecture scene, might create the condition where this dynamic could be our content (Dhaka and Bangladesh lack the comforts that draws in international tourism, as well as sustaining a negative perception in the minds of those who have never visited.

It is also interesting to note that our most critical visitors are those from India, which can be attributed to the rise of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s anti-Muslim sentiments; while international visitors have risen substantially since the first DAS in 2012, Indian visitor numbers have decreased to only the most die-hard of devotees.)

When appointed Artistic Director of Samdani Art Foundation in October 2013, developing the Foundation and Dhaka Art Summit into leading sites for incubating curatorial thought (a paramount agenda for the 2014 edition of DAS), I developed a strong team of curatorial collaborators who I knew I wanted to work with for each future edition. Some of the invited curators who visited and later became part of the core curatorial team included Dr. Shanay Jhaveri, Dr. Devika Singh, Nada Raza, Cosmin Costinas, Iftikhar Dadi, Amara Antilla, Beth Citron, Katya Garcia Anton, Daniel Baumann, Simon Castets, Philippe Pirotte, Kathryn Weir, Sean Anderson, Aurelien Lemonier l

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and Sharmini Pereira. Most attended as either a speaker or jury member before joining the DAS team.

As chief curator my role was to cohere ideas found in the guest curator’s exhibitions through my exhibition (which began as ‘Solo Projects’ in 2014 and 2016, mostly new commissions of South Asian and diaspora artists with transnational experiences in South Asia, revolving around themes found elsewhere in the Summit. This morphed into a section called ‘Bearing Points’ in 2018—five curated group exhibitions puntuated by large commissions—that sought to reorient how Bangladesh was perceived, the title referencing points on a compass. The 2020 edition brought everything together into a single theme, ‘Seismic Movements’). I also looked for disparities in research and exhibition histories which informed the commissioning of sub-exhibitions comprising the larger construct of DAS; eg., the DAS 2018 exhibitions One Hundred Thousand Small Tales (a part-archive, part inventory survey that mapped the various paths of art production in Sri Lanka from its independence in 1948 to the present, curated by Sharmini Pereira) and The Utopian Stage (excavating the archives of the Festival of Arts Shiraz-Persepolis, curated by London-based Iranian curator/historian Vali Mahlouji, its participants from the non-Western majority8); the institutional history and collection legacy of the Asian Art Biennale in Bangladesh under the leadership of Syed Jahangir (a response to larger profile biennials in Asia, such as the Gwangu Biennale which erroneously claimed to be the first biennale in Asia); and in 2016, Rewind linking Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Burmese, Pakistani and Indian modern art, where abstraction emerged from figurative practices. Across DAS 2014 to 2016, I realised that Western artists who made their lives and careers living in these regions were rarely included in regional surveys, while diaspora artists, who had not spent anytime within the region, were. Given my loathing of identity politics this exhibition construct was my response to what I felt were myopic racial definitions of what it meant to be associated with a region, and DAS 2016 introduced artists with regional ties such as Lynda Benglis, Tino Sehgal, Germaine Krull and Saskia Pintelon.

Bangladesh has a phenomenal architectural scene: we were the first to commission and produce a survey exhibition of Bangladeshi contemporary architecture, curated by Aurelien Lemonier in 2016, which preceded and arguably influenced the much talked about Bengal Stream (2018) at the Swiss Architecture Museum in Basel. The curators met Lemonier in their research process, and while he was not generously credited by them he was very helpful with his knowledge and contacts.

This instance highlights DAS’ research and online information having a global ripple effect, its impact transcending any credit lists one might see on exhibition walls or acknowledgements in a publication.

DAS 2018 was taxing due to the logistical work needed to accomplish the guest curator projects. Similarly, when audiences attended the prior DAS editions in 2014 and 2016, they were not aware of the intense behind-the-scenes financial and logistical acrobatics, including the sourcing of technical equipment from other foundations and fundraising external to the Samdani Art Foundation that made what was seen by all possible. The exceptions to what was available in Bangladesh seemed like the norm; when negotiating the loan of a hemp sculpture by Mrinalini Mukherjee in a country with no art insurance I had to prevail upon the owners to insure it themselves (which they did, to which I was immensely thankful and proud to have been able to show this work in Bangladesh ahead of her lauded retrospective at the Met Breuer in New York); similarly, convincing other collectors to not only loan their artworks to a country they had never considered before but also again to insure them; begging the Sharjah Art Foundation to loan technical equipment for multiple projects; and to avoid government censorship (from Sri Lanka) to realise Sharmini Pereira’s 100,000 Small Tales, the personal hand-carrying of art onto flights into Bangladesh before DAS 2018 opened 50 | 51

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(which required her to negotiate permission from the CEO of Sri Lanka Airlines). While these outcomes evidence what might be possible in Bangladesh, the unique working processes can be daunting for those without experience, working in contexts without formal art institutions; there was considerable translation on my behalf to bridge how things are done abroad and how they are done in Bangladesh.

Behind-the-scenes difficulties aside, DAS 2018 was a critical success—a number of its exhibitions continue to travel around the world, participants have begun collaborating in wider forums globally, and guest curator Dr Devika Singh was hired by the Tate Museum as curator of South Asian art, partially in response to her DAS 2018 exhibition. However, I understood that this multiple curator model would no longer work for future editions. Observing the same curatorial approach adopted by the Sharjah Biennial and Gwangju Biennale for their cycle aligned with DAS between 2016 and 2018, I knew I wanted to abandon this model, given the difficulties for collaboration within a team of curators with individual agendas and the inequities inherent—e.g., space allocations, identical loan requests, budget allocations, and so on. The ensuing reviews of both biennales highlighted these dilemmas, for the broader perspective of curatorial visions to become apparent when structurally divided into distinct parts. The decision therefore was to build another model for co-curating, where I could be both the chief curator and co-curator of the program, to allow a plurality of voices to emerge while also being able to direct and write the bigger picture narrative without choppy organisational waves in the middle, to build a team of collaborators much like a theatre production, as a counterpoint to the individual curatorial ego.

Reflecting further on DAS 2018, I realised that its strength was not just its curatorial acumen —more so its audience, one that engaged with and brought these ideas into their lives. With more than 300,000 visitors over nine days, DAS became the highest daily visited contemporary art exhibition in the world according to The Art Newspaper.9 In between DAS 2018 and 2020, photojournalist Shahidul Alam was arrested under Section 57 of Bangladesh’s Information and Communication Technology Act (for allegedly making “false” and “provocative” comments in an interview to Al Jazeera on student protests), provoking the journalistic and art worlds into an uproar about how Bangladesh could host an expansive event like DAS while simultaneously instigating repression of artistic freedom. This aroused my consideration about personal conviction in the arts—many artists, poets, thinkers and architects who maintained their conviction about their ideas had historically been sent to jail as a result. Many artists who created the images, words and songs that mobilised Bangladeshis to stand up for their independence had been in jail; artists had catalysed such movements of freedom of expression and will continue to do so. Having so many people in the same spaces contemplating ideas that could not be freely expressed in the print media, but could be expressed through art, gave me a huge sense of agency at a time when such artistic freedoms were under threat. How could I use the exhibition as a movement—and not just simply as a presentation of art? Anticipating such an audience I wanted to create an exhibition and discursive/research platform where we could discuss past movements of resistance, and consider how ground shifted over time physically and metaphorically. In the process of designing the exhibition, I hoped that our audiences could spend time thinking about ways and mechanisms that might shift the world and build on the work that generations before us have put into freedom of expression.

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The Dhaka Art Summit in 2012 began as a platform for Bangladesh, expanded to a platform for South Asia in 2014, and grew to include other regions and transnational platforms in subsequent editions. Taking the metaphor of moving tectonic plates, reminding us that the physical ground that nations stake claim to has and will invariably be far from static, Seismic Movements marked a shift in the platform of the Dhaka Art Summit to no longer be defined by a geographic regional remit. In my view, a geographical remit is a limitation that can keep us from addressing the complexities of racism, avarice and enmity that continue to plague the world. Could a region instead be a state of mind, a set of values, a place of shared conditions where people who are of the land are made to feel subordinate and inferior to their historical colonial rulers, and descendants of slaves and exploited workers moved to that land continue to be oppressed by powers ruling these lands today? As it has been since its inception, DAS is committed to valuing the contributions of artists and thinkers who art history has undervalued due to systemic racism and classism embedded in who has the power and agency to write history. It is hoped that through our efforts and those of others, these voices will finally be able to be heard, not just in Bangladesh or the region, but all over the world.

Notes 1 Rather than release an artist list, where people could pick out names that they knew, we released a graphic designed mountain range that included all individuals, institutions and team members who built the Summit. Given our work with collectives–whose members change relatively often–it would have been impossible to release a static artist list, and this approach required readers to consider every name when trying to find out who was part of the exhibition 2 The theme also tried to respond to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s call in her speech at DAS 2018 that another kind of work, activism outside the exhibition, had to walk hand in hand with a platform like DAS if we were to try to address the “impossible possibility of a socially just world” 3

Thank you to Muhammad Nafisur Rahman for sharing this research with me which inspired the form of this essay

4 It is important to note that more than forty other indigenous mother tongues are spoken in Bangladesh beyond Bangla–and DAS also has been working to empower indigenous communities in Bangladesh since its inception. ‘Sovereign Words’ in DAS 2018 brought together indigenous peers from over the world, including Australia. My mother is indigenous Chamorro from Guam, so my engagement with indigeneity comes from a personal place 5 This support and commitment also extends to the employment and development of our core team in Bangladesh, especially Mohammad Sazzad Hossain, Ruxmini Reckvana Choudhury, Mobinul Haque, and Asifur Rahman, who are our head of administration and assistant curator, engineer, and architect; all of these talented individuals were working first time for a major art festival. I mention them because if the art world is going to fight racial and class bias, it has to start by hiring people who come from outside the small community of elites running the art world, and by supporting their growth over the long-term 6

https://flash---art.com/2012/04/bangladesh-bangladeshs-first-art-summit-and-a-hope-to-be-the-new-india/

7

‘Bangladesh’s first Art Summit’; https://flash---art.com/2012/04/bangladesh-bangladeshs-first-art-summit-and-a-hope-to-be-the-new-india/

8

See Vali Mahlouji, ‘The Super-Modernism of The Festival of Arts, Shiraz-Persepolis’, di’van | Journal of Accounts 2, 2017, pp. 42-53

9 The Art Newspaper, Special Report 311, April 2019; https://www.museus.gov.br/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/The-Art-NewspaperRanking-2018.pdf

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A “Real Allegory” of Manual Labour in The Age of Global Capital Inspired by the historical and ongoing importance of maritime life to the development of the port cities of the Arabian Gulf, The Stonebreakers brought together three recent projects by artists that focused on a particular node within the modern shipping infrastructural network: the ship-breaking yard.1 At these sites, decommissioned modern steel-hulled ships, the hulking vessels that incessantly circle the globe transporting the bulk of manufactured goods and raw materials, are dismantled and salvaged for scrap metal and reusable parts. Over the last two decades of the twentieth century, as the shipyards in Japan and South Korea pivoted from breaking to building and maintenance, South Asia took over as the primary location of the industry. Until a decade ago, the region’s yards still handled eighty percent of the world’s ships though, in recent years, competing facilities in Turkey and China have cut into this share.

Most of the work at these yards is done manually by migrant labour from the rural hinterland who are paid subsistence wages. The process begins with the ship being run aground during high tide; the demolition crews board the vessel and start work once the tide recedes.2 Over many months, the humongous steel structures are slowly carved up into somewhat smaller sections using blowtorches, hammers, saws and other basic tools. The workers begin with the multi-story superstructure and then move on to the hull, working back from port to starboard. Grappling hooks, thick iron ropes and diesel-powered winches are used to pull these segments off the vessel and drag them onto the beach where they are broken down further and loaded onto trucks for distribution.

The scrap metal, especially the large flattened sheets that make up the hull, is sent to nearby “re-rolling mills” where it is transformed into re-bar for use in the local construction industry.

Anything else that can be salvaged and resold is wiring and plumbing, equipment and furniture, wood panelling used in ship interiors, and even the bathroom fixtures.

The dismantling process is both physically demanding and extremely hazardous for both the workers and the surrounding environment. The breaking crews are rarely provided with even basic safety equipment and accidents, disabling injuries, and even deaths on-site are frequent occurrences. As the decades-old ships are dismantled, toxic materials like asbestos, heavy metals and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) embedded in their structures are released. Residual oil and trapped gas in supertankers can cause deadly fires and explosions when they encounter sparks from the blowtorches and saws. These toxins not only fill the air but also leach out onto the beach and into the surrounding waters polluting the local groundwater and devastating coastal ecosystems.

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countries where the companies that own them are based and so they are auctioned off as scrap to the highest bidder and sent to the global South for dismantling. Global shipping is a notoriously underregulated industry; ship-breaking even more so. Though the international export of toxic material is prohibited, flags of convenience and frequent name changes are used to obscure a vessel’s ownership, allowing companies to circumvent restrictions and abdicate their responsibility over the proper disposal of decommissioned ships. It is simply cheaper and easier to outsource the break down process to less developed countries where there is an abundance of low-cost unskilled labour and safety and environmental regulations are laxed.

Over the past three decades, the abject working and living conditions and harmful environmental effects that characterise ship-breaking have attracted the attention of labour, human rights, environmental and anti-globalisation activists and NGOs based in the West.3 Photographs and films are a key part of such activist campaigns and are used to elicit outrage, garner support and advocate for better regulation and legislation. Their primary function is as evidence, revealing previously invisible or unknown injustices and bearing witness to the human suffering and the environmental destruction caused by the industry. Though this increased scrutiny and resulting media coverage has limited access to the yards, they continue to attract photographers and filmmakers and the industry’s hypervisibility has resulted in a familiar and oft-repeated iconography. More recently, however, ship-breaking has begun to draw the attention of artists from South Asia itself.

The industry and the yard are ideal case studies—like mining and sweatshops—for those interested in investigating and challenging the unjust geographic division of labour associated with globalisation which exploits the poverty of the global South and forces it to bear the brunt of the human and environmental costs that result. As Michael Crang has argued, images of ship-breaking serve as powerful “counterimages of globalisation,” revealing, through their focus on the waste it generates, 54 | 55

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globalisation’s materially abject and morally questionable underbelly.4 A focus on the labour required to manage this waste also restores, to some degree, the cultural visibility of the worker, which the neoliberal ideologies and deregulated processes of globalisation have rendered invisible.5

Each of the artists included in The Stonebreakers focuses their attention on the main sites in their respective countries: Shumon Ahmed on Chittagong in Bangladesh, Ranjit Kandalgaonkar on Alang in India, and Hira Nabi on Gadani in Pakistan. Acutely aware of the common representational tropes associated with ship-breaking, and its related networks and ecologies, these artists choose to experiment with new methodologies, forms and aesthetic registers. Though each uses a distinct medium, they all depart notably from the more direct reportage-style strategies commonly used, skeptical of unqualified mimesis as a valid approach given photography’s capacity, shared with capitalism, to objectify the body at work. Instead, they follow the influential example of Allan Sekula, who chose to represent maritime labour through and as negation and absence.6 Like Sekula, they use self-reflexivity and autobiography to complicate the purported objectivity of the document itself, be it photographic, archival, acoustic or filmic. But they also use gestures of fiction and fantasy to nudge realism towards the surreal, a strategy comparable to what Saidiya Hartman has called “critical fabulation,” which uses the speculative register to compensate for archival or evidential erasure or lack.7 The intimacies and unruly excesses of these gestures collapse the objective distance of conventional documentary practice, revealing and challenging the apparatus used to construct it, while also exploring the potential of affect to engage with and address social and political injustice.

The diversity of their approaches is instructive, highlighting the multiplicity of possible ways in which a site of exploitative manual labor and ecological devastation may be represented.

MARITIME HAUNTS Consisting of two discrete series, titled Metal Graves (2009) and When Dead Ships Travel (2015), Shumon Ahmed’s photographs of the ship-breaking yards are more like fleeting impressions or half-remembered dreams than veracious documents of either the labouring body and/or the ruined landscape. Characterised by a painterly indeterminacy and blur, they are the product of Ahmed’s willingness to experiment technically.8 He shot the images using a variety of analogue cameras —from standard equipment like a medium format Hasselblad or a Polaroid to more unconventional formats like the Diana plastic and pinhole cameras—and film stocks (Kodak 100 VS, Kodak 400 VC colour film, Agfa 100 to 400 ISO). Unconventional cross-processing and printing techniques added another level of unpredictability. Relinquishing total control over the outcome, Ahmed invited accident and embraced contingency; the resulting images are marked by uncertainty (visual blur and soft focus, temporal and perspectival multiplicity through multiple exposures) and a decidedly unreal palette (from sepia and other desaturated tones to intense moody blues) which together given the photographs a wistful otherworldly feel.

Among Ahmed’s most conventional images, When Dead Ships Travel 9 and When Dead Ships Travel 10 are black and white studies in contrasting textures that juxtaposes a ship’s crusty eroded hull against the glistening waterlogged beach. This attention to light, surface, texture and weight, an ethos of studied formalism that offsets the significant representational burden of his subject and site, animates all his photographs. Metal Graves 20 is a closeup of the soft coastal sands, the sun reflecting off the gentle ridges left by the receding tide. An almost monochrome, its tarry slickness smuggles in the possibility of oil contamination. In many of the Metal Graves prints the ships and their fragments appear as “picturesque” timeless ruins. Their sepia tones give them an anachronistic look recalling l

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Samuel Bourne’s famous nineteenth century photographs of ancient monuments across South Asia.

Ahmed often includes a black border around the exposed image, with the film stock code and frame number clearly visible. Sometimes multiple shots are presented in a row, echoing the structure of both a contact sheet and a film strip. Such darkroom tricks reveal the otherwise obscured apparatus of photography. Similarly, his use of multiple exposures introduces indeterminacy—visual, perspectival and temporal—disrupting the singularity and clarity of the “decisive moment” so sought after by documentary photographers.

Ahmed oscillates productively between nature and the manmade, between panorama and closeup, the two visual devices that Sekula identifies as historically used to picture maritime space.

This dichotomy of scale is apparent in Ahmed’s choice of presentation formats: he intersperses intimate Polaroids amongst his large-scale prints. However, he does not let size dictate subject.

Metal Graves 17 and Metal Graves 18 feature details in the landscape—pits and squiggles on the beach, heads of washed up coral—presented sequentially in a large horizontally elongated frieze.

Their tight framing and sepia tint extract them from their context, giving them the look of vintage natural history photographs. Centered within the intimate three-by-three-inch frame of a Polaroid, the sections and parts of dismantled ships that appear in them feel almost toy-like. This scalar play keeps the viewer engaged, forcing a constant calibration of the optimal viewing distance from which to best experience the work.

Human figures rarely appear in Ahmed’s photographs. When they do, their presence seems incidental and liminal, their spectral bodies literally haunting the margins of the frame. Though a man appears in the top left corner of Metal Graves 9, his face obscured by shadow; the image is essentially a black and white study of sunlight reflecting off the tidal sands. The ships are similarly elusive; their familiar silhouette dissolves into a mirage on the distant horizon through Ahmed’s use of multiple exposures and uncertain focus. In Metal Graves 24, a vessel’s imposing presence is merely intimated 56 | 57

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through the ghostly shadow of its deck rail cast onto the surrounding mud or water. One could take Ahmed to task for merely aestheticising his subject, compromising critique in the name of beauty or style. However, by going against the technical mastery and precision fetishised by photojournalists and fine art photographers alike, Ahmed renders the photographic apparatus visible to his viewer, reminding them that the images before them are not unmediated records of reality.

The elegiac air that Ahmed produces through his technical play seems appropriate for an industry and a site defined by decay and death, a fate shared by both the ships and the workers.

Ahmed translates this condition into visual liminality, endowing his subjects with a mobility beyond mimesis that allows them to migrate well beyond their specific material realities. Acknowledged in his title ‘When Dead Ships Travel’, this mobility is not only about journeys but also hauntings, about pasts and futures, about movement and memory. It gestures towards both their material and metaphoric afterlives, to the many social and political trajectories of exploitation, injustice and destruction left in their wake.9 In contrast to the documentary image, Ahmed’s photographs do not simply rely on mimesis to solicit pity or empathy or to elicit outrage; they mobilise aesthetics to maximise affect, approaching truths that might otherwise elude the photographic image.

AGAINST REPRESENTATION Ranjit Kandalgaonkar’s practice is characterised by a principled refusal of conventional documentary approaches, rejecting the objectifying gaze of lens-based visual representation. Instead, he seeks out alternative methodologies and aesthetic registers—archival and field research, autobiography, sound recordings and sci-fi imagery—to hold the mimetic force of the documentary image at bay.

Implicating the artist within the matrix of representation, autobiography collapses the objective distance expected of both academic research and documentary practice, while the sonic and the fantastic release his subject from its geographic and temporal locus. Kandalgaonkar’s approach is also pragmatic. As the first major regional centre for ship-breaking, Alang was the focus of early media coverage and humanitarian and environmental protest.10 In response to the scrutiny, access to the yard has been severely curtailed, necessitating both dogged persistence and strategic pivots.

In Kandalgaonkar’s view, the designation of ship-breaking as waste management allows the shipping industry to absolve itself of the human and environmental costs of disposal, a discursive separation that is enacted geographically through outsourcing to the global South. Mapping out the complex material and labor ecologies of modern shipping, Kandalgaonkar’s multifaceted project, titled Modelled Recycled Systems, reintegrates breaking back into the network of maritime infrastructure, forcing the industry to acknowledge and reckon with the waste it generates. [shipbreak _dossier] (2019—) is a set of works on paper that engage with the industry’s technical archive and processes. basic design, page 7 (2019) adds the cost of disassembly to an infographic estimating shipbuilding costs that appeared in a 1969 maritime engineering handbook. week1week2month1month2 (2019) distills the approach used by yard supervisors to organise disassembly—usually improvised using the technical plan of a ship that is commonly found on its bridge—into a diagram that is both a measure of labor and time, or rather of labour as time. Infect_shoreline_I-IV (2019) abstracts both observed and speculated moments from the scrapping process using handmade paper of different colors and textures, embellished with delicate line drawing, to suggest alternatives to photographic representations. And the sheer breadth and depth of Kandalgaonkar’s extensive and ongoing research is barely contained in T-A-G-B-O-A-R-D (2010—), a dense repository of research notes, photographs, diagrams and drawings that literally bursts beyond its frame. l

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The latest in a series entitled In the Wake of Shipping Infrastructure, the digital print Cellular-II (2020) juxtaposes archival material with the family album, specifically photographs of and taken by the artist’s captain father. The title refers to the mid-twentieth century shift to a cellular, and easily automated, system for loading, unloading and transporting cargo through the adoption of the standardised metal container. Containerisation dramatically increased the volume and speed of trade catalysing a shift from more modestly sized bulk carriers to the gigantic container ships and supertankers that dominate shipping today.11 In the print, two vintage advertisements for steamship tourism are obscured by a technical diagram of a container, with all its parts diligently labelled, its logistical efficiency eclipsing the romance of early maritime travel. A photograph of Kandalgaonkar’s father in uniform appears twice, entangling the artist’s familial past with the annals of modern maritime history.

In Shipbreak-I (2016), Kandalgaonkar chooses to represent labour, both the actions and the bodies that enact them, as sound work, acoustically transcribing the yard and the activities that transpire there. The result is an eerie otherworldly sonic scape, filled with industrious taps, ominous clangs, grating saws and hissing blowtorches, and the dull thud and muffled scrape of sections of the hull being torn off and dragged onto the beach, interspersed with the gentle lapping of waves. What is both unexpected and uncanny is the absence of the sonic trace of the human, either as speech or the sounds of its bodily exertions. Untethered to imagery, the sounds become expansive and spacefilling, tapping into the medium’s capacity to be both specific to a site and resonate beyond it. While the loop literally takes us into and then out of the cavernous hull of a ship as it is being broken down, it metaphorically opens up to the vastness of the open ocean or of outer space. A snippet of filmi music overheard on a television grounds the loop back in the time and place of its making, a refreshing burst of joy and leisure that, paradoxically, jolts us back to the drudgeries of the yard.

Kandalgaonkar’s in[fra]structional drawings provide a speculative storyboard for this soundscape, illustrating and exaggerating its alien-ness. Initiated as a visual repository and a space for experimental drawing, a dystopic landscape unfurls across a seventy-foot long scroll of delicate yellow tracing paper, visualising a post-apocalyptic future filled with grotesque hybrids, ships fused together with antiquated machines, submarine landscapes and pelagic life forms. In a related series of small drawings, ships conjoin with destructive devices like a wrecking ball crane and a guillotine, resulting in self-consuming ouroboros-like units that, symbolically at least, restore the place of disassembly within a vessel’s lifespan. In clam soup and mandeli fry (both 2019) they meld together with marine life, specifically with key ingredients of Kandalgaonkar’s father’s signature recipes, illustrating an intimacy with the sea that is at once biological, autobiographical and culinary. Another set of small drawings draw parallels between ship-breaking and another problematic maritime industry: whaling. The two share a descriptive language because of shared scale: ships are beached before demolition begins, their dismantled structures are frequently referred to as carcasses. In these drawings, vessel and animal share a body: the process of tearing off sections of the hull is equated with the way a whale is butchered; a tail sticks out of pit, surrounded by a patchwork of bloodstained metal sheets, a reference to the khaddas used in the past to collect and sort non-steel scrap; a hybrid body, part whale part submarine, is drenched in sanguine strokes that suggest both blood and rust.

Similarly, in a series of larger drawings made on sheets of paper meant to resemble a ship’s technical plan, a vessel midway through demolition is drawn to resemble the skeleton of a whale, flesh picked clean from its ribcage. Even in the throes of death, the ship morphs, visually, from an inanimate and now redundant object into a once vital body.

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This body of work is notable for its approach to ship-breaking entirely through the imaginary, which allows it to escape the indexical limits of the lens-based image. On one hand, the corporeal horror of this imagery evokes the physical suffering and bodily harm endured by workers at the yard. It can also be read as a protest against the industrialisation of sea trade, a process Sekula links to a “suppression of smell,” the stink of bulk trade contained by the container’s corrugated steel walls.12 Kandalgaonkar’s monstrous hybrids recall the sensorial intensities of the maritime past, of an embodied intimacy with the oceans and the abundance of life within; they are an exuberant return of the repressed, of the body at work made redundant by processes of automation and standardisation driven by global capitalism.

THE SHIP SPEAKS Ship-breaking yards have inspired a number of notable films.13 In addition to the humanitarian and environmental concerns, conditions at the yard make for striking visuals: the ship’s gargantuan scale and the David versus Goliath size differential between it and the workers; the thick plumes of smoke, the polluting murk often intensifying the sublimity of changing light; the treacly gleam of leaking oil; the firework-like bursts of blowtorches, sparkling within the cavernous darkness of the hull; the gleaming white eyes of workers covered head-to-toe in soot and dirt; the quiet drama and sudden violence as sections are yanked off of a ship’s deck or frame, fall into the surrounding water and are dragged onshore; the easy camaraderie of the workers, working together to accomplish incomprehensible physical tasks. Made in collaboration with the Workers Union at Gadani, Hira Nabi’s All That Perishes at the Edge of Land (2019) opens with a dramatic shot that centres on the keel of a grounded ship. The camera slowly tilts up, both revealing and emphasising the vessel’s immensity, its presence looming over us. It is a powerful image, placing the viewer in the position of the workers as they approach a ship, conveying their awe at that first encounter when the incomprehensible immensity of the task ahead hits them. A large metal chain, which starts from the top right corner at the beginning of the sequence but moves down as the camera pivots up, loops through two holes near the very front of the ship. The workers often use such chains as makeshift l

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bridges to clamber onto the ship and, again, the shot’s compositional logic mimics the workers’ point of view, the chain leading our eye into the frame and towards the vessel. The chain is both a perspectival device and a visual metaphor, a universal symbol of bonded labor and exploitation.

Despite such strong and sensitive visuals, what really distinguishes Nabi’s film is her voiceover, which she reimagines as a tool for “critical fabulation”. It begins as one might expect, with ambient sync sounds of the yard, overlaid with snippets of the workers describing the hardships and injustices they endure working there, though they are almost never shown speaking. The soundtrack pivots dramatically about a third of the way in, as these testimonies begin to be intercut with a scripted monologue narrated by an anthropomorphised bulk carrier named Ocean Master, delivered in a solemn female voice, with the dramatic emphasis and measured pace of a seasoned storyteller.

As the camera hovers around the ship, she recounts her life story, mourning not only her own obsolescence and demise but also lamenting the disastrous effects that her destruction has on those who break her down and the site where that act occurs. Alternating between fact and fiction, the film’s voiceover emphasises the storytelling aspect of testimony and posits fabulation as a viable political tool for speaking truth to power.

This voiceover is key to Nabi’s intersectional approach, functioning both as a dialectical and a self-reflexive device. Through it she is able to address antinomies related to gender and class that are important to but rarely enter into either the physical or representational space of ship-breaking.

Like many industries reliant on migrant labor, the industry and yard are undeniably masculine, and the interjection of the ship’s female voice has a disruptive force. The workers at Gadani, mostly from the northern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, are forced to leave their families and villages in search of livelihood. Their wages at the yards, though meagre, are still more than they are able to earn at home. Nabi’s voiceover recasts the ship as an unlikely intimate and a beloved confidant, a wife or mother left behind. After the ship recalls her own dreams, some realised others abandoned, she prompts the workers to share theirs, asking, “What do your dreams tell you?” This back and forth between the ship and the workers transforms the latter’s testimonies into dialogues, enabling them to not only speak their truth but to also have it be heard. It allows the heartache of separation that they carry with them, voiced by so many of them, to become palpable as affect.

While clear class distinctions exist between the workers and yard owners, the subject is rarely addressed in representations of shipbreaking. Visual media predominantly focus on the workers’ plight, fetishising the toiling body; the owners’ perspective only seems to appear in textual accounts.14 Nabi’s voiceover broaches the question of class through differences in language, between the ship’s more formal and literary Urdu, associated with educated metropolitan elites, and the vernacular dialect the workers speak. It ventriloquises not just an otherwise inanimate ship but also the otherwise invisible filmmaker. Striving for objectivity and transparency, documentarians, especially those driven by activism, tend to minimise their presence and perspective. Instead, Nabi’s voiceover announces her presence, dramatising and amplifying other self-reflexive moments in the film. Near the beginning, as the workers’ playfully banter over a morning cup of tea they casually acknowledge the crew, demonstrating a grudging familiarity with media presence at the yard. The cameraman quickly admonishes them, requesting they not look directly into the camera so as maintain a fly-onthe-wall feel but the interaction has already broken the cinematic fourth wall. Like Ahmed’s technical experiments or Kandalgaonkar’s entanglement of autobiography and the industrial archive, such self-reflexive strategies render the documentary apparatus visible, acknowledging the filmmaker’s privileged subjectivity implicating both her and us in her film’s representational dilemmas.

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Through the voiceover, Nabi establishes an opposition and a dialogue between a (now) animate thing and human beings reduced to objects, to the condition of bare life, by the rapacious machinations of global capital. The ship’s unexpected agency seems to emphasise the workers’ lack of it, questioning the efficacy of testimony, and a documentary practice anchored to it, as a tool for addressing injustice and enacting change. However, though the workers often speak of their desperation (encompassed by the repeated Urdu word majboori), a structural necessity borne of abject poverty that forces them into this type of work, they are far from disempowered.15 One of them speaks eloquently about how his fight for better working conditions and pay is not an individual but a collective struggle against systematised exploitation. His comments reveal a sophisticated understanding of class solidarity and a commitment to uplifting the condition of all workers, especially his younger comrades. A familiar strategy in recent art, the anthropomorphised ship forces a shift in perspective that displaces the human as the subject of history. Its animism enables the articulation of other conversations, statements and truths, broadening the film’s subject beyond labor rights. Near the end, a worker relates how pollution from ship-breaking has transformed the coast, pushing marine life back into deeper waters and compelling him to abandon his ancestral trade as a fisherman and seek work at the yard, the industry’s “slow violence” revealing the entangled vulnerabilities of labor and ecology.16 Finally, the success of Nabi’s film lies in precisely this intersectionality, its ability to oscillate between different registers of truth—between labour and ecology, gender and class, testimony and fable, veracious image and scripted voiceover, politics and aesthetics—without ever really settling anywhere. *** The Stonebreakers was conceived in response to its venue’s location in Abu Dhabi’s Mina Zayed neighborhood, situated between the city’s modern container and old dhow ports. Though an integral part of the country’s non-oil revenue, the modern container ports in the Emirates have received scant critical or artistic attention thus far.17 This can be partly attributed to the fact that though the majority of cargo continues to be transported by sea, the networks, economies and processes of maritime trade remain largely invisible, constituting what Sekula has called “the forgotten space” of modernity.18 Instead, air transport and information networks are more commonly heralded as the motors of globalisation. And security concerns (and general suspicions around photography), always heightened in the Gulf, limit physical access to the ports themselves. The works in The Stonebreakers were intended to provide local audiences with a portal into the world of global shipping, allowing them to better situate the port infrastructures that are an integral part of local cityscapes but remain inaccessible. Though dhow trade still remains active across the Arabian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, especially out of neighbouring Dubai and Sharjah, it is increasingly viewed as part of a pre-oil past and, as such, is commonly romanticised as heritage by the region’s fast-growing museum and culture industry. This nostalgic lens can obscure troubling historical realities, minimising the hardships and inequities of the maritime past. The Stonebreaker’s focus on the demolition of ships was intended as a counter measure to such hollow memorialisations of the past, which neither acknowledge its complexities nor properly mourn its passing. The exhibition’s focus on exploitative labor practices within modern maritime economies functioned as an oblique reminder of the past horrors of the Indian Ocean slave trade.19

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The key to understanding some of the other local resonances of The Stonebreakers lies in its somewhat enigmatic title, which I borrowed from a famous mid-nineteenth century Realist painting

by Gustave Courbet.20 The painting shows two peasants, a youth and an older man, dressed in tattered clothing, quarrying rocks in the French countryside. The youth’s body, shown from behind, twists awkwardly under the weight of a basket of stones, which he rests on his left knee for support.

To his right, the older man, shown in profile but with his face obscured by the shadow cast by his wide brimmed hat, kneels on one knee, his raised right arm holding a pick and poised to strike.

Painted in the aftermath of the 1848 Revolution, its unflinching portrayal of the rural poor, which showed in detail the impoverished conditions in which they worked, was a significant break from tradition. Presenting a subject previously considered unworthy of art it reveals Courbet’s political sympathies with the peasant and working classes. When first exhibited, the painting attracted both acclaim and criticism for its forthrightness and startling lack of sentiment. In the painting, the face, the portal for pity and empathy, is avoided; the focus is instead on the body at work, and specifically the contortions and exertions of manual labour.

Courbet’s painting inaugurated an important humanist tradition of socially conscious realism. As photography became more widespread it took over as the medium of choice for such subject matter, as exemplified in the Depression-era photographs of Lewis Hine and Dorothea Lange. This tradition, arguably, evolved over the course of the twentieth century into precisely the type of activist photojournalism and filmmaking that constitute the bulk of representations of the ship-breaking industry today. Influenced by post-structuralist and semiotic critiques of the politics of representation, artists like Sekula and Martha Rosler took a critical stance against such images, arguing that they simply reinforced the hierarchy between the privileged photographer/viewer and their destitute subjects, eliciting only pity and robbing their subjects of agency. Instead, they resisted objectifying the subaltern body through direct representation, revealing the photographic apparatus and supplementing their images with critical texts that acknowledged their privilege.

While the self-reflexivity we see in the practices of Ahmed, Kandalgaonkar and Nabi is indebted to such critiques of documentary practice, the younger artists go a step further, putting the legibility of the documentary mode as evidence into question through a recourse to fiction.

The exhibition’s title was, firstly, a ruse, intended to momentarily deflect the expectations the viewer might bring to an exhibition about shipbreaking. The idea was to counter the hypervisibility of humanist, humanitarian and journalistic accounts of the industry and clear space for the artist’s novel approaches, ones that are cognisant of the complex politics of representation around ship-breaking. Secondly, the titular reference to Courbet’s painting was a provocation, extending the exhibition’s examination of these politics of representation beyond the specificities of ship-breaking to other instances and sites of manual labour. Both the title and the subject matter of the painting function as a metaphorical bridge—a “real allegory” to quote the subtitle of a slightly later Courbet painting—linking shipbreaking to the construction industry.21 There is, of course, a direct connection between the two industries: the steel salvaged from the ships feeds into the local construction industry, especially in Bangladesh, where the capacity to industrially produce it is limited. The exhibition’s title acknowledges this material connection between industries and economies of destruction and construction, emphasising that under globalisation specific industries cannot be adequately examined and critiqued in isolation as each is a node in a vast shifting interconnected network that spans the planet.

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Like ship-breaking, construction in the Gulf relies heavily on low-cost migrant labour from South Asia and has similarly attracted the attention and ire of human rights and labour activists critical of exploitative labour laws and conditions within the industry. In 2011, a group of artists and other cultural practitioners initiated the Gulf Labor Boycott against the Western cultural institutions involved in the plans for the Saadiyat Island Cultural District, wielding the significant cultural capital they held as integral to the planned collections and programs of those institutions as leverage to advocate for labour reform.22 The reference to a French masterwork, which could easily have been on display at the nearby Louvre Abu Dhabi, was intended as a tongue-in-cheek reference to this history, a reminder that the heroic and unacknowledged efforts of manual labour are the foundation, literally and metaphorically, of all such cultural institutions. The eventual crackdown on the leaders of that boycott has made conversations around the status and value of manual labour and its cultural representations within the United Arab Emirates exceedingly difficult. The Stonebreakers proposed ship-breaking as a comparative case study, a “real allegory” through which one might begin to revive such important inquiries. Destroyed during World War II, Courbet’s lost masterpiece haunts the exhibition, casting a melancholic shadow back across and beyond the included works.

It reminds us that despite its ideological erasure under regimes of globalised capital and its withdrawal from contemporary representations of labour, the body at work never comes to rest.

For Linda, to whom the work of bodies mattered.

Notes 1 The exhibition opened on 7 March 2020 but was closed almost immediately due to the global pandemic. At the time of writing it is scheduled to reopen in September and run through to December 2020 2 For an overview of the history of the global shipbreaking industry and a detailed account of its practice in India specifically, see William Langewiesche, ‘The Shipbreakers’, The Atlantic Monthly 286, No. 2, 2000, pp. 31-49 3

See Greenpeace, Ships for Scrap VI–Steel and Toxic Wastes for Asia: Findings of a Greenpeace Visit to Darukhana Shipbreaking Yard in Mumbai, India, Amsterdam: Greenpeace India and Greenpeace Netherlands, 2003 and Greenpeace, End of Life Ships–The Human Cost of Breaking Ships (A Greenpeace-FIDH International Federation of Human Rights report in cooperation with YPSA), Amsterdam: Greenpeace, 2005

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4 Mike Crang, ‘The Death of Great Ships: Photography, Politics, and Waste in the Global Imaginary’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 42, 2010, pp. 1084-1102 5

Peter Hitchcock, Labor in Culture, Or, Worker or the World(s), London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, p. xi

6

Allan Sekula, ‘Conversation between Allan Sekula and Benjamin Buchloch’, Performance Under Working Conditions, Sabine Breitwieser (ed.), Vienna: Generali Foundation, 2003, p. 48

7

Saidya Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe 26, vol. 12, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1-14

8 Shanay Jhaveri, ‘Shumon Ahmed’, Frieze 176, 2016, p. 157. Jhaveri ascribes a painterly quality to these images and Ahmed himself cites the painter Zainul Abedin as an important influence 9 Following Christina Sharpe, I use “wake” here for both its nautical and funerary meanings. See Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Durham: Duke University Press, 2016 10 Gary Cohn and Will Englund of The Baltimore Sun won a Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting in 1998 for a series of articles that exposed the dangers posed to both workers and the environment by the unregulated ship-breaking industry, following a trail that took them from Baltimore to the yards at Alang and eventually resulted in the United States Navy ending its plans to export decommissioned ships for scrapping to the global South. Langewiesche provides a useful overview of the history of this coverage and the political attention it garnered in the United States as well as the Greenpeace campaigns that followed 11 Container size is now the standardised unit for the capacity of container ships, which is measured in either twenty-foot (TEU) or forty-foot equivalent units (2-TEU) 12

Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 1995, p. 12

13 Conventional documentaries include Shaheen Dill-Riaz’s Iron Eaters (2007) and Park Bong-Nam’s Iron Crows (2009) while Peter Hutton’s At Sea (2007) and Yasmine Kabir’s The Last Rites (2008) employ a more avant-garde approach 14

Langewiesche comprehensive account of shipbreaking at Alang is rare in its inclusion of the perspective of yard owners

15

Hira Nabi, ‘How to Dismantle a Ship in Nine Steps’, Texte zur Kunst 114, 2019, pp. 114-119

16

Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011

17

The notable exception is Stephen J. Ramos, Dubai Amplified: The Engineering of a Port Geography, Farnham; Burlington: Ashgate Press, 2010 18 Sekula, Fish Story, pp. 48-54. The quoted phrase is the title of Sekula’s famous 2010 film essay, made in collaboration with Nöel Burch, which examines the symbolic and material networks of contemporary maritime trade and builds on his observations in Fish Story 19 The Indian Ocean slave trade and its role in pearling and maritime trade are still taboo subjects at the region’s cultural institutions.

A notable recent exception was Look for Me All Around You, the Claire Tancons-curated section of the 14th Sharjah Biennial, which suggested parallels between the slave trade across the Atlantic and around the Indian Ocean littoral 20 For discussions on Courbet’s painting and the socio-political context in which it was painted see Linda Nochlin, Realism, New York: Penguin Books, 1971, pp. 111-137, and Timothy J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1973, pp. 77-100 21 On the allegorical use of realism see Linda Nochlin, ‘Courbet’s Real Allegory: Rereading The Painter’s Studio’, Courbet Reconsidered, Sarah Faunce and Linda Nochlin eds, Brooklyn: The Brooklyn Museum; New Haven, Yale University Press, 1988, pp. 17-42 22

For more information about the boycott see Andrew Ross (ed.), The Gulf: High Culture/Hard Labor, New York: OR Books, 2015

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The Nemesis and The Muse: E. Phillips Fox’s Cook and Daniel Boyd’s Pirates

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Here, in this jolly-boat they graced, Were food and freedom, wind and storm, While, fowling-piece across his waist, Cook mapped the coast, with one eye cocked for game.1 As the Australian poet Kenneth Slessor wrote in Five Visions of Captain Cook (1931), the Admiralty man had many facets. In Australia in 2020, the nation marks the much anticipated and maligned sestercentennial of James Cook’s arrival on the eastern shore of the continent, and the legacy of colonisation is yet to be reconciled 250 years on. Such anniversaries in the settler-nation’s calendar are always testy times, bringing conflicting ideologies and unfinished business under telescopic focus, salting unhealed wounds on one hand and spicing up nationalist sentiments on the other.

The first Australian centenary of 1888, leading up to the Federation of the six colonies into the nationstate of Australia in 1901 was a celebration of the latter—blue skies, golden summers and fair skin.

By comparison, the 1988 Bicentenary and the re-enactment of Governor Arthur Phillip’s First Fleet seemed tasteless, parting the waters for the postcolonial reckoning still shaping the nation today, (often at the behest of Indigenous contemporary artists).

The long shadow of the 1988 legacy falls across the formal ambitions of the sestercentennial.

While part of a larger multi-nation, four-year commemoration of Cook’s first ‘Voyage of Discovery’ to the Pacific (1768-71), the Australian government contribution of $50 million pledged in 2018 seemed a gesture of excess. Would it be a Cook salute, or would it seek further atonement for the catastrophic consequences that HMS Endeavour later rendered on Australia’s First People? Among a raft of official and more informal events and exhibitions, a planned commemoration of Cook’s landing at Botany Bay on 29 April received the most press, as if signalling the way forward. Billed as “The Meeting of Two Cultures 2020”, it entailed a significant upgrade of Kamay/Botany Bay National Park,2 the unveiling of three commissioned commemorative installations by Indigenous artists and a program of “immersive, educational and evocative truth-telling experience through… events and interactive storytelling.”3

How can a nation make twenty-first century sense of this eighteenth century “meeting of two cultures”? Since 1988, some artists have been proclaiming their answer: rewrite the myths to privilege the other side of the story, “the story from the shore,”4 to name another 2020 project by filmmaker Alison Page and the National Museum of Australia.

As it happened, the truth-telling in Kamay/Botany Bay never occurred, cancelled due to the COVID-19 lockdown. The political poster artist Chips MacKinolty caused a stir with his Cookpostage stamp image, The First Pandemic: Commemorating 250 years of Colonial Virus-COVID-1770, but the corollary was not lost on the public: British colonial possession in 1770, British ‘boat people’ crashing sovereign borders in 1788 and a sea of troubles ever since. Or as Indigenous artist and curator Brook Andrew’s 2020 Biennale of Sydney public program read, … we challenge the dominant narrative that the arrival of a British sailor [Cook] who pillaged his way across the Pacific is a more impressive story than the 60,000 years of continuous history of Australia’s Indigenous people… On 29 April First Nations artists will take centre stage… in the historic Sydney Town Hall… to flip this flawed history… as we debate, “to cook Cook or not?”5

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The Nemesis and The Muse: E. Phillips Fox’s Cook and Daniel Boyd’s Pirates

Daniel Boyd’s painting We Call them Pirates Out Here (2006) is a popular portal to this proliferating linguistic and visual discourse, and it came some years ahead of the sestercentennial tide. A humorous flag-burning exercise, the work de-commissions a canonical icon in the settler-nation story: Emanuel Phillips Fox’s The Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, 1770 (1902), commissioned to mark the Federation of Australia in 1901. By law of attracting opposites, these two ‘psycho-pendant’ paintings by Fox and Boyd made over a century apart continue to demonstrate the power of myth —and its creative and temporal unravelling. Put another way, each painting reinforced the potency of the other, both the nemesis and the muse that make us look again at history.

“Cook,” penned Slessor, “was a captain of the Admiralty/When sea-captains had the evil eye.”6 Embracing this ever popular swashbuckling theme, Boyd’s We Call them Pirates Out Here is his most ambitious in a series of appropriation paintings made between 2005 and 2007 in which portraits of colonial Empire heroes were wittily dethroned. His first quarry was John Webber’s Portrait of Captain James Cook RN (1782), acquired by the new National Portrait Gallery in Canberra for $5.3 million in 2000. With support from private benefactors, the ‘foundational’ acquisition attracted public criticism, especially from Indigenous communities offended by the Cook “discovery” narrative. When patron Bob Oatley expressed the sentiment that “Australia is the greatest nation in the world, it has everything and it has a future… but often people don’t have a true sense of our history,”7 he was not being ironic.

Boyd’s first Cook after Webber, copied from a gallery postcard, became Captain No Beard (2005). The portrait’s aristocratic formality and masculine force (hand hovering above his hilt) is shifted sideways to caricature. He repeated the subject, Captain No Beard after Nathaniel Dance’s famous portrait of Cook. Additional paintings of Governor No Beard (2005) (Governor Phillip after Francis Wheatley), Sir No Beard (2009) (Joseph Banks after Benjamin West) and King No Beard (2007) (King George III after Nathaniel Dance) all brandish the signs of lawless, trophy-hunting pirates, the parrot and the eye-patch, along with more sinister tokens of slaughter: skull necklaces and a decapitated Aboriginal head in a specimen jar which Boyd modelled on himself. Implicated in this gruesome subject is the colonial practice of collecting Indigenous human remains, in this instance the Eora resistance fighter Pemulwuy who was killed by the British in 1802 and held in the private collection of naturalist and botanist, Joseph Banks, who accompanied Cook on his 1768-71 voyage.8

That such dark histories can be explored through spirited parody by Indigenous artists demonstrate conciliatory performances within a self-reflexive art world; it’s a case of knowing your patron and the self-immolating desires of your audiences. Boyd shares with a cast of Indigenous artist peers in this task, and his readily accessible appropriations have found safe harbour in Australia’s public institutions, further reflecting the nation’s earnest efforts to decolonise and reconcile. But it was a very different set of self-aggrandising desires that shaped the Australian nation at the dawn of the twentieth century when Fox constructed his grand history painting, Landing of Captain Cook, the key ingredient in Boyd’s signature Cook.

Emanuel Phillips Fox’s brief for the National Gallery of Victoria’s Gilbee Bequest came with clear instructions and cloudy paradoxes. The painting had to celebrate a precise moment in Australian history with “historical accuracy” and a sense of theatrical occasion, but it had to be painted in England.9 A star pupil of the National Gallery School in Melbourne, the young Fox had already sailed to Europe in 1887 in the Antipodean conventions of his day. He studied at illustrious Parisian ateliers, practiced en plein air on The Continent and immersed himself in the cosmopolitan, expatriate community in St Ives, Cornwall. Like Boyd, he too had had an earlier audience with 68 | 69

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Cook, creating Captain James Cook (copy of Nathanial Dance original in the Greenwich Hospital) in 1891 before returning to Melbourne the following year. His induction into French Impressionism may seem contrary to the nation’s Anglophile sentiment and its nationalistic public commission, but Fox’s international credentials paid dividends and he duly returned to England in 1901 to take up the Cook assignment.

Before leaving Australia in March 1901, Fox made extensive landscape studies and measurements at Kurnell in Kamay/Botany Bay—at much the same time as the first ever reenactment of the Landing, performed as part of the Federation celebrations. In the interests of authenticity demanded from empire history painting, he executed several studies of Aboriginal men at the nearby settlement of La Perouse (named after the French explorer Jean François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse, who in 1788 encountered the First Fleet several days after its arrival, but never made it home to France). Back in London, Fox studied eighteenth century period dress before finishing the painting at St. Ives, among Australian expatriate artists including Will Ashton, who apparently posed for the figure of Cook.10

Gallery Trustees endorsed Fox’s Federation picture’s subject of a “glorified conquest” that upheld the values of Empire, while it conveniently truncated the messy convict genealogies born of the First Fleet in 1788. It locks in the framework for the White Australia Policy and guarantees British Australia’s birthright, primary goals of Federation. Under pressure, Fox took no risks, keeping with modern history painting traditions established by Benjamin West in the time of Cook (West’s groundbreaking at the time populist The Death of General Wolfe [1770] shares the 250 year birthday in 2020); l

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The Nemesis and The Muse: E. Phillips Fox’s Cook and Daniel Boyd’s Pirates

the Apollo Belvedere is referenced in the stature of Cook and Banks as “a device of ennoblement” and art historian Ruth Zubans further suggests the maritime-genre painter Charles M. Padday’s pirating picture Marooned (c. 1899) as a likely compositional template.11

Fox’s seamen-adventurers are caricatures of the genre, enthusiastically escorting their Lieutenant (yet to be promoted to captain) Cook to the upper crest of the beach to make his seminal, flag-planting gesture. With its high-keyed cobalt blue sea and sky, the robust naval explorers are heroically silhouetted against the elemental magnificence of the Australian landscape.

The HMS Endeavour bobs in the background and two longboats bridge the watery passage, but the primary action is Cook’s enigmatic gesture. Standing in the centre of a triangular tableau capped by a billowing red ensign, Cook is a gleaming figure in white, his loins centring the composition as if to stake his patriarchal authority. The tension between the three figures aiming their muskets toward two Aboriginal men in the far right-hand distance (to which Banks, on Cook’s left, points) is animated by a circular movement generated by the pointing of Cook, Banks, the guns and the spears.

In consultation with Cook’s journals, Fox’s chosen moment is the third shot fired by the visitors.

Cook’s outstretched arm, a classic regal gesture signifying magisterial power, is often interpreted as a pacifying command, a symbol of the enlightened leader’s humanity, but the gesture is openended. Is Cook’s command to shoot or not? And what of his gaze, along his own arm, as scholar Golnar Nabizadeh concludes, in a “triangular visual loop,” creating “a metonym for the colonial project’s march through time.”12 Perhaps intentionally, Fox leaves the question hanging, though Cook’s journal was clear: keep firing.

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Indigenous Australian artist Julie Gough, who addressed Fox’s The Landing in her 2001 installation, Chase, suggests that Cook is sleepwalking, metaphorically blind to his actions and his environment. But if Fox’s depiction of Cook with outstretched arm has had people guessing—the late Indigenous Australian artist Gordon Bennett appropriated it a century later in Notes to Basquiat (Death of Irony) (2002)—Fox’s source is Webber’s The Death of Captain Cook (1784), which depicts Cook signalling to his Marines for help moments before he was stabbed in the back by Hawaiian natives.

This mortal reference adds another dimension of mystique and tragedy to the image.

If there are ambivalent and esoteric meanings in Fox’s painting, Boyd takes the very different and direct approach of satire. Appealing to ones’ artistic and social peers was and remains a matter of importance and hitting the cultural zeitgeist was as much a defining principle of contemporary art practice for Fox and as it is for Boyd. Boyd’s artistic rites of passage seek different honours and audiences to Fox, as his pastiche of Fox’s practice indicates. A practitioner of the postcolonial school of revisionist histories, and popular culture, We Call them Pirates Out Here takes its title from the soundtrack of the Wes Anderson film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004). Whereas Fox faithfully renders historical figures (while modelling from friends), Boyd inserts his own social network, ostensibly implicating contemporary audiences in the original act of colonisation, and by design, the reconciliatory aspirations of twenty-first century Australia.

Eclipsing the scale of Fox’s original, Boyd’s work emulates the aesthetic of the postcard from which he made a number of his ‘pirate’ copies. To reinforce his point, Boyd incorporates a white border with the work’s title written in faux-Edwardian copperplate script across the gutter of the canvas. The postcard/painting imitates an ironic souvenir representing the ‘wildlife’ out here in the Pacific, as gang-ho, colonial bounty hunters. In Boyd’s heraldic vision, a hybrid ‘Jolly Jack’ flag replaces the British Navy’s ensign, no mistaking Cook’s marauding pirate insignia, the black eye-patch eye repeating the skull’s empty socket. For a gestalt flash the rippling skull elicits the anamorphic skull of Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533), crystallising the landing party’s failure of cultural diplomacy.

As a recent art school graduate, Boyd would have been well-versed in the colonial art historical conventions of ‘propaganda/settler’ imagery and its current revisionism, hence the import of his touristic missive. It was Boyd’s intention to one day send his Cooked-up pirates back to England as if serving a summons for crimes committed against Indigenous Australians; the wish was realised in 2018 when the painting was included with Fox’s Landing in Captain Cook: The Voyages in The British Library, one of the mother country’s sestercentennial’s exhibition programs. More effective from an institutional perspective was Boyd’s three-month residency at The Natural History Museum in London, researching the First Fleet collection in 2011. Archival research by Australian Indigenous artists in the Empire’s collections has become a regular, mutually instructive endeavour and something of a professional rite of passage, offering unique perspectives from the other side.13

As state-funded forces guard inanimate statues of dead white men in parks, gardens and civic squares under fear of Black Lives Matter rallies, Fox’s Landing—a likely icon for retaliatory violence—lies safely out of sight if not out of mind at the national Gallery of Victoria, while Melbourne’s other galleries and museums enter (at the time of writing) their second COVID-19 lockdown. According to one long-term curator, the painting was an awkward moment in an increasingly embarrassing narrative, until the agency and creative investment of Indigenous artists and curators began to take effect in the 1990s. But for all the political changes brought about since Federation, Australia remains a constitutional monarchy with a British sovereign. The ongoing l

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The Nemesis and The Muse: E. Phillips Fox’s Cook and Daniel Boyd’s Pirates

project for the multicultural nation is not a single landing site but a cross-cultural meeting which is still playing out in the contemporary cultural imaginary.

On the horizon line of Boyd’s We Call them Pirates Out Here a plume of smoke rises into the dark sky, a signifier of Aboriginal hearth and homelands—the human habitation countering the fiction of terra nullius (empty land) by which Cook claimed the continent on Queensland’s eponymous Possession Island on 22 August, 1770. Though the doctrine of terra nullius was overturned in the Australian High Court in 1992 with the Mabo ruling, questions of sovereignty and constitutional recognition are still far from complete.14 While Fox’s picture gives clear evidence of Indigenous occupation, his Aboriginal subjects are presented in hostile animation, noble savages brandishing their weapons as if they have no language and no civilised or social claim on the land. The bark huts nearby only serve to reinforce the sense of itinerancy and primitive technology, whereas Boyd’s smoke signals a perennial domesticity and millennia of firestick farming the land.

If there is a mysterious ambivalent element in Boyd’s painting, it’s the substitution of the two resisting Aborigines with two passive native grass trees, xanthorrhoea. Boyd is teasing out the once-common name ‘black-boy’ given these graceful—and fire-dependent—plants by the colonisers.

The tall flower-spikes resemble spears and the foliage of dense needles shimmers like ceremonial garb. Anecdotally, ‘black boy’ comes from an Aboriginal word “barga” for boy; however, the Latin xanthorrhoea is now considered the respectful term. Boyd creates a proxy by way of the grass trees, returning the colonial gaze that conflated Indigenous people with wild nature while suggesting the absurdity of Fox’s ostentatious pictorial re-enactment of a botched greeting in which Cook misread all the social and cultural signals: as if a Don Quixote, tilting at trees.

Parodying colonial officers launched Boyd’s art career, though a few years later his aesthetic style shifted from realist copy to grisaille dotting and video, employing more subtle facsimiles of modernity’s icons. But there’s another ‘black boy’ who Boyd owes a debt to, and one painting in particular from Gordon Bennett’s cornucopia of Cook-critical works that sings out from the archive.

Metaphysical Landscape (To the sound of cicadas no.3) (1990) presents a black and white pointillist view from the shore, looking through a screen of casuarina and flowering xanthorrhoea to the HMS Endeavour as it approaches landfall. The master of this gaze is unequivocal, and Bennett was a master of the hybrid, art-historical appropriation style in which Cook and his documentarians held high rank.

Fox died in 1915 as a new myth was being born on a foreign shore, of the Anzac legend of Australian sacrifice for ‘King and Country’. But the Pacific explorer he commemorated so dutifully has a long tail. Ironically, it is Indigenous artists who are writing the contemporary myths of Cook, as far afield as Central Australia where the figurative painter Vincent Namatjira, great grandson of Australia’s first Indigenous art celebrity Albert Namatjira (1902-1959) won the lucrative Ramsay Art Prize in 2019: a free-standing double-sided portrait, Close Contact (2018) which features his selfportrait on one side and Cook, from Fox’s Landing of Captain Cook, on the reverse, literally “shoulder to shoulder… unambiguously ambivalent… obverse and reverse renderings of a double-sided vision of our shared past,” according to curator Lisa Slade.15 Such perennial engagements with Cook’s complex legacy have, somewhat ironically, promoted his iconography within the national (and the Pacific) psyche: tight white trousers, gold-rimmed tricorne hat and right hand raised in a sign of divine power. As the eighteenth century “Daemons in periwigs,/doling out magic” demonstrated, it’s better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.16

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The Nemesis and The Muse: E. Phillips Fox’s Cook and Daniel Boyd’s Pirates

Born in Cairns in 1982, Daniel Boyd would have known the tourist town’s big Captain Cook, a gauche concrete sculpture with a phallic, outstretched arm, standing in the lineage of Australian ‘big things’—bananas, pineapples and prawns. Like the more robust bronze and marble statuary of masculine endeavours which punctuate public places and now look devilishly misguided, this one has been the subject of ‘removal’ campaigns. If nothing else, it may be where Boyd first learned to laugh at folly.

Notes 1 Kenneth Slessor, ‘Five Visions of Captain Cook’, Collected Poems, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, HarperCollins Australia, 1992; https://www. poetryfoundation.org/poems/47089/five-visions-of-captain-cook 2

The agreed Indigenous name for the local area is Kamay (or Gamay) from the Dharawal language

3

Sutherland Shire Council, ‘The Meeting of Two Cultures Program’, NSW State Government; https://www.sutherlandshire.nsw.gov.au/ Community/What39s-On-in-the-Shire/The-Meeting-of-Two-Cultures-2020-Programme 4 National Museum Australia, ‘The Message–the Story from the Shore’, National Museum Australia; https://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/ endeavour-voyage/the-message 5

Biennale of Sydney, ‘Nirin-Wir’, Sydney: City of Sydney, 2020, p. 20

6

Slessor, ‘Five Visions of Captain Cook’

7

Brian Dale, ‘The Quiet Australian’, National Portrait Gallery; https://www.portrait.gov.au/magazines/2/the-quiet-australian

8

Cara Pinchbeck, ‘Sir No Beard: Daniel Boyd’, Art Gallery of NSW; https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/378.2012/

9

Two paintings were created from the Gilbee Request. The other commission went to John Longstaff, whose work finally completed in 1907 celebrated the heroic but fatally flawed mission of Melbourne’s inland explorers Burke and Wills 10

Ruth Zubans, E. Phillips Fox: His Life and Art, Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 1995, p. 99

11

Ibid., p. 100

12

Golnar Nabizadeh, ‘Of Rabbits and Pirates: After-Images of E. Phillip Fox’s Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, 1770’, Adaption 9 no.1, 2015, p. 39 13

Daniel Boyd, Daniel Boyd: The Law of Closure, Dan Rule (ed.), Melbourne and Sydney: Perimeter Editions, 2015, p. 70-71

14

First invoked in late-nineteenth-century international law, terra nullius is a legal concept that in special cases gave colonisers sovereignty over occupied territory. For centuries, the European “law of nations” paradigm had accepted that states could acquire territory through conquest, or through treaties with existing occupants or, in the case of unoccupied land, through the “Discovery Doctrine”. In order to explain how European sovereigns had acquired colonies like New South Wales, which had clearly been occupied at the time of colonisation and had neither been ceded by its indigenous inhabitants (through treaties) nor truly conquered by the coloniser according to international law, jurists adopted the term terra nullius to extend the meaning of unoccupied land to include “barbarous country”, territory occupied by “backward” or “uncivilised” people, or “territory practically unoccupied”. In this way, terra nullius emerged as a legal concept that gave colonisers sovereignty over occupied territory if, as it was claimed, the inhabitants were not united permanently for political action within the European comity of nations, and so lacked statehood. As it often does, the law made explicit or conscious what had long been implicit or taken for granted when Lt. James Cook invoked the conditions of the Discovery Doctrine when he claimed New South Wales for the British Monarch; thus, the concept of terra nullius sharpened rather than overturned long held beliefs regarding the cultural and legal superiority of the European nations and their rights of sovereignty. In 1992, the Indigenous activist Eddie Mabo won a long-running case in the High Court of Australia known as The Mabo Decision, in which the Meriam people of the Murray Islands, in the Thursday Island group, were awarded the first Australian example of Native Title, on the basis of their long and continued occupation of the place being recognised by the common law as having survived alongside the British Crown claims of sovereignty 15 Lisa Slade, ‘Reframing Cook and his legacy through an artist’s lens’, INDAILY, 28 May 2020; https://indaily.com.au/opinion/2020/05/28/ reframing-cook-and-his-legacy-through-an-artists-lens/ 16

Slessor, op cit.

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A Perfect (Shit)Storm: On Memes, Movements and Geopolitics

It all began with a sentence: “the internet is for everyone.” But now we’re living with the reality, it’s not quite what we expected.1 The Coriolis Effect is the name of a phenomenon caused by the earth’s rotation which makes tropical cyclones swirl clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere and counter-clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere. No tropical cyclone has been known to pass the equator since the storm would have to work against its initial direction of spin, but the theoretical possibility of a crossover has not been ruled out.2 The idea of a storm that is strong enough to turn direction once it moves from one side of the world to the other came to mind when thinking about Pepe the Frog: the first meme to be classified as a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League in 2016 due to its appropriation by the U.S. alt-right, which resurfaced as a mascot for Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement in 2019.

Pepe is an anthropomorphic frog with a long and winding narrative arc. He debuted in 2005 as a character in Matt Furie’s comic series Boy’s Club.3 As the story goes, a specific panel launched the Pepe meme, circa 2008, in which Pepe says “Feels good man” after peeing with his trousers down.4 “By 2010,” writes media anthropologist Gabriele de Seta, “the character’s stylised expression had already become one of the most distinctive examples of American digital folklore… circulating in relatively unknown bodybuilding forums.”5 The meme was then “picked up by users of larger discussion boards like Something Awful, 4chan, and Reddit,” becoming something of a mascot for these communities, with Pepe’s image “quickly spun into an endless series of self-referential variations.”6 74 | 75

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Pepe reached peak mainstream in November 2014 when American singer Katy Perry posted about Australian jetlag on Twitter with the image of a crying Pepe, followed by a bootylicious Pepe featured on singer/rapper Nicki Minaj’s Instagram that December. This is when things took a dark turn. Devout members of the Pepe-verse, centred around the frankly terrifying ‘incel’ communities of 4chan, began to sabotage their meme in order to reclaim it, flooding the online space with offensive versions of Pepe to deter any ‘normie’ from using his image.7 Still, “Pepe’s popularity continued to soar,” and “his hateful side began to grow,” reported Dani Di Placido, “as both harmless trolls and genuine racists continued to pump out Nazi-themed Pepe memes.”8

Then came the 2016 US presidential elections. A May 2016 Daily Beast article quotes anonymous Twitter users who described an organised effort around Pepe—later denied in a Daily Caller article, whose author conceded that he couldn’t tell if his sources were trolling him or not9—to “push white nationalism into a very mainstream position,” thus “setting up… a massive cultural shift.”10 That shift was solidified in autumn 2016, when Hilary Clinton described Trump supporters as “a basket of deplorables” to which Donald Trump Jr. responded by sharing an image of the movie poster for The Dependables with the title changed to ‘The Deplorables’ and the film’s characters replaced by Trump allies, Pepe included. Shortly after, Clinton’s campaign published a primer outlining Pepe as a hate symbol. Even still, Trump, who retweeted an image of himself as ‘President Pepe’ in 2015, won.

Trump’s election was declared a victory for “meme magic” in which memes are capable of influencing real-world events. (One Washington Post article quoted a 4chan user, who proclaimed: “We actually elected a meme as president.”11) At the time, journalist Douglas Haddow, who describes memes as “Molotov jpegs,” reflected on the “meme warfare” he waged as a staff writer at the anticapitalist, “culture-jamming” publication, Adbusters. “Back in 2010, the idea of using memes to political ends was still housed within a fairly slim leftist-activist corridor,” Haddow wrote.12 It was around this time that “political events started to become ‘memetic’,”13 with Obama’s 2008 and 2012 election campaigns lauded for their “tech-savvy, data-heavy use of social media, voter profiling, and microtargeting,”14 the so-called Arab Spring launching a flurry of movements across the world, and Adbusters tweeting #occupywallstreet for the first time.15 l

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A Perfect (Shit)Storm: On Memes, Movements and Geopolitics

“Never in our most ironic dreams,” Haddow continues, “did we the think that the spirit of our tired, lager-fuelled pisstakes would end up leading to a resurgence of white nationalism and make the prospect of a fascist America faintly realistic.”16 Buoyed by Trump’s success, the alt-right became increasingly visible as the Overton Window definitively expanded, and the world “seemed to have taken on the… quality of a message-board fight.”17 Shortly after the election, the president of the white nationalist National Policy Institute, Richard Spencer, boldly echoed the infamous ‘heil Hitler’ salute when he opened his speech at a Washington conference. In 2017, he was filmed getting punched in the face as he was about to explain the symbolism of his Pepe badge.

Meanwhile, Pepe’s creator, Matt Furie, attempted to rehabilitate his character, launching a #SavePepe campaign with the Anti-Defamation League, writing a TIME op-ed titled, ‘I’m Reclaiming Him. He Was Never About Hate,’ and embarking on a legal crusade against Pepe’s use by the altright. In 2017, Furie had the author of a self-published Islamophobic children’s book featuring Pepe donate all profits from the book’s sales to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, while in 2018 he made the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer remove Pepe’s images.18 In June 2019, Furie reached a settlement with Infowars, which had been selling merchandise with Pepe’s image. He even tried killing Pepe off, staging his funeral in a one-page strip released on Free Comic Book Day in May 2017.

But Pepe would not—could not—die. Versions showed him arisen as a zombie. Earlier in 2017, the Russian Embassy posted a Pepe on twitter to troll the UK government, while images of Pepe Le Pen, named after the leader of the far-right National Front Party in France, began circulating around the French presidential elections.

“The harsh truth is that Furie’s latest gambit to change Pepe’s legacy isn’t likely to be any more successful than his previous attempts,” wrote Aja Romero for Vox; “Remix culture is a doubleedged sword.”19 As “a class of media that has emerged with distributed, platform-based networks”20 internet memes are open to a decentralised process of mutation through their virulent circulation, which renders ownership and authorship void. When an image on the internet strikes a chord it takes on a life of its own, evolving through an ever-growing, non-linear chain of connections that strike out to form new paths as they develop in a rhizomatic state of constant flux. “Networks of memes never reach a moment of stability,” says internet culture researcher Marley-Vincent Lindsay; “there will always be another remix, on top of the remixes of the remixes, creating a seemingly endless tree of variation that snakes back on itself,” continues An Xiao Mina.21 To quote Haddow, the internet can be “weird like that“—“It takes things and twists them.”22 Cue Pepe’s reincarnation in Hong Kong. *** “Tropical cyclones are like giant engines that use warm, moist air as fuel,” states a NASA explainer.

While not known to have crossed the equator, they form near its line, where warm surface waters can evaporate to make cumulonimbus clouds, with the resulting low pressure pulling more air in.

In short, a tropical cyclone is a movement: when enough air has accumulated, a storm is created that draws more molecules into its spin. This is one way to think about Pepe’s ascent: a history that “has for the most part been narrated as a thoroughly American story,” writes de Seta, even though the meme was circulating in China well before the US presidential elections as a biaoqing, “a term that describes a broad category of digital content including emoticons, reaction images, animated GIFs, and stickers.”23 76 | 77

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In Pepe the Sad Frog Coloring Book and Chinese Language Guide, Fei Liu suggests that Pepe emerged in China in 2008, becoming “a go-to sticker for vocalising complaint on the internet” or “fighting with pictures,” which Fei Liu interprets “as using memes for a ‘battle of wits’ not unlike what happens on American social media.”24 Pepe’s appearance in Hong Kong is thus not as surprising as some would believe. Even before the historic June anti-extradition marches in 2019—as early as 2014, according to the Hong Kong-based Rare Pepe Party Facebook page moderator—Pepe was already a common emoticon, appearing as an overworked office worker, for example.25 As the protest movement grew, so new Pepe identities emerged, including a frontline protester with distinctive yellow hard hat; appearing on storefronts to signal allegiance with the so-called Yellow Movement, “Post-its decorating the city’s many Lennon Walls,” and “backpacks of peaceful airport protesters, inviting tourists to scan a QR code that led to details of the movement’s five demands.”26

None of the Hong Kong protestors seemed to know of Pepe’s hateful associations in the West; for them he was a benign symbol of the movement’s youthful energy.27 (Indeed, the AntiDefamation League cautions that not all Pepes are signs of white supremacy.28) That energy was on full display on the night of 1 July 2019, the 22nd anniversary of the former British colony’s handover to China, when a tense day-long stand-off with police climaxed with protestors storming the city’s Legislative Council building and brandishing Hong Kong’s colonial flag in the main hall. The gesture was an uncomfortable detournement, as problematic as the sight of protestors waving UK and US flags on Hong Kong’s streets, or the strong support for the movement from US neo-conservatives, particularly when looking at such events through a decolonial lens and with Pepe’s ominous Western spectre in mind.

But these optics point to Hong Kong’s double bind. Having been brought to the edge of democracy by its former coloniser, its freedoms are being taken away by a new one, which complicates any kind of decolonial reading of the city, not to mention the global superpowers that have a stake in it. By aligning with the international community with which Hong Kong’s Basic Law associates (and which should protect Hong Kong’s international system through to 2047)—whether petitioning G20 countries to “liberate Hong Kong” from “Chinese colonisation” or requesting, as pop star Denise Ho did in July 2019, a special session on Hong Kong’s autonomy at the United Nations Human Rights Council29—the Hong Kong movement has played into, or on, an old Cold War axis, whereby liberal democracy is pitted against communist totalitarianism. This narrative suited Trump, who in November 2019, amid a US-China trade war, signed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act (HKHRDA) into law.

For scholars Ellie Tse and Chris Chien, the bipartisan support among US politicians for the HKHRDA “highlights the re-emergence of a Cold War model of antagonistic geopolitics that imagines a battle between two superpowers—except this time between the US and the PRC.”30 And things have only continued to heat up. After a US-China ‘phase one’ trade deal was signed in January 2020, Beijing announced a fast-tracked National Security Law to be passed over Hong Kong in May that year, prompting Trump to declare Hong Kong no longer autonomous enough to uphold the United States-Hong Kong Policy Act of 1992, which considers the territory separately from China. What followed was unanimous US Senate approval for a bill laying out sanctions on Chinese officials undermining Hong Kong’s autonomy.31 Once again, the Cold War analogy was raised, this time by pro-democracy lawmaker Claudia Mo: “Hong Kong is being made a new Berlin,” she said, “We are caught right in the middle of it.”32

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But while it is true that Hong Kong is caught in the middle of an ongoing trade war between two global superpowers while simultaneously negotiating political and civil autonomy in the context of post-colonial assimilation and/or de-/re-colonisation, Tse and Chien point out how unhelpful the Cold War rhetoric is when taking into account the “binary nationalist worldview” this framing supports, which both the US and China seem to play up in order to support their geopolitical agendas. As they write, “The US’ penchant for political reversals, in addition to mutual US-PRC interest in putting open markets ahead of workers, should be a clarion call to sceptics and protesters alike to refuse a retrenchment in binarism and the use of entire peoples as bargaining chips.”33 To quote writer Wilfred Chan, “When it comes to the question of Hong Kong’s autonomy, I think that neither China nor the United States desires Hong Kong to truly be free.”34

Chan is a member of the Lausan Collective, a platform for decolonial left perspectives that resists Western and Chinese imperialisms by building trans-national and trans-social networks of anti-capitalist solidarity. In 2019, he interviewed Avery Ng, chairman of the League of Social Democrats, a left-wing political party in Hong Kong, about the city’s “broad-spectrum movement against a totalitarian government.”35 Ng pointed out that Hong Kong’s struggle is not “a purely leftist fight” because a unified stand is crucial. Despite their differences, the movement includes centrists and right-wingers, some of whom reflect a rise in recent years of “an anti-migrant, rightwing ‘Hong Kong first’ sentiment,” echoing a general resurgence in nativist, nationalist politics across the world.36

This divergent diversity speaks to Hong Kong’s contextual particularities. Ng concedes that “most people do not know how to distinguish between right and left because of [Hong Kong’s] historical context,” with the city historically developing to the right of China, under the wing of a neoliberal, Western coloniser.37 Leftist positions are often “labelled as pro-Communism,” Ng explains, which in short means “pro-CCP,” a confusion that becomes more complicated when considering the Chinese State often appears communist only in name, since it has evolved to become something of a hybrid of neoliberal and totalitarian state capitalism with neo-imperialist characteristics.38 This all feeds into the complexity of Pepe’s evolution as a meme that has become a political symbol in two very different contexts, and which contains a spectrum of meaning as a result—something that resonates with Lausan’s statement regarding the complexity of their own position: “Though what constitutes ‘the left’ in Hong Kong is far from clear,” they write, “we hold the multiple meanings of this term and political category together in tension.”39

The idea of a political term holding together divergent positions resonates with Ernesto Laclau’s definition of an empty signifier, whose ‘emptiness’ unifies diverse groups—a unity made possible in the establishment of “a frontier of exclusion” that institutes an antagonism with a repressive power (in short, a common enemy).40 The empty signifier represents an incommensurable totality, Laclau explains: “a body split between the particularity which it still is and the more universal signification of which it is the bearer.”41 This incommensurability relates to the function of a politicised internet meme as an image that facilitates “what [Chantal] Mouffe would call a ‘libidinal bond’ in the formation of an ‘us’.”42 As Paul Torino and Adrian Wohlleben write in relation to the yellow vest as a meme for the grassroots gilets jaunes movement in France, “The fluidity of the meme makes it possible to join a march, a blockade or a roundabout occupation without having to buy into a ‘common interest’ or the legitimising ‘beliefs’ of a movement. It does not solve, but simply defers the question of a common grammar of suffering to a later point.”43

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To contain an ever-expanding multiplicity is all part of a meme’s magic. What Scott Wark and McKenzie Wark consider as fetish: not simply because of “what it says about our ‘consciousness’ of heterogeneous value systems,” but because of the anthropological fetish as “a physical object that mediates values that are otherwise ‘incommensurable’.”44 As they explain, it is the continued circulation of the internet meme that constitutes it as a collectively produced object. This in turn facilitates a meme’s ambiguous oscillation between the seeming incommensurability of the ‘instance’ and ‘plurality’, in which it can be taken as both a specific instance and as a “gesture towards an envisaged totality of related instances of it.”45 This simultaneous expression relates to Limor Shifman’s understanding of an internet meme as “cultural information that passes along from person to person,” which “gradually scales into a shared social phenomenon.”46 Returning to Wark and Wark, “Circulation smooths the ambiguity between the Internet meme’s instance and its plurality into something that net culture works with intuitively,” mutating “through acts of collective production that stretch and mould [its] features to affect the plurality through the instance.”47

Pepe’s stretch and mould continued in Hong Kong in December 2019, when a pop-up store appeared selling non-political Pepe merchandise, including T-shirts and phone cases—the kind of bootleg Pepe items that have been sold across China for a while. Rumours circulated about a suspected link “to a shady mainland Chinese Amazon storefront, diluting the revolutionary iconography of Pepe with tacky garbage.”48 But it soon emerged that a Hong Kong firm Best Crew PR officially licensed Pepe’s trademark from Furie, and registered with the Hong Kong Customs and Excise Department as the exclusive official licensed partner of Pepe in Hong Kong.49 The twists and turns continued. Ahead of the 2020 Lunar New Year, Best Crew PR’s Facebook page, which features Pepe among hearts and a text bubble reading “peaceful frog”, announced a second pop-up store in Hong Kong. The post, in part, read: “What kind of weird character will Pepe become this new year?”50 l

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*** In October 1991, an anticyclone, a low-pressure system and a hurricane collided in the North Atlantic Ocean off the coasts of New England, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland.51 Described as “a ferocious anomaly,” the deputy meteorologist of the NWS Boston office at the time called it “The Perfect Storm.”52

It is interesting to think about tempestuous convergences in Hong Kong, a city where a swirl of Pepes meet, and whose conditions, “bound by the unprecedented confluence of neoliberal capitalism and state capitalism,” are somehow mirrored in Pepe’s absorption of different movements in two different parts of the world.53 In Hong Kong, writes Professor Yiu-Wai Chu, “The conflicts as well as collusion between two capitalisms have generated a persistent storm, which may well usher in a new era of ‘one world two systems’ global order.”54 This murky geopolitical tempest is complicated by a binary historical Cold War narrative that, while unhelpful, comes into play in propaganda deployed through the same computational networks and platforms in which Pepe circulates—at its core, the context in which the meme emerged and has developed as a form of propaganda. One example is the CCP-affiliated tabloid Global Times reporting on the presence of Ukrainian neo-Nazis with alleged support from the CIA in the Hong Kong protests55—an angle echoed by Russia, an old enemy in the Cold War redux narrative, to discredit the Euromaidan movement in Ukraine as “Western-backed regime change” executed by “Nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes and anti-Semites,” and justify the annexation of Crimea in 2014.56

Journalist Leonid Ragozin describes Crimea’s annexation as “a triumph of political manipulation.”57 Cognisant of the memetic spread of popular protests across the world sparked by the so-called Arab Spring, the Kremlin reportedly launched a “manipulation campaign” to control the narrative.58 Supporting this work was the Kremlin-backed ‘troll farm’ Internet Research Agency, best known for allegations of meddling in the 2016 US presidential elections by creating fake social media accounts to post fake news, political advertisements and comments “aimed at sowing discord and inflaming tensions among Americans.”59 (The agency also reportedly showed “significant levels of interest” in the European elections of 2016, including the Brexit Referendum.60)

Aside from stoking division, the IRA’s mission to undermine public confidence in democracy and unsettle collective conceptions of ‘truth’ aligns with the Russian state’s weaponisation of dis/information overall, which Metahaven’s 2015 documentary The Sprawl interrogates in part by focusing on state-funded international news broadcaster RT, “unquestionably a case study in the complexity of modern propaganda.”61 In one 2014 clip, RT presenter Anissa Naouai acknowledges the network’s privileging of a ‘Russian perspective’ while accusing CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour for propagating the US state department line. That year, an RT ad campaign featured posters of Tony Blair, George Bush and Colin Powell next to Iraq War civilian death counts and the statements “No WMDs” and “This is what happens when there is no second opinion”, emphasising US and UK media’s own half-truths and omissions. (On the coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, academic Graeme Smith found Central China Television’s international news channel “more reliable than CNN or even the BBC, who were grappling with embedded reporters and administrations bent on misleading the public.”62)

RT’s assertion of a “Second Opinion”, which relates to the slogan for Central China Television’s international media network CGTN, “See the Difference”,63 comes through in Eurasia, Metahaven’s 2018 follow-up to The Sprawl, which travels the roads where China’s geopolitical Belt 80 | 81

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and Road Initiative meets the Eurasian steppe, as a means to reflect on the shifting borders and ideological legacies that have sought to define or claim a historically contested territory. The film is partly narrated with excerpts from sociologist Emile Durkheim’s early twentieth century lectures on ‘Pragmatism and the Question of Truth’, focusing on two main points, that “truth cannot be immutable because reality itself is not immutable; hence truth changes in time,” and “Truth cannot be one because this oneness would be incompatible with the diversity of minds; hence truth changes in space.”64

Aleksandr Dugin, who appears briefly in the film, echoes Durkheim’s position on truth’s relativity when he talks about there being “no facts, only interpretations”—in a multipolar world where “America is not the boss.”65 Dugin is the self-proclaimed founder of Neo-Eurasianism, an ultra-nationalist geopolitical ideology that rejects the ‘Atlanticist’ order of the United States in favour of a ‘Pax Eurasiatica’, and champions a global multipolarity that resists the Western project of “unipolar and unidimensional globalisation.”66 This brand of multipolarity, a core tenet of Russia’s soft power brand, supports the “conservation” and “further development” of “the cultural, religious, and ethnic identities of every people,”67 which aligns with Putin adviser Vladislav Surkov’s concept of “sovereign democracy”—that every country has the right to determine its own path68—not to mention China’s own non-interventionist rhetoric surrounding the Belt and Road Initiative as a project of geopolitical realignment. All of which relates back to RT’s provision of “another perspective” and CGTN’s invitation to “see the difference.”69

The decentring of geopolitical perspective problematises what author Peter Pomerantsev states about Russian propaganda using “a plurality of truths to feed disinformation” and “trash the information space,”70 not in terms of the accusation, but in its application to just one global power. As the US talks of Russian disinformation campaigns, so Dugin describes “a system of total disinformation” led by a “global oligarchy.”71 Technically he’s not wrong.72 The US Army’s Psychological Operations recruitment page describes a mission unchanged since World War I, to “convey selected information indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behaviour of foreign governments, organisations, groups, and individuals.”73 This undertaking matches Psy-Ops objectives worldwide, whether state or not. Take for example the British SCL Group, the private behavioural research and strategic communications company scandalised by its subsidiary Cambridge Analytica, which utilised data harvested from Facebook for Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Quoting journalist Carole Cadwalladr, SCL Group must be considered “a military contractor using military strategies on a civilian population” in order to persuade or change people’s minds.74

Reportedly contracted by the UK’s Ministry of Defence and the US Department of Defense, SCL’s operations are located in cyberspace, the so-called fifth dimension of war, which UN peacekeeper Raghu Raman describes as “a foundation for a more sinister sixth dimension.

The battle for the mind.”75 These dimensions unfold in “the technical and geopolitical structures of planetary computation,” which Benjamin H. Bratton defines as the “accidental megastructure” of ‘The Stack’76—“a real physical construction” that “is also a canvas on which spatial imaginaries are screened.”77 (In short, the internet and the technologies, infrastructures, and networks that both compose and utilise it, a concept that could loosely align with Lauren Berlant’s definition of infrastructure “as that which binds us to the world in movement and keeps the world practically bound to itself.”78) These spatial imaginaries are screened through what Bratton calls “interfacial regimes”—like Google or Facebook—which make this “vast global supercomputational network” l

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usable and legible.79 In The Sprawl, he talks about these regimes operating like “totalising machines” that produce “a highly ideological distortion of all… possibilities into a framework,” in which “the capacity for a kind of cognitive fundamentalism” is “not only a danger” but “almost an inevitability” since “what you see and encounter is pre-narrated.”80

RT could be read as one example of this pre-narration: an ‘interface’ that filters the world through a specific geopolitical lens while effectively using the online space to present its ‘perspective’ to a global audience. (In 2013, RT became the first TV news channel in history to reach one billion views on YouTube.) As a state-backed international news broadcaster, its function aligns with Bratton’s definition of the interfacial regime as something that “draws together flows and connections that may be geographically dispersed, massively discontiguous, and yet intimately connected by a particular causal interfacial chain” presented “as a single image”81—which in this instance would be the projection of a global, Russian ‘perspective’ encapsulated in RT’s logo as a sign of its identity.

This perspectival projection could be connected with the concept of the empty signifier, and in turn a politicised meme, which brings together disparate communities through a chain of equivalences that are ultimately organised in resistance to a ‘repressive power’—which in the case of RT, and the NeoEurasianist position more generally, would be the homogenising force of the liberal West.

In this sense, it is not surprising that Dugin has claimed Trump as neo-Eurasian, since his nationalist platform is positioned against liberal politicians and mainstream media in the US, nor that Pepe arose as an effective symbol of this opposition. As Trump was characterised as a disruptive outsider hell-bent on laying down borders and discrediting CNN during the 2016 election, so Pepe became the image of a networked collective that mirrored this outlier identity —“subcultures and folkways of the internet” whose participants, like the reality TV candidate they rallied behind, had become adept at “manipulating the attention economy.”82 But that is not to say that Pepe is a product of the state, nor is the meme a representation of its machinations. By 2016, it was clear that non-state actors like ISIS could operate effectively in the fifth and sixth dimensions of war, given the stateless, im/material quality of the online world and its direct link to individuals, as opposed to the first four dimensions (land, sea, air and space), which are defined by kinetic warfare geared towards the destruction of state-owned or state-controlled people and infrastructure.83 In the virtual realm, “it’s a question of focus, not funds,” writes Raman, geared towards “leveraging and riding on” an enemy’s grid rather than attacking or destroying it.84 This is where social media comes in: at once open ground for governments, terrorists, corporations, and individuals alike to influence opinion and in turn ‘reality’—and a series of frameworks with architectures of their own that influence the way information is produced, disseminated and consumed.

“For this turbulent territorial economy,” Bratton writes, “some purposes may be intentionally designed while others seem to emerge as organic mutations in response to apparently normal conditions.”85 On one end of the spectrum, there are the apparatuses of the state, and platforms like YouTube, designed to extract revenue from online engagement that have been shown to reward extreme content. On the other end, there are individuals, some who game the system for the ‘lulz’, and others for the profit, indifferent to the implications, like the individuals in Veles, Macedonia, where scores of websites producing fake news during the 2016 US elections were traced. Far from being an outpost of the Russian propaganda machine, the people running these sites were reportedly motivated by the monetary rewards of online ad services like Google AdSense rather than the politics. In short, they took advantage of the algorithms for personal gain, like an independent storm system that merged with another.

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In this regard, 2016 was a watershed year when it came to public awareness of the weaponisation of the internet’s social and informational spheres, whether for economic, political, or personal gain; a moment when “the extent to which memetic warfare [was] already taking place” became visible86—a turning point for which Pepe became emblematic, and continues to embody. After all, writes C_YS in Seize the Memes of Production, “Online media are not merely a replication of real-world phenomena superimposed on the digital realm, but another layer of abstraction entirely”: a reflection of “the self-producing imagination of the Internet”87 itself, where, per techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufecki’s 2014 prediction, “The rise of online symbolic action —clicking on ‘Like’ or tweeting about a political subject,” or sharing a meme, even—has become “one of the more potent impacts from digital tools,” since “wide-spread use of such semi-public symbolic micro-actions can slowly reshape how people make sense of their values and their politics.”88

On the fallout from the 2016 US elections, An Xiao Mina concedes that the difference between deliberate acts of political propaganda and misunderstandings or mis-shares is minimal these days. Either way, “the effect is similar.” In the case of America, there is a growing distrust of traditional news institutions and social media, with many turning “to the silos of friends, family, and niche media for their news diets,” making it “increasingly more difficult to build a single national narrative.”89 This breaking down of common narratives—a trend that, as demonstrated by the 2019 and 2020 Reuters Institute Digital News Reports, resonates worldwide90—makes today’s movements, quoting An, “perhaps more complicated and open-ended than ever before.”91 The result of a multipolar reality spanning geopolitical spectrums and individual experiences that has been conditioned, in part, by the online platforms through which much of the new normal has been shaped. (To quote Shifman, “whatever happens in the digital memetic sphere never stays only in this sphere.”92) l

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The online space, in this light, could be understood as a ‘geoscape’: what Bratton defines as “a contested terrain of contested terrains” which “extends in all possible directions at once and is held only by the tensile strength of the imagined geographies”—and the “incommensurate projections” of their worldly interfacial maps93—“that compose it by their co-occupation.”94 To think of the online world as a geopolitical engine that churns competing projections is to think of it as a global commons.

A site—in keeping with Berlant’s conceptualisation of the commons as “a powerful vehicle for troubling troubled times”95—that is grounded in contradiction, negotiation and confrontation, as well as resistance, organisation, and community—whether national, regional, or personal; where all actors who have access to a device and a connection can participate in its unfolding, while those who don’t still participate in and/or suffer the consequences. It is this tension, “that grinding of incompatible terms for addressing things, events, and territory,” writes Bratton, “that is, in practice, the engine of geopolitical design.”96 Perhaps this is why Pepe the Frog has become such an enduring mask of this anarchic, fluid and conflicted setting, a symbol that has captured a clusterfuck, or as academics Laura Glitsos and James Gall put it, an “unstable composite in a widespread possibility of ideas.”97

When thinking about memes as products and reflections of the contexts in which they are produced and circulated, which includes the labour and technics of those that participate in the process,98 it is within this maximalist landscape of multipolar and multi-positional formation and fragmentation that Pepe can be read; as a fractal image behind which lies a complex and overlapping web of relations—individualised, corporatised and politicised—with “so many textual nodes” that it has “generated conflicting and contradictory signification systems.”99 In this context, following Wark and Wark, to consider the Pepe meme as “a productive object of theory” in relation to his most recent transition from fascist, edge-lord avatar to pro-democracy activist, would be to think beyond the impasse it signifies—as an image that at once mirrors, encapsulates, resists and obscures the global sprawl from which it emerged.100 It all depends on one’s perspective. *** When a storm makes landfall, it begins to decay. The particles making up its form disperse and reenter the ecosystem, perhaps even forming part of another storm at a later stage, such is the nature of air. In 2017, for example, science writer Sam Kean wrote that Julius Caesar’s dying breath in AD44 would have spread across the planet within years, estimating that “roughly one molecule of Caesar’s air” would “appear in your next breath” today.101 To quote journalist Simon Worrall, “The gases in the air around us are unseen but their influence is surprisingly visible.”102 The same could be said of a meme like Pepe—ubiquitous and yet often unnoticed until enough critical mass has accumulated to create a perfect shitstorm.

As a politicised meme, Pepe has somehow emerged as an ever-expanding site that absorbs divergent chain reactions and equivalences as it circulates, smoothing over patchworks of difference with a commonality expressed as a signal of resistance. It is “this open-endedness” that “gives [the meme] an obvious strength, since it can be taken up by anyone, pushed in virtually any direction,” write Torino and Wohlleben: “its currency depends on its ability to expand and reinvent itself, to resonate and combine with new content and modes of expression.”103 Here, credit should be afforded to Matt Furie, Pepe’s creator: an accomplished artist who had to watch as his personal creation was co-opted for unspeakable horror, and who has since turned to rendering Pepe-esque characters into mandala-like spirals in reflection of the enduring truth that things never stay the same.104 84 | 85

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For de Seta, is it this capacity for transformation that makes Pepe “a consistent case study of how digital folklore challenges the notions of the local and the global,” or to borrow Wark and Wark’s terminology, the instance and plurality—a demonstration of how the internet as a broad and decentralised network that even the most authoritarian state powers find difficult to police, is a site of “user-generated globalisation” in which non-linguistic forms of communication open up complex sites of interrogation, particularly “regarding the globalising role of vernacular content.”105 Of course, de Seta cautions, “the circulation of Pepe does not necessarily involve a direct translation.”106 But while Pepe’s meaning might not fully translate from one context to another, there is something to be said of his function.

For Laclau, the presence of empty signifiers “is the very condition of hegemony,” the establishment of a frontier delineated by the identification of a common enemy in order to cohere a movement.107 In the case of Pepe the Frog, however, the condition of hegemony is likewise fluid, relating to nationalist hegemonies, per his usage within the context of the fascist right, and ‘hegemonic’ resistances against repressive powers, per his usage in Hong Kong. More broadly, however, the meme is also a reflection of Baudrillard’s definition of hegemony, characterised by “the domination of networks—of calculation, and integral exchange” in which “an irreducible antagonism to the global principle of generalised exchange” emerges as a form of confrontation that “exists not only at the heart of the dominant power, but at the heart of our individual existence.”108

Baudrillard’s definition invokes Shifman’s call “for a deeper look into [how] values—which are less organised and articulated social constructs than ‘ideologies’—are manifested in mundane acts of creative expression” within the context of social media, “characterised by the fragmented flow of data from below.”109 Shifman identifies “five communicative” values shared by memes —authenticity, creativity, communal loyalty, freedom of information, and expressive egalitarianism —which diminish the “sharp content-related differences” between them.110 In particular, she identifies “two fundamental features” shared by diametrically opposed memes like Pepe the Frog and #MeToo: “the construction and expression of individual-group relationships, and the subversion of ‘prevalent values’ which combine to valorise… the right, and perhaps even the obligation, to communicate.”111 All of which recalls C_YS’s assertion that political memes reveal “steeper banks of… ideologies” that “become truly dialectical” when they collide in “new arenas.”112

This examination may seem problematic. But, as Shifman continues, it could also contribute to “a deeper understanding of broad social, cultural, and political issues” that “move away from veteran, all-embracing ideological dichotomies”—such as, returning to Hong Kong, the Cold War binaries of capitalism vs. communism—“to expose core principles shared by groups who are, at face value, completely disparate.”113 As Wark and Wark note, “Meme magic points in negative to something real and perhaps even something true… beyond perennially refreshing appearances.”114 Perhaps the unrefreshing reality revealed by Pepe’s move from the US in 2016 to Hong Kong in 2019 is the very problem that Laclau sees enunciated by the “absent totality” behind an empty signifier’s “unified” projection.115 “That is, the limits of signification can only announce themselves as the impossibility of realising what is within those limits.”116

With that in mind, what could the communities that have adopted Pepe’s image have in common, or rather, what is legible in the space between them? Writer Emma Grey Ellis attempted a possible answer in 2019 when thinking about his migration from West to East. “Despite sharply different cultural understandings,” she proposed, Pepe has managed to conserve an “emotional context in [a] global game of telephone,” becoming “more or less a young netizen’s worldwide mood” l

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of “sad resistance.”117 This resistance, through the lens of Wark and Wark, could be understood as having emerged from an insufficiency “to adequately encompass our contemporary technical conditions”—an insufficiency that, “most surprisingly,“ reveals in a meme like Pepe “a political project that is constructive rather than negative,” in which “Meme magic invokes new anchors for a culture adrift.”118 These anchors could be read as products of their contexts. In the case of Pepe, a meme formed out of the online space, a worldly geoscape that has effectively become a turbulent and weaponised site in which all individuals are caught, whether knowingly or not. Where, quoting James Bridle, “a cognitive crisis produced by automated systems, weak machine intelligence, social and scientific networks, and the wider culture—with its own matching set of easy scapegoats and cloudier, entangled substructures”—has emerged.119 Yet despite this complexity, continues Bridle, “we are still seeking clear answers to cloudy problems.”120

Pepe could be read as one such cloudy problem, or to return to Laclau, an impossibility: a politicised meme that is composed of antagonism and agonism, affect and indifference, community and atomisation, resistance and complicity alike, whose appearance as an enduring icon reveals an urgent disjuncture; one that is embodied by disparate, emergent communities formed out of historical contexts and present dynamics that are marking out new limits, horizons, and ruptures.

In the case of the US, Pepe made visible a dangerously alienated white supremacy that was there all along, which in turn has fuelled an ongoing—indeed, historical—resistance. In Hong Kong, he signalled a popular movement that stakes itself in opposition to an authoritarian state. (But that is not to say that Pepe brought these movements into being.)

Interestingly, these two sites align in positive and negative space. Blocs within Hong Kong’s protest movement, which has used Pepe as an assertion of a resistant front, stand in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, which galvanised in response to the front that 86 | 87

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Pepe made visible. At the same time, the PRC government has voiced support of BLM by condemning police brutality against the American people, while dismissing accusations of state violence both against Hong Kong’s protestors and the Uyghurs of Xinjiang; as some international leftists, notably in the US, consider the reporting on Xinjiang a form of US propaganda that feeds a Cold War narrative that they reject—just a few points in a constellation of dizzying convergences and divergences that exist among the positions that have been taken by and towards both movements and the authorities they resist or support.

Meanwhile, violent protests across the US, spurred by aggressive police crackdowns and invocations of ‘rule of law’, do not only mirror those that occurred in Hong Kong in 2019 and 2020, but those that erupted across the Arab world and the Southern Mediterranean in 2011 and 2012, and beyond. The directions that these movements and their counter movements will take remain to be seen, but what is certain is that, like the rhizomatic trajectory of a meme, their paths will be multiple—and even if they break up or are broken down, they will continue to circulate and mutate before resurfacing again. One Hong Kong protestor put it this way when describing Pepe as “the perfect ideological ambassador of the movement” not only because of his irreverence but also because of his fluidity, citing the famous quote by Hong Kong’s favourite son Bruce Lee, “Be Water,” which has become the protest’s mantra.121 “Water is fluid, can take many shapes, and it’s not easy to grasp or capture—those are its unique attributes. The various forms that Pepe is able to take is also quite representative of this.”122 And with that, a storm system crosses the equator.

Notes 1 ‘Explore The Sprawl with Metahaven’, introduction text on The Space website; https://www.thespace.org/artwork/explore-sprawlmetahaven 2

Marshall Shepherd, ‘Why Hurricanes Almost Never Form Near or Cross the Equator’, Forbes, 28 June 2018; https://www.forbes.com/sites/ marshallshepherd/2018/06/28/why-hurricanes-almost-never-form-near-or-cross-the-equator/#10da6fd51f83 3 The date of the comic’s book debut shifts between 2005 and 2006 in online reports. In an email to the author, Furie explained he first selfpublished a photocopied ‘zine of Boy’s Club and distributed it in 2005, then it was published by Teenage Dinosaur, the small press label, in 2006 4 Laura Glitsos and James Hall, ‘The Pepe the Frog meme: an examination of social, political, and cultural implications through the tradition of the Darwinian Absurd’, Journal for Cultural Research 23:4; DOI: 10.1080/14797585.2019.1713443, p. 383 5 Gabriele de Seta, ‘Pepe Goes to China, or, the Post-Global Circulation of Memes’ in Post-Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production, Alfie Brown and Dan Bristow eds, Goleta, CA: Punctum Books, 2019, p. 389 6

Ibid., p. 390

7

Angela Nagle, ‘The New Man of 4chan’, The Baffler, March 2016; https://thebaffler.com/salvos/new-man-4chan-nagle

8

Dani Di Placido, ‘How “Pepe The Frog” Became a Symbol of Hatred’, Forbes, 9 May 2017; https://www.forbes.com/sites/ danidiplacido/2017/05/09/how-pepe-the-frog-became-a-symbol-of-hatred/#a8a326e426bf

9 Jesse Singal, ‘How Internet Trolls Won the 2016 Presidential Election’, Intelligencer, 16 September 2016; https://nymag.com/ intelligencer/2016/09/how-internet-trolls-won-the-2016-presidential-election.html 10 Olivia Nuzzi, ‘How Pepe the Frog Became a Nazi Trump Supporter and Alt-Right Symbol’, Daily Beast, 26 May 2016; https://www. thedailybeast.com/how-pepe-the-frog-became-a-nazi-trump-supporter-and-alt-right-symbol?ref=scroll 11 Abby Ohlheiser, ‘”We actually elected a meme as president”: How 4chan celebrated Trump’s victory’, The Washington Post, 9 November 2016; https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/11/09/we-actually-elected-a-meme-as-president-how-4chan-celebratedtrumps-victory/

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12 Douglas Haddow, ‘Meme warfare: how the power of mass replication has poisoned the US election’, The Guardian, 4 November 2016; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/04/political-memes-2016-election-hillary-clinton-donald-trump 13 Mark Tuters and Sal Hagen, ‘(((They))) rule: Memetic antagonim and nebulous othering on 4chan’, SageJournals, 27 November 2019; https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1461444819888746 14 Zeynep Tufecki, ‘How social media took us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump’, MIT Technology Review, 14 August 2018; https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/08/14/240325/how-social-media-took-us-from-tahrir-square-to-donald-trump/ 15 Ben Berkowitz, ‘From a single hashtag, a protest circled the world’, Reuters, 18 October 2011; https://www.reuters.com/article/uswallstreet-protests-social/from-a-single-hashtag-a-protest-circled-the-world-idUSTRE79G6E420111018 16

Haddow, ‘Meme warfare: how the power of mass replication has poisoned the US election’

17 Max Read, ‘The Whole World is Now a Message Board’, New York Magazine, 30 April 2017; https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/04/thewhole-world-is-now-a-message-board.html 18 Samantha Schmidt, ‘Author of Pepe the Frog children’s book must give profits to Muslim rights group’, The Washington Post, 31 August 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/08/31/author-of-childrens-pepe-the-frog-book-must-give-profits-tomuslim-rights-group/; Alison Flood, ‘Pepe the Frog removed from Daily Stormer after creator makes legal challenge’, The Guardian, 12 July 2018; https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/12/pepe-the-frog-daily-stormer-matt-furie 19 Aja Romano, ‘Pepe the Frog was killed by his creator. But his alt-right legacy lives on’, Vox, 9 May 2017; https://www.vox.com/ culture/2017/5/9/15583312/matt-furie-kills-pepe-frog-alt-right-meme 20 Scott Wark and McKenzie Wark, ‘Circulation and its Discontents’ in Post-Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production, Alfie Brown and Dan Bristow eds, Goleta, CA: Punctum Books, 2019, p. 293 21 An Xiao Mina, From Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media is Changing Social Protest and Power, Boston: Beacon Press, 2019, p. 103 22

Haddow, op cit.

23

de Seta, ‘Pepe Goes to China, or, the Post-Global Circulation of Memes’, pp. 390, 393

24

Fei Liu, ‘Pepe the Sad Frog Coloring Book and Chinese Language Guide’, LOGIC Issue 7: China 中国; https://logicmag.io/china/

25 Christina Ko, ‘How Pepe the Frog became face of Hong Kong protests–despite cartoon being a symbol of hate in US’, South China Morning Post, 17 August 2019, https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/article/3023060/how-pepe-frog-became-face-hong-kong-protests-despitecartoon 26

Ibid.

27 Daniel Victor, ‘Hong Kong Protesters Love Pepe the Frog. No, They’re Not Alt-Right’, The New York Times, 19 August 2019; https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/world/asia/hong-kong-protest-pepe-frog.html 28 “However, because so many Pepe the Frog memes are not bigoted in nature, it is important to examine use of the meme only in context.

The mere fact of posting a Pepe meme does not mean that someone is racist or white supremacist.” As stated on the Pepe the Frog page on the Anti-Defamation League website; https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/pepe-the-frog 29 Rosemarie Ho, ‘The American Left is Failing Hong Kong’, The Nation, 10 July 2019; https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/democratshong-kong-autonomy/ 30 Chris Chien and Ellie Tse, ‘“The Hong Kong Card”: Against the New Cold War’, The Abusable Past, 23 October 2019; https://www.radicalhistoryreview.org/abusablepast/the-hong-kong-card-against-the-new-cold-war/; also published on Lausan, https://lausan.hk/2019/hong-kong-card-against-new-cold-war/

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31

AFP, ‘US Senate approves sanctions on Chinese officials over Hong Kong’, The Straits Times, 26 June 2020; https://www.straitstimes.com/ world/united-states/us-senate-approves-sanctions-bill-over-hong-kong

32 Quoted in Vivian Wang and Amy Qin, ‘In Hong Kong, Anxiety and Defiance Over Trump’s Move to Cut Ties’, The New York Times, 30 May 2020; https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/world/asia/hong-kong-trump-china.html. As Chris Chien and Ellie Tse note, prominent activist Joshua Wong similarly warned the international community that Hong Kong could become the next West Berlin 33

Chien and Tse, ‘“The Hong Kong Card”: Against the New Cold War’

34 Dake Kang, ‘Anti-establishment views unite, divide Hong Kong protesters’, The Star, 9 January 2020; https://www.thestar.com/news/world/ asia/2020/01/08/anti-establishment-views-unite-divide-hong-kong-protesters.html 35

Wilfred Chan, ‘The Left’s Role in the Hong Kong Uprising, An interview with Avery Ng, chairman of the League of Social Democrats in Hong Kong’, Dissent, 27 November 2019; https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-lefts-role-in-the-hong-kong-uprising 36

Ibid.

37

Ibid.

38

Ibid.

39

See https://lausan.hk/about/

40

Ernesto Laclau, ‘Why Do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?’, Emancipation(s), London/New York: Verso, 2018, pp. 38, 42

41

Laclau, On Populist Reason, London/New York: Verso, 2007, p. 70

42

Tuters and Hagen, ‘(((They))) rule: Memetic antagonim and nebulous othering on 4chan’

43 Paul Torino and Adrian Wohlleben, ‘Memes With Force–Lessons from the Yellow Vests’, Mute, 26 February 2019; https://www.metamute.org/ editorial/articles/memes-force-–-lessons-yellow-vests 44

Wark and Wark, p. 300

45

Ibid., p. 303

46

Limor Shifman, ‘Memes in a Digital World: Reconciling with a Conceptual Troublemaker’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 18 (2013), pp. 364-365; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/jcc4.12013 47

Wark and Wark, p. 303

48 Ryan Broderick, ‘How a Pepe The Frog Pop-Up Store Fractured a Divided Hong Kong’, BuzzFeedNews, 25 January 2020; https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/hong-kong-pepe-the-frog-lihkg-copyright 49

Ibid.

50

Ibid.

51

US Department of Commerce, ‘Natural Disaster Survey Report, The Halloween Nor’easter of 1991’, 14 https://www.weather.gov/media/ publications/assessments/Halloween Nor’easter of 1991.pdf 52 Charles Homans, ‘How the ‘Perfect Storm’ Became the Perfect Cop-Out’, The New York Times, 20 January 2016; https://www.nytimes. com/2016/01/24/magazine/how-the-perfect-storm-became-the-perfect-cop-out.html 53 Yiu-Wai Chu, ‘Hong Kong Studies in the future continuous tense’, International INstitute for Asian Studies, The Newsletter 84, Autumn 2019; https://www.iias.asia/the-newsletter/article/hong-kong-studies-future-continuous-tense

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54

Ibid.

55 Xu Keyue and Chen Qingqing, ‘HK police probes alleged neo-Nazis’, Global Times, 12 April 2019; https://www.globaltimes.cn/ content/1172308.shtml 56 Putin expressed these comments in a speech after a March 2014 referendum in Crimea delivered a 96% vote in favour of reunification with Russia. See ‘Crimea crisis: Russian President Putin’s speech annotated by Bridget Kendall’, BBC, 19 March 2014; https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ world-europe-26652058/ 57 Leonid Ragozin, ‘Annexation of Crimea: A masterclass in political manipulation’, Al Jazeera, 16 March 2019; https://www.aljazeera.com/ indepth/opinion/annexation-crimea-masterclass-political-manipulation-190315174459207.html 58

Ibid.

59 Paris Martineau, ‘Russia’s Disinformation War is Just Getting Started’, WIRED, 8 October 2019; https://www.wired.com/story/russiasdisinformation-war-is-just-getting-started/ 60

The Internet Research Agency in Europe 2014-2016, Cardiff University Crime & Security Research Institute, May 2019, p. 3

61

Steven Erlanger, ‘Russia’s RT Network: Is It More BBC or K.G.B.?’, The New York Times, 8 March 2017; https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/ world/europe/russias-rt-network-is-it-more-bbc-or-kgb.html 62 Graeme Smith, ‘See the difference: CGTN’s Australian gambit’, The Interpreter, published by the Lowy Institute, 12 October 2018; https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/see-difference-cgtn-australian-gambit 63 Aike Li and Minsu Wu, ‘”See the Difference”: What Difference? The New Missions of Chinese International Communication’, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 1 June 2018; https://www.westminsterpapers.org/articles/10.16997/wpcc.275/ 64

Emile Durkheim, ‘Pragmatism and the Question of Truth’, published on Marxists.org, sourced from Source: Pragmatism Sociology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983; https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/durkheim.htm/ 65

Aleksandr Dugin, ‘We have our special Russian truth’, BBC Newsnight; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGunRKWtWBs/

66

Aleksandr Dugin, Eurasian Mission: An Introduction to Neo-Eurasianism, Budapest: Arktos, 2014, p. 87

67

Ibid.

68 David Clark, ‘Putin is exporting ‘sovereign democracy’ to new EM allies’, Financial Times, 20 December, 2016; https://www.ft.com/ content/0ddd946d-ad14-3c92-bfe9-761ab3396a02/.

69

Ibid.

70

Stephen Castle, ‘A Russian TV Insider Describes a Modern Propaganda Machine’, The New York Times, 13 February 2015; https://www. nytimes.com/2015/02/14/world/europe/russian-tv-insider-says-putin-is-running-the-show-in-ukraine.html

71

Dugin, Eurasian Mission: An Introduction to Neo-Eurasianism, p. 156

72

Parts of this section have been drawn from an essay on Metahaven’s films The Sprawl and Eurasia, published in 2020 with Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 73

‘History Of Psychological Operations’, US Army website; https://www.goarmy.com/careers-and-jobs/special-operations/psyop/psyophistory.html

74 Carole Cadwalladr, ‘The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked’, The Guardian, 7 May 2017; https://www. theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy

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75

Raghu Raman, ‘The Sixth Dimension of War: A Battle for the Mind’, THE WIRE, 31 July 2016; https://thewire.in/politics/the-sixth-dimensionof-war-battle-for-the-mind 76 The Sprawl film script in Metahaven, PSYOP: An Anthology, Karen Archey and Metahaven eds, Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 2019, pp. 137-41 77

Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack | On Software and Sovereignty, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016, p. 246

78

Lauren Berlant, ‘The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space Vol. 34(3), 2016, p. 394

79

The Sprawl film script in Metahaven, PSYOP: An Anthology

80

Ibid.

81

Bratton, p. 229

82

Max Read, ‘The Whole World is Now a Message Board’

83

Raman, ‘The Sixth Dimension of War: A Battle for the Mind’

84

Ibid.

85

Bratton, p. 247

86

Jeff Giesea, ‘It’s Time to Embrace Memetic Warfare’, originally published in winter 2015 as part of the ‘Defence Strategic Communications’ peer-reviewed journal, a project of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence (NATO StratCom COE); https://www.act.nato.int/ images/stories/media/doclibrary/open201705-memetic1.pdf 87

C_YS, ‘In the Future, the Means of Production Will Own Themselves’ in Post-Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production, Goleta, CA: Punctum Books, 2019, p. 323

88

Zeynep Tufecki, ‘Capabilities of Movements and Affordances of Digital Media: Paradoxes of Empowerment’, Connected Learning Alliance, 9 January 2014, https://clalliance.org/blog/capabilities-of-movements-and-affordances-of-digital-media-paradoxes-of-empowerment/

89

An Xiao Mina, p. 10

90

In 2020, for example, “less than four in ten (38%) said they trust most news most of the time–a fall of four percentage points from 2019.

Less than half (46%) said they trust the news they use themselves,” while “WhatsApp saw the biggest growth in general with increases of around ten percentage points in some countries, [with] more than half of those surveyed (51%) us[ing] some kind of open or closed online group to connect, share information, or take part in a local support network.” See https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/ files/2020-06/DNR_2020_FINAL.pdf 91

An Xiao Mina, p. 4

92

Limor Shifman, ‘Internet Memes and the Twofold Articulation of Values’, Society and the Internet: How Networks of Information and Communication are Changing Our Lives, second edition, Mark Graham and William H. Dutton eds, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2019, p. 55 93

Ibid.

94

Bratton, p. 247

95

Berlant, p. 395

96

Bratton, p. 247

97

Glitsos and Hall, p. 391

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98

Wark and Wark’s ‘Circulation and its Discontents’ in Post-Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production is very much focused on the obfuscation of the role of labour and technics in producing culture on internet platforms 99

Glitsos and Hall, p. 391

100

Wark and Wark, p. 314

101

James Lloyd, ‘Are we really breathing Caesar’s last breath?’, Science Focus, 13 July 201; https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/arewe-really-breathing-caesars-last-breath/

102

Simon Worrall, ‘The Air You Breathe is Full of Surprises’, National Geographic, 13 August 2017; https://www.nationalgeographic.com/ news/2017/08/air-gas-caesar-last-breath-sam-kean/

103

Torino and Wohlleben, ‘Memes With Force–Lessons from the Yellow Vests’

104

Furie talks about this in Feels Good Man, the 2020 documentary directed by Arthur Jones

105

de Seta, p. 398

106

Ibid.

107

Laclau, Emancipation(s), p. 43

108

Jean Baudrillard, The Agony of Power, Los Angeles CA: Semitotext(e): 2010, pp. 34, 56

109

Shifman, p. 50

110

Ibid., p. 53

111

Ibid., p. 55

112

C_YS, p. 325

113

Ibid.

114

Wark and Wark, p. 297

115

Laclau, Emancipation(s), pp. 42, 36

116

Laclau, ibid., pp. 36, 37

117 Emma Grey Ellis, ‘Pepe the Frog Means Something Different in Hong Kong–Right?’, WIRED, 23 August 2019; https://www.wired.com/story/ pepe-the-frog-meme-hong-kong/ 118

Wark and Wark, p. 314

119

James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, London/New York: Verso, 2019, p. 231

120

Ibid., p. 235

121

Christina Ko, ‘How Pepe the Frog became face of Hong Kong protests–despite cartoon being a symbol of hate in US’

122

Ibid.

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Plurality of Memory: History Projects, Diaspora and Nationalism In response to the 2018 exhibition The Burrangong Affray at Sydney’s 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, the far-right political party Australia First published an extensive racist diatribe on their website, in which they accused artists and academics involved (all with some degree of Asian heritage) of being “Chinese agents” and of masking their true ethnicities behind Anglicised names in order to mount an exhibition of anti-Australian ‘Digger’ propaganda with ambitions of historical revisionism.1 The exhibition featured artworks by Hong Kong-born Australian artist John Young (with Australian-Chinese artist Jason Phu), which responded to the Lambing Flat riots of 1860-61, a series of hostile demonstrations and attacks by European, North American and Australian-born miners against Chinese on the Burrangong goldfields (now the town of Young), in the state of New South Wales. The riots lead directly to the implementation of New South Wales’ Chinese Immigration Act of 1861, one of a string of laws in Australia’s colonies that preceded the Immigration Restriction Act forty years later in 1901, the basis of the White Australia Policy, which affectively ceased all nonEuropean immigration, and was one of Federated Australia’s first substantive pieces of legislation.

How best to situate the virulence of this response, directed, as it was, towards an exhibition displayed in a small non-commercial gallery without extensive public reach beyond its own artistic community, and related to an event far removed in Australia’s history? In her research into the Lambing Flat Riots and their significance to Australian myths of nationhood, Australian historian Karen Schamberger described the manner in which the riots have been variously “reassembled” by proponents of both pro- and anti-immigration causes since the time they occurred, coming in and out of public view in accordance with contemporary aspirations to bolster a particular narrative of Australia and its history.2 The facts of the event were manipulated in their immediate aftermath to highlight a purportedly essential incompatibility between pan-European and Chinese miners, and thereby further the isolationist cause in debates over immigration.3 Following a three-decade period of absence from official New South Wales history and a general diminution in public awareness, the riots were again disinterred in the lead up to Australian Federation to notate a (presumptively British) collective social body—the unification of Australia’s six individual colonies being a generally stronger drive for Federation than one of independence.4 Insofar as they evidence an assumed prerogative on the part of the Anglo-European miners involved to literally control and/or oversee their Chinese counterparts, the Lambing Flat Riots were a clear manifestation of the kind of territorial nationalism anthropologist Ghassan Hage describes in his 2000 text White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, that they were motivated by an image of a national space within which the perpetrator is master and the “‘ethnic/racial other’ [is] mere object” to be controlled.5 The riots of l

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course did not materialise unexpectedly, but rather represent a flash point within a broader schema of ongoing resentment towards Chinese miners on the goldfields due to visible cultural differences, anxiety over their cheap labour, and the contrast in their collective mining practices (successful to the extent that the term “Chinaman’s luck” became part of the Australian vernacular during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries).6 Their incidence thus articulates a will to, and presumption of, a white national space nearly forty years prior to Australia formally becoming a nation, making them of surpassing usefulness in iterative attempts to claim or preserve an idealised mono-ethnic mainstream for Australia’s body politic. As Schamberger further notes, the redeployment of the riots over time has seen them cumulatively cast as the “birth of White Australia.”7 In light of this history, the response by Australia First to The Burrangong Affray can be understood as an incantatory effort to re-stabilise meaning of a perceived national origin story, to suppress the difference at the point of origin that would displace their ability to locate themselves at the mainstream of Australian history.8

Nationalist practices of territorial control that informed both the riots and their subsequent characterisations in ‘birth of the nation’ discourses have also emerged in memorialisations and celebrations that have since occurred in the town of Young, at the initiative of the Young Shire Council and the Chinese Heritage Association of Australia.9 An annual Lambing Flat Chinese Festival, held since 2013 to celebrate the Chinese presence and contribution in Australia has, on a number of 94 | 95

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occasions, relied on Chinese-Australian performers imported from Sydney to realise ‘traditional’ Chinese cultural forms.10 This fetishisation of ‘authentic’ and static modes of cultural address has come at the expense of contributions by Chinese communities in Young, many of whom have been so longstanding that they are no longer perceived as being ‘Chinese’. Local Australians with Chinese ancestry lack, of course, a visible or magnifiable difference that would adequately demonstrate liberal tolerance and/or relativism within a multicultural policy of embellishment. As (in)visibly Australian, this community also refuses any capacity for ‘real’ (white) Australians to authenticate their social belonging and thereby retain a veneer of authority over the makeup of the body politic.11 Here the erasure of heterogeneity within the social fabric occurs not through deliberate eradication of difference, but through the disappearance of embodied experience behind expected representations.

Local efforts at museological narration of the Lambing Flat riots have also tended to abridge the experience of the Chinese miners involved.12 Didactics in the Lambing Flat Folk Museum neglect to include the voices and personal information of Chinese individuals, relying instead on quotations from European miners and officials to represent the events, and so rendering Chinese actors homogenous, dematerialised and without agency.13 All of which is in keeping with what Australian academic Jacqueline Lo, writing in the catalogue for 2013 survey exhibition The Bridge and the Fruit Tree: John Young, has described as Australia’s reluctance to recognise the extent to which it is “already ‘Asianised’,” an aversion to acknowledging disjunctive cultural expression emanating from the core of the national body as opposed to an appendage to it.14 That is, if the acquisition of Australianness occurs by a process of accumulation (practices or people being attributed more or less), then, in many spheres of activity Asian-Australians are only able to move so far towards the centre, refused sufficient cultural capital to operate as signifiers of Australianness in and of themselves, in either historic or contemporary terms.15

For the artist John Young, the The Burrangong Affray was the most recent project in an ongoing body of artworks dealing with the history of Chinese diaspora in Australia—drawing out stories of their presence since pre-Federation. The central axis of each project consists of a gridded installation of layered and degraded archival photographs and chalkboard works of multilingual quotations, intermingling historical voices in a manner that pursues a strategy of fragmentation rather than counter-narration, the artist refusing to either figure or occupy a succinct historical subject. Despite this non-totalising affect, as a cumulative effort The History Projects (variously taking as subject matter, the radically divergent destinies of two young men of ethnic Chinese origin who arrived in the colony of Victoria in the mid-1800s seeking their fortunes during the gold rush, whose lives bookend the Chinese diaspora experience of nineteenth century Australia, 1866: The Worlds of Lowe Kong Meng and Jong Ah Siug in 2015; cosmopolitan Shanghai-Australian women of the 1930s, Modernity’s End: Half the Sky in 2016; and Chinese immigrants and miners who walked from Darwin to Queensland’s east coast during the late nineteenth century in search of gold, a perilous and unmapped journey of two thousand kilometres that resulted in many deaths, None Living Knows in 2017) work to enrich the history of nineteenth and twentieth century Australia, reinserting a consistency of presence even through a legislated White Australia, from 1901 to 1973. This might best be understood as the formulation of a supplementary question (in the mode of Bhabha): an interjection from the non-dominant that introduces a structure of belatedness into the fabric of the social, and so reveals a lack in its original articulation.16 Framed in this way, the radical destabilisation posed

by The Burrangong Affray comes not from the enunciation of a straightforward multicultural ethic or reality for contemporary Australian society (even one that is retroactively applied), but rather, in l

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its archival basis, the revelation of the act of forgetting that occurred at the moment of Australia’s constitutional formation, which haunts the contemporary at the point of origin with a belated interjection of incontrovertible presence. As Bhabha notes, this is the “mote in the eye of history, its blind spot that will not let the nationalist gaze settle centrally.”17

Each project’s standardised grid form refuses any overriding point from which a linear narrative might be determined, and for the same reason refuses a perspectival imperative that orders the gaze of the viewer. The grid as a grammatical structure furnishes a visual reciprocity of elements; each becomes subject to its logic of standardisation. In the absence of any foreground to catch that gaze, the entire work becomes the ground, and so the gaze remains restless.18 The viewer’s eye is empowered to move freely across components, to combine and dismantle individual elements in accordance with subjective impulses, enacting a deferred authorship. The treatment of the archival images reinforces this effect. Uniformly rendered in halftone, the photographs align themselves with norms of traditional newsprint, and allude therefore to documentation. This consistency across source material produces a perceptual recession, muting fluctuation in immediacy such that the images can be collectively read on a cerebral level. This delay in perception, deflected from the level of affect, allows the photographic images to be read simultaneously with the more visceral chalk drawings.

The two registers work in duality, with the grid ensuring that neither comes to dominate the overall work. The renunciation of a central site of articulation within the work is then a minor reflection of the broader point that history always lacks a legitimate perspectival centre (thus invoking Bhabha).

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These projects did not stem directly from any motivation on the part of the artist to rewrite Australian history with multiculturalism in mind, but rather from his particular preoccupation with specifically transcultural actions or expressions. Much of Young’s interest in the Lambing Flat Riots is held by the actions of John Roberts, a local farmer who sheltered over one thousand Chinese miners and their families on his property after they were chased off their allotments, an example of the kind of cross-cultural ethical action that has preoccupied the artist for years. This is elsewhere explored through series of artworks that deal with the role of foreigners during Japanese military forces’ Rape of Nanjing in 1937, and German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s anti-Nazi dissidence informed by his time spent with African-American parishioners in Harlem in 1930, and is a general extension of Young’s ongoing interest in the conjunction of distinct cultural epistemologies (specifically Chinese and Western). In his 2011 text, first published for Art & Australia, DutchAustralian art historian Thomas Berghuis proposes the concept ‘Situational Ethics’ to describe artworks or practices that aim to effect an ethical and not purely communicative role for art, a classification for which Young’s History Projects are exemplar.19 The History Projects are driven by the search for a temporally and spatially specific ethic, one that eschews the vagaries associated with the collapse into a universal moral code and relies instead on a didactic communicative principle in order to reground art’s function, while retaining its autonomy as an aesthetic domain. The didacticism of the works (historical quotations on chalkboard strictly connoting the classroom, and for which the artist is indebted to the pedagogical chalkboard drawings of both Joseph Beuys and Rudolph Steiner) is primarily for Young, the residue of an effort to locate himself within the frame of an ethical encounter with the Other, that refuses a representational distance that would allow for mastery over his subject. Layering and erasure here prevent the foreclosure of meaning in narrative construction.

In creating the drawings, Young situates himself as a subject reacting to history, literally writing out the voices of the past with chalk on a blackboard, erasing and reworking fragmented quotations until they achieve the right weight—there are evocations of the artist’s training in Chinese calligraphy as a child, the student forced to repeatedly write a character in water until the contour of its expression is fully held within its configuration.

Centring both the condition of ‘the refugee’ and the act of hospitality at the heart of his exploration, suggests Young is not simply proposing that Australia has always been ethnically plural, although this is true, but that he is in fact demanding a more radical reorientation of the bounds and schema of our political communities. In a 2019 interview between Homi Bhabha and Klaus Stierstorfer for the publisher De Gruyter, Bhabha suggests that it is the condition of the refugee (temporally delimited, at least theoretically) that demands the most from our structures of civility,20 that the refugee’s appeal for hospitality throws into sharp relief the deficiencies of citizenship as the mode of certification offered by nation-states to formally accept one into a community, and thus render legible their political agency.21 He further proposes that the short-term necessity for refuge, which comes in excess of the provisions and permanent nature of citizenship, most clearly reveals the need to reframe the ethical basis of modern governance and the boundaries of socio-political community around more radical principles of hospitality, as a framework which allows for structures of impermanence within a politics of recognition;22 further framed by Jacques Derrida, that the cosmopolitan ethic of hospitality, being not a complete dissolution of territoriality through unconditional welcome, is a mode of address to strangers that is without any demand for reciprocity.23 The risk in seeking to grasp the ethical enunciation that emerges at the point of transcultural crossing, specifically via the act of hospitality, distinguished from its expression in conflict or violence, is that hospitality presents l

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a positive historical reading, tending to emphasise the hero. According to Schamberger, the shift in narrative focus of the riots onto the figure of James Roberts, as opposed to previous glorification by some accounts of perpetrators-as-heroes (around the time of Federation), resolves the story of the riots as a multicultural triumph.24 Even while Young’s artworks resist being read conclusively, his attention to hospitality (we observe in a scene in The Field, from the perspective of a prone, apparently injured Chinese person, being covered by a felt blanket by a woman, in an anonymous act of care) can nevertheless function to offer audiences positive points of re-identification.

Young’s insistence on the resonance and relevance of historical events, his conviction that they continue to ripple through cultural memory, is in reaction to the speed and flatness of contemporary life and the mediated nature of our relationship to images, which he understands as contributing to an ethical indifference.25 Viewed in relation to his earlier Double Ground Paintings (1995–), which are characterised by the layering of carefully rendered kitsch stock images over digitally printed backgrounds, in a pastiche of traditional art historical genres (landscape, still life, nude), The History Projects constitute an effort to rediscover and reinvest into images a depth of meaning, after decades of postmodernist deconstructivist practice, into absolute relativism or aesthetic play—syntactical strategies that dominated during the artist’s developmental years.

Connecting these bodies of work, it is possible to see a poststructuralist belief that existing codes of practice are just one possible order amongst many. Hence Young’s interest in transcultural humanitarianism (on an individual rather than a national level): certainly, ethical codes are relative and relational to socio-historical milieu, but what are the specificities of their cultural inflection? What are the precise historical circumstances that cause them to be expressed as such? And, significantly, how might their reconsideration inform or reground contemporary subjectivity?

Such a reading of Young’s practice is supported by the video work The Field (2018), commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art for The Burrangong Affray. Within the work an anonymous hand, the full figure cut off by the edge of the camera frame, tugs at the braid of a hyperbolically Anglo-Saxon woman (the artist had freckles painted onto the model for effect), pulling her backwards. In a later scene her braid is cut off entirely, an action that mirrors the scalping of Chinese miners of their queues during the Lambing Flat riots. This deliberate slippage of identity confirms that the specific historical role occupied by Chinese and pan-European miners during the riots is less relevant to the artist than the juncture of their interaction or negotiation.

For Young, as a member of the Chinese diaspora, existing and moving between cultures proffers a unique motivation to action that is not bound only to the principles or practices of a singular milieu.

The diasporic figure as informed by a dialectic of ‘here and there’ and possessing the ability to draw on asymmetrical cultural codes or registers, highlights the generative capacity of dwelling across a multiplicity of cultural realities. It is relevant here to briefly explicate a perspective that lies at the heart of the critical anthropology project, as articulated by Ghassan Hage in his 2011 text ‘Dwelling in the Reality of Utopian Thought,’ that anthropology, in researching and revealing radically different modes of living in and relating to the world, at its heart implies the maxim: “we can be radically other than what we are.”26 Hage suggests that the more challenging and profound implication contained within this proposed latent capacity to difference, is that if we can be, then we must also already have it in us to be other than what we are, or as he states: “Our otherness is always dwelling within us, and we are always dwelling in it: there is always more to us than we think.”27 This can be read in both positive and negative terms. As the woman in The Field is pulled by her braid, her expression shifts ambivalently between a grimace and a grin, failing to land conclusively. l

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It is impossible to deduce entirely from the actions of the figures in this scene if we are witnessing a moment of cruelty or playfulness. Young has suggested that this slippage is in order to maintain an actionable proximity between violence and play, highlighting the contingent line along which they fold into each other, most plainly in the acts of children. The inference of a universal capacity (of violence, trauma, benevolence) is in order to make it more difficult for an audience to maintain Self/Other subject positions in relation to these histories and so remove themselves from association.

In seeking moments of rupture, re-inscription or displacement, of the repetitive performance of prevailing cultural values manifest in individual acts of reaching for, across or beyond Otherness, Young’s History Projects make visible this inherent potential of the various minor realities that we inhabit.

At the time of writing, Australia is, like much of the world, in the midst of collective selfisolation in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Fear has a tendency to reveal the prejudices of a society, contracting in a moment of threat around a presumed essential core. The language of racial exclusion is often closely linked to that of medical contagion, framed in terms of contamination of an ethno-culturally homogenous body politic in a manner that emphasises permeability. In newspaper reports documenting the riots and public debates around the ‘Chinese Question’ of that preFederation period, research presents such a vocabulary (and it is inscribed within Young’s artwork): “pestiferous,” “locust,” “caterpillars,” “curse,” “plague,” “degenerating,” etc.28 The term “Le Peril Jaune” (The Yellow Peril) was coined by Russian sociologist Jacques Novikow in an 1897 essay, three years after the discovery by Franco-Swiss scientist Alexandre Yersin of the bacillus that caused the bubonic plague in Hong Kong.29 This particular outbreak of the plague started in Yunan Province, China in the 1850s, gradually making its way to Canton and Hong Kong, before spreading across the world in a global pandemic.30 The introduction of the White Australia Policy in 1901 did not only affect the migration of non-Europeans to Australia (although this impact was immediate and considerable) but also had significant ramifications for the lives of Chinese-Australians, whose presence became marked for surveillance. After 1903 naturalisation was denied to Chinese people, irrespective of how long they had lived in Australia.31 The White Australia Policy remained in force until 1957 when reforms introduced by the Menzies government began a slow dismantling—it was formally abolished in 1973. In Australia, as elsewhere in the world, COVID-19 has precipitated racist attacks directed against Asian members of the national community, mirrored by a xenophobic backlash against foreigners in China, stoked by nationalist rhetoric of the Chinese Communist Party.32 Also at the time of writing, in the context of increasingly tense political and trade relations between China and Australia, the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism escalated the gravity of the overall stiuation, issuing an alert advising Chinese citizens not to travel to Australia and citing this increase as justification.33 Enrolments of Chinese students are down in both Australia and the USA (a trend pre-dating the outbreak of COVID-19) and there has also been a decrease in the number of Chinese-born residents being granted citizenship in Australia.34 In May 2020 the National Library of Australia, long underfunded by government, announced that it will cease collecting material on Japan, Korea and all of mainland Southeast Asia, and maintain a “reduced acquisition” of content on China, Indonesia and Timor-Leste.35 All of which points to a likelihood that beyond the current period of closed borders we may see an exacerbation of the rejection of globalisation in favour of the introspection of nationalist interests. That being said, as John Young demonstrates, the actions and lives of individuals are not always or not necessarily circumscribed by the nation and its dominant imaginaries of culture, epistemology, or ethics.

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Notes 1 John Hood, ‘Two dis-Oriented Chinamen Jason Phu and John Zerunge stage anti-Digger hate expo in Chinatown’, Australia First Party website, 25 August 2018; https://australiafirstparty.net/two-disoriented-chinamen-jason-phu-and-john-zerunge-stage-anti-digger-hate-expoin-chinatown/. The term “digger” has been in use since Australia’s goldrush era and became closely linked with Australia’s armed forces during the First World War and subsequent wars, connoting a specifically masculine figure, with characteristics of larrikinism, mateship, tenacity, and good humour even in the face of extreme hardship, understood to be intrinsic to the Australian national character. The term has also taken on patriotic overtones 2 Karen Schamberger, ‘An Inconvenient Myth–The Lambing Flat Riots and the Birth of White Australia’, paper delivered at ‘Foundational Histories’, Australian Historical Association Conference, University of Sydney, 2015 3

Ibid.

4

Ibid.

5 Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, New York: Routledge; Annandale, NSW: Pluto Press, 2000, p. 28 6

Hector Edwin McGregor and John Kevin McGregor, Roll Up, Dunedoo, NSW: J.K. McGregor, 1999

7

Schamberger, ‘An Inconvenient Myth–The Lambing Flat Riots and the Birth of White Australia’, p. 3

8

Such attempts to fix particular events or dates in Australia’s history with interpretive significance are not dissimilar to annual debates over the celebration each year of Australia Day on 26 January, that marks the arrival of the First Fleet at Port Jackson and the raising of the flag of Great Britain at Sydney Cove; also referred to by indigenous Australians as Invasion Day, Survival Day or Day of Mourning 9 Schamberger, op cit. For a discussion that draws a direct line between the Lambing Flat Riots and contemporary issues of race in Australia, see ‘How Coronavirus Feeds Australian Racism’, 7am Podcast, 27 February 2020, https://7ampodcast.com.au/episodes/how-coronavirusfeeds-australian-racism. Extensive coverage of debates over the ‘Chinese question’ and issues of immigration around the time of the Lambing Flat Riots can be found in Hector Edwin McGregor and John Kevin McGregor, Roll Up, op cit.

10

Schamberger, p. 8

11

Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society

12

Schamberger, op cit.

13

Ibid.

14 Jacqueline Lo, ‘Diaspora, Art and Empathy’, The Bridge and the Fruit Tree: John Young–A Survey (exh. cat.), Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University, Canberra, 2013, p. 19 15 This is not to say that there have not been radical demographic shifts to Australia’s social make-up, particularly since the late 1970s with large-scale migration from Asia, or that this increasing plurality has not been embraced by much of the population. However, it is telling to here consider Asian-Australian representation within the field of culture. In thinking through the ways in which Australia presents itself on international stages, we might look to the Venice Biennale, where Australia has been represented by non-white artists numerous times since participation in the event began in 1954. Indigenous artists Rover Thomas and Trevor Nickolls were selected in 1990; Emily Kame Kngwarre, Yvonne Koolmatrie and Judy Watson were jointly selected in 1997, Vernon Ah Kee and Japanese-born Ken Yonetani were part of a group presentation in 2009, Egyptian-born Hany Armanious in 2011; and most recently Simyrn Gill, born in Singapore and currently working across Australia and Malaysia, was chosen in 2013. See ‘Australian pavilion’, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_pavilion.

16

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London; USA; Canada: Routledge, 1994

17

Ibid., p. 168

18

Conversation between the author and John Young, 11 June 2020

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19

Thomas Berghuis, ‘Situational Ethics’, Art & Australia 48, no. 3, Autumn 2011, pp. 440-443

20 Homi K. Bhabha and Klaus Stierstorfer, ‘Diaspora and Home: and interview with Homi K. Bhabha’, De Gruyter Conversations, 7 December 2019; https://blog.degruyter.com/diaspora-and-home-interview-homi-k-bhabha/; accessed 26 March 2020 21

Ibid.

22

Ibid.

23 Garrett W. Brown, ‘The Laws of Hospitality, Asylum Seekers and Cosmopolitan Right: A Kantian Response to Jacques Derrida’, European Journal of Political Theory 9, No. 3, 2010, pp. 308-327 24

Schamberger, p. 2

25

Berghuis, ‘Situational Ethics’

26

Ghassan Hage, ‘Dwelling in the Reality of Utopian Thought’, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements 23, no. 1, 2011, p. 8

27

Ibid, p. 8

28

Hector Edwin McGregor and John Kevin McGregor, Roll Up, pp. 34, 34, 34, 40, 40 and 61

29 ‘Yellow Peril’, Wikipedia; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Peril; Sarah Lazarus, ‘When death came calling: how the plague swept through Hong Kong’, South China Morning Post, 21 June 2014; https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1535499/whendeath-came-calling-plague-hong-kong; accessed 8 May 2020 30

Ibid.

31

Kate Bagnall, ‘Women, history and the shifting patterns of Chinese Australian Life’, Modernity’s End (exh. cat.), Incinerator Art Space, Sydney, 2016 32 See ‘The US Sinophobia Tracker: How America is becoming unfriendly to Chinese students, scientists and scholars’, SupChina, 5 May 2020; https://signal.supchina.com/the-u-s-sinophobia-tracker-how-america-is-becoming-unfriendly-to-chinese-students-scientists-and-scholars/; accessed 26 May 2020; Elizabeth Williamson and Vivian Wang, ‘’We Need Help’: Coronavirus Fuels Racism Against Black Americans in China’, The New York Times, 2 June 2020; https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/us/politics/african-americans-china-coronavirus.html; accessed 3 June 2020 33 ‘China warns citizens not to travel to Australia amid “increased” racism since coronavirus outbreak’, ABC News, 6 June 2020; https://www. abc.net.au/news/2020-06-06/do-not-travel-to-australia-china-warns-citizens-of-racism/12328488; accessed 7 June 2020 34

Elizabeth Redden, ‘Fewer Chinese Students at Many Campuses’, Inside Higher Ed, 17 October 2019; https://www.insidehighered.com/ news/2019/10/17/colleges-see-declines-chinese-student-enrollments; accessed 7 June 2020; Geoff Maslen, ‘Sharp fall in number of visas issued to Chinese students’, University World News, 25 September 2019; https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story= 20190925132954975; accessed 7 June 2020. The reduction in successful citizenship applications granted to Chinese-born Australian residents was reported in a 2018 article in The Sydney Morning Herald, according to which just 1559 Chinese-born residents were granted citizenship in the first eight months of the 2018 financial year, compared to 6500 successful applications over 2016-17, where over the same period British, Indian and South African approval rates saw a marginal improvement. See Eryk Bagshaw, ‘Plunge in number of Chinese residents granted Australian citizenship’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 17 August 2018; https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/plunge-in-number-of-chineseresidents-granted-australian-citizenship-20180816-p4zxsd.html; accessed 7 June 2020 35 Tessa Morris-Suzuki, ‘Out of Asia: the National Library shuts borders and stops collecting on our neighbours’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 27 May 2020; https://www.smh.com.au/national/out-of-asia-the-national-library-shuts-borders-and-stops-collecting-on-our-neighbours20200524-p54vtp.html?mc_cid=70b8e6426d&mc_eid=79243baf6a; accessed 7 June 2020

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Wawasan 2020: At the End of the Day Even Art is Not Important

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The attempt was as banal as it was futile: another effort by the Malaysian authorities to impose censorship upon an artist. Over several decades, Ahmad Fuad Osman’s art practice has dealt with ethnic identity, national memory and particularly, government abuse of power. Acclaimed as one of the most prominent artists working in Malaysia today, his engaging and sophisticated art has been exhibited recently at the 2016 Singapore Biennale: An Atlas of Mirrors and the 2019 Sharjah Biennial: Leaving the Echo Chamber. Malaysia was ready to acknowledge the achievements of one of its proud sons when the Balai Seni Negara (National Art Gallery of Malaysia) gave him a mid-career exhibition in October 2019, which he ironically titled At the End of the Day Even Art is Not Important (1990-2019).

The exhibition consisted of a variety of media—painting, installation and photography, selected and approved by the Bali. On 21 January, 2020, three months into the exhibition, Osman was informed that four of his works would be withdrawn following a complaint from a Gallery Board member.

The works in question were Untitled (2012), posters of Anwar Ibrahim with a black eye, a reference to his assault by the Inspector General of Police while in detention before his sodomy trial in 1988; Dreaming of Being A Somebody Afraid of Being A Nobody (2019), portraits of Mohamed Azmin, Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamad and Anwar Ibrahim, key figures in the struggle for power that led to the collapse of the reformist government that came to power after the 2018 general election; Imitating the Mountain (2004), a painting of a naked man lying on his back against the backdrop of a mountain, and Mak Bapak Borek, Anak Cucu Cicit Pun Rintik (2015-18), an installation of overweight white ceramic pigs sited before a gold-plated rock. The artist called the censorship “arbitrary, unjustified and an abuse of institutional power.”1 In response, the Balai Director, as an attempt to out-guess the views of some in the public who might find the artworks culturally offensive and derogatory, offered the explanation, “The role of this gallery is a government-funded institutional gallery and has to operate within its norms and order.”2 The nakedness of the male figure (his pubic hair showing) and the (presence of) pigs are indecencies to conservative Muslims, while Anwar, with his checkered political history, and Mahathir, the Prime Minister of the coalition government which at that time was on the verge of collapsing, had powerful political interests directed against them.

Whatever the reasons, censorship of the arts has been a common occurrence in Malaysia.

Before Osman there was the extended situation of the political cartoonist Zunar (Zulkiflee Anwar Haque), who since 2004 had been subject to raids and arrests for railing against the tyranny and corruption of the Malaysian government. His books banned, he was eventually charged for sedition for criticising the then Prime Minister Najib Razak and his wife, Rosmah Mansor, of corruption.3 Ahmad Fuad Osman fared better. After public protests and denouncement by colleagiate artists, the Balai reversed its decision and restored the four works within the exhibition. But the point had been made. Official action against political art was normalised.

The reformist government that won the 2018 general election, ending the ruling Barisan National coalition’s six-decade long monopoly of power since independence in 1957, had shown signs of relaxing official oppression on civil liberties of which Zunar was a beneficiary when charges against him were dropped. But people were cautious, as those repressive laws remained, most noticeably the Security Offences (Special Measures) Act which prescribes severe punishment, including the death penalty, for offences against public order and security. The new government might have been in place, but the laws and traditional political allegiances persisted. The exhibition At the End of the Day Even Art is Not Important (1990-2019) had to negotiate this uncertain territory, with a somewhat predictable result.

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When this government, Mahathir’s coalition Pakatan Harapan (Alliance of Hope) fell in 2020, less than two years after winning the election, it ended a grand social experiment. The stillbirth of multi-ethic intercourse at the official and national level was heart-felt and tragic. Its rise and fall involved complex manoeuvres of the political parties, in which the ‘grand old man’ of Malaysian politics, Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamad, had played a crucial part. Indeed, 2020 marks one of the most critical point in Malaysian politics since independence. It saw the end of the first truly multiracial government in Malaysia, and it witnessed the demise of Mahathir as a political figure of influence.

In 1991, as the country’s fourth Prime Minister, he had announced the plan of Wawasan 2020, or Vision 2020, which was to transform Malaysia into a modern First World nation. History has made its judgement. Not only that his coalition government failed to hold on, but the ambitious agendas of Wawasan 2020 were shown to be a failure, a fantasy of an obsessive and charismatic political leader.

For those in Malaysia, there have been two Mahathirs. There was the Mahathir who held political office from 1981 to 2003, and there was the one who, during the 2018 election, rose like a phoenix from the ashes of the scandal-ridden government of Najib Razak. Both Mahathirs were leaders of record-making duration: one for longevity, twenty-two years; the other for brevity, for just less than two years. Mahathir’s first prime ministership is remembered for its energy and dynamism, and the prosperity the country enjoyed under his watch. For all his achievements though, he carried over the racialist policies of earlier governments and consolidated many of their repressive measures.

But economic growth and national pride had made him in many people’s eyes a memorable political leader. As for the latter Mahathir, there had been much blustering from all quarters.

When he took office, the foreign press tagged him the oldest prime minister in the world; many Malaysians saw him as coming out of retirement to lead a coalition in order to defeat the muchdetested Najib and his cronies. There were good stories associated with the second Mahathir. Maybe he did save the nation from Najib, and the voters, exhausted by Najib’s greed and scandals, were prepared to forgive Mahathir’s own misdeeds during his previous time in office. Now that he is no longer in power and his government has fallen apart, how do we evaluate his legacy? Whether or not Wawasan 2020 had realised it lofty goals, Mahathir had laid the foundation of a modern industrialised economy, now dominated by manufacturing and services rather than primary produce, with only about eleven per cent of the people employed in agriculture.4 l

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The Malaysian economy is heavily dependent on foreign investment, and relies on exports.

Regarding its society, people in the rural areas and plantations remain poor, and a true Malaysian national identity has yet to emerge. All this places shame on a man who sees himself as a national unifier. For through Wawasan 2020, Mahathir had articulated nothing less than a total transformation of Malaysian society, not only the economy. This transformation entailed nine goals, or challenges: Challenge 1: Establishing a united Malaysian nation made up of one Bangsa Malaysia (Malaysian Race) Challenge 2: Creating a psychologically liberated, secure and developed Malaysian society Challenge 3: Fostering and developing a mature democratic society Challenge 4: Establishing a fully moral and ethical society Challenge 5: Establishing a matured liberal and tolerant society Challenge 6: Establishing a scientific and progressive society Challenge 7: Establishing a fully caring society Challenge 8: Ensuring an economically just society, in which there is a fair and equitable distribution of the wealth of the nation Challenge 9: Establishing a prosperous society with an economy that is fully competitive, dynamic, robust and resilient.5

A moral and just society, burnished by scientific and progressive ideas, a liberal and tolerant nation built on equal citizenship, an economy of fair and equitable distribution: with these goals Mahathir had himself transformed from a medical doctor to an economist, then a social reformer.

As it is now 2020, the verdict is these goals are mostly unfulfilled except, it may be argued, except for the economy, which has been bravely spluttering along since the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, and the Global Financial Crisis which followed a decade later.

But this is hindsight. The future did not look like that in the 1980s and 1990s when Mahathir was in office. Most Malaysians eagerly embraced the agendas. There had been calls for national integration before; every government had ethnic harmony and good citizenship in its policies.

But none had expressed this vision with such clarity and passion as Mahathir. The idea of “Bangsa Malaysia” (Malaysian Nation), Malaysians as a single ‘race’, was bold and socially intrepid.

Few knew how it would be realised though. Nonetheless, it encouraged the thought no one had dared to contemplate before: that the government would dilute, or even repeal pro-Malay racial discrimination put in place at the time of independence, and hardened by communal riots following the 1969 election when the ethnic Chinese-based opposition made significant gains and threatened the ruling Alliance coalition. Wawasan 2020 struck a chord in many people, perhaps more the nonMalays. It was something people wanted to hear, but was never forthcoming.

Mahathir’s personality and charisma helped to sell the boldness of his vision. There was also the economy. Until the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, the Malaysian economy grew at eight per cent per annum, one of the highest in the world. It had become the world’s thirteenth largest economy, and per capita income rose from US$2,255 in 1990 to US$3,908 in 1995.6 It was a prosperous time, people felt financially secure and went in droves to the shopping malls that sprung up one after another. The economic cake was being shared too, so it appeared. With money in their pockets, people put aside the racial antagonism that had always plagued the nation.

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From a global perspective, Mahathir made his mark by championing an anti-West position, as an expression of postcolonial pride and self-interest. Unlike his deputy Anwar Ibrahim, Mahathir was less a globalist than an economic nationalist. He directed government procurement away from Western sources—the United States, the UK and the EU—towards Japan, Korea and Taiwan.

His Look East Policy was both economic and cultural. Japan became the main source of foreign capital that financed the country’s industrialisation, and Mitsubishi was the major partner in producing the Malaysian car Proton.7 Culturally, he believed the East (he meant Japan and Korea), not the decadent West, was of greater relevance in fostering industrial discipline, hard work and social consensus.

In the so-called Asian Values debate he advocated with Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, and South Korean President Park Chung Hee, that Asian traditions were morally-centred and collectivist as opposed to Western democratic values, implying that, after centuries of colonial rule, it was time for Asia to take control of its own destiny.

On 20 November, 1993, US President Clinton convened the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference (APEC) in Seattle. The historic session was attended by thirteen leaders of Pacific Rim nations: Jiang Zemin, President of the People’s Republic of China; Paul Keating, the Australian Prime Minister; Indonesian President Suharto; South Korean President Kim Young Sam; Japanese Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa; the Sultan of Brunei Hassanal Bokiah; New Zealand Prime Minister James Bolger; Singapore Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, and officials from Taiwan and Hong Kong.8 The otherwise pleasant event was marred by the Malaysian leader’s absence —he had refused the invitation and did not attend (his call for an ‘Asians-only’ trading group had been met with a cool response), with Paul Keating famously describing Mahathir’s dissent as “recalcitrant”. In response, Mahathir accused Australia of “talk[ing] down to Asia—it tells the Asians how to behave themselves, even when the Australians themselves are not very well behaved,”9 while his government proposed a ’Buy Australia Last’ campaign. Mahathir’s contrariness followed the flap between Australia and Malaysia two years prior, when the Australian government was forced to apologise to Malaysia over the television soap opera, Embassy (1990-92), which portrayed scandalridden Ragaan, a fictional Southeast Asian country that bore a strong resemblance to Malaysia. l

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If this was seen as an anti-West gesture, Mahathir was equally fractious with the leader of neighbouring Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew. Both were ambitious and politically ruthless. Needled by their policy differences—for instance, Singapore’s friendly relationship with Israel whose selfdefence force provided the model for Singapore’s own SDF—Mahathir once remarked, “The fact remains that [Lee] is a mayor of Singapore. This is something he doesn’t like. He wants to be big, you see, and he feels that we took away his opportunity to lead a real country.”10 That “real country” was, of course, Malaysia. Singapore had been a part of Malaysia since 1963, but the expulsion from the Federation two years later aborted Lee’s dream of winning an election and becoming its Prime Minister; so it was implied.

All this felt like public performance. But for Malaysians, something was more critical domestically: Mahathir’s tribalism that favoured his own community, the Malays. When he was sworn in as Prime Minister in July 1981, he inherited the New Economic Policy (NEP), a set of official measures put in place after the 1969 race riots to strengthen the economic positions of the bumiputera (“son of the earth”) Malays, and other indigenous communities. Mahathir strengthened the NEP, and set about to increase Malay corporate ownership through privatisation. The transfer of utility, telecommunications and other government enterprises was designed to create Malay capitalists and professionals, long dominated by the ethnic Chinese and Indians. While it provided opportunities for Malays linked to the government, privatisation took place often without open, competitive tender, leading to corruption that benefited Mahathir’s own associates, among them major Chinese players.

Mahathir was astute enough also to recognise that the transfer of wealth had to involve changes to Malay culture and identity. Towards this end, and to facilitate efficient governance, he was prepared to intervene in one of the pillars of Malayness: traditional royalty. Malaysia has a system of constitutional monarchy. Each state is ruled by a sultan (or in two states a Raja and Yang di-Pertuan Besar), of which the hereditary sultans of the nine Malay states, the King (Yang di-Pertuan Agong), is elected once every five years. The King is also the head of Islam in Malaysia, and he appoints the chief Mufti of each state. After an election, the King appoints the Prime Minister who holds a majority in the lower house of Parliament, the Dewan Rakyat. The King’s role is primarily formal and ceremonial. However, the Yang di-Pertuan Agong is given the power of royal assent to the passing of parliamentary bills. The original Constitution imposed no time limit for the King to give royal assent, and theoretically a bill could be shuffled between the parliament and the palace indefinitely and impede the government’s effort to turn it into legislation.

In 1983, the post of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong was to be rotated and the two candidates were Idris Shah II Sultan of Perak and Sultan Iskandar of Johor. Both had the reputation of interfering in the affairs in their own states: Sultan Iskandar had a few years earlier been charged with manslaughter for shooting a trespasser.11 Mahathir was unhappy with the two candidates. To limit the new Agong’s power over his government, Mahathir initiated amendments to the Constitution, under which, in the event of the Agong’s failure to give royal assent within fifteen days, the bill in question would be considered passed and become law. In addition, the Prime Minister, not the Agong, would have power to declare a state of emergency. When the Agong and Sultans refused to give consent to these amendments, Mahathir engineered demonstrations to seek public support through a media campaign. The crisis was resolved in a compromise that favoured the government.

Under the Article 66 (4A) of the Constitution, His Majesty could object to a bill and delay royal assent for thirty days, after that the government could bypass the King in the legislative process.12

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While Mahathir struggled with this constitutional crisis, there was accompanying racial tension which led to a government crackdown on political dissent. First was disunity within UMNO (the United Malays National Organisation, Malaysia’s biggest and main national political party, the founding member of the Barisan Nasional coalition which had ruled since independence in 1957).

The challenge to Mahathir’s chairmanship resulted in the splitting of UMNO into two group: one led by the him, the other by prominent Malay figures including Mahathir’s former deputy, Musa Hitam.

Mahathir however, won the challenge to his chairmanship with a narrow margin. Another crisis facing the government was opposition to the decision to appoint non-Mandarin speaking supervisors to Chinese-medium primary schools. The Chinese community and its leaders saw this as an attempt to thwart the Chinese language usage in schools, as the supervisors would communicate with teachers and pupils in Malay or English only. On 11 October 1987, a crowd of some 2,000 protesters gathered in the city, among them the chairman of Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA), a partner in the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition; the leader of Democratic Action Party (DAP) and figures from other Chinese-based opposition parties. The subsequent meeting called for a three-day boycott of Chinese schools—though it was later abandoned when the government promised to resolve the issue. Nonetheless, the boycott quickly invited a counter rally organised by the UMNO Youth, the radical wing of the dominant Malay party. On 17 October, some 10,000 government supporters held a demonstration at a sports stadium in Kuala Lumpur, condemning the MCA for colluding with the Chinese educationists and opposition parties. Besides Mahathir, two figures in the crisis would play a prominent role in the 2018 election and the subsequent political drama: Najib Razak, the then head of UMNO Youth, and Anwar Ibrahim, the Education Minister in Mahathir’s cabinet. True to form, Najib had during the rally promised to soak a Kris—a traditional Malay dagger—in Chinese blood. Next day, on 18 October, a Malay soldier ran amok killing a man and injuring two others in Jalan Chow Kit, an area of Chinese and Malay businesses and residents. Many shops in the city were closed, fearing a repeat of the 13 May, 1969 race riots between Malays, Chinese and Indians which resulted in hundreds of deaths, looting and arson.13

Subsequent events moved quickly. On 27 October, Mahathir launched Operation Lalang,14 announcing that the crackdown was necessary to defuse racial tensions which had reached “dangerous proportions” and that the country was in the midst of an economic recession and high unemployment, so could not afford racial riots. Altogether 106 people were arrested under the Internal Security Act, under which a person could be detained indefinitely without trial. Among the detainees were DAP secretary general and deputy chairman, opposition politicians, leaders of the Chinese education movement, NGO activists, intellectuals, students, artists, scientists and others.

Operation Lalang also brought into detention three members of the team that opposed his UMNO chairmanship. Clearly, the crackdown was Mahathir’s show of force against his opponents, including those with his own party. It was a devasting suppression of political dissent and civil liberty. Of those arrested, most were released while forty-nine served a two-year detention without being charged; some alleged they had been tortured during imprisonment.

Following the arrests, the right to public assembly was restricted. The law prohibited rallies for elections, public lectures and general meetings by political parties without a police permit.

Additionally, the Home Ministry withdrew the publishing licences of the English (The Star and Sunday Star) and Chinese newspapers (Sin Chew Jit Poh)—and a Malay paper (Watan)—accusing them of reporting views unfavourable to the government. Tunku Abdul Rahman, the country’s first Prime Minister, in writing for The Star commented, “we are on the road to dictatorship.”15 The press l

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never regained their former spirit of liberal critique, mild even before the government crackdown.

The press and the media, as they still do today, fall under the Printing Presses and Publications Act which was amended to require newspapers and publishers to renew their licences annually. A new offence of “maliciously publishing false news” was added to the Act. The requirement of annual application of licences was later withdrawn, but the government retained “absolute discretion” over the granting of such permits.16

Then there was Anwar Ibrahim, Mahathir’s deputy and Finance Minister. A younger man with strong Islamic credentials, Anwar appeared to advocate loosening of the laws against civil liberty. His response to the Asian Financial Crisis had been to follow the sway of global markets, and to align himself with advice of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

His relationship with Mahathir worsened when the Prime Minister abandoned the tight monetary and fiscal restrictions the IMF had favoured. As Mahathir took control of economic policy, Anwar was marginalised. Within UMNO, Anwar’s supporters attacked Mahathir for his slowness in combating corruption. In September 1998, Anwar was dismissed from the cabinet, and from UMNO. Beside the policy differences between the two men, there was rumour of Anwar’s sexual misconduct.

As public support for him grew, Anwar was arrested under the Internal Security Act.

Thus begins the sorry tale of Anwar’s fall. Four charges of corruption were laid against him.

He was alledged to have abused his power by directing the police to intimidate people who had accused him of committing sodomy. Mahathir told the press that he was “convinced” of Anwar’s guilt. In April 1999, Anwar was found guilty of corruption and given six-years imprisonment.

In a trial shortly after, he was given a nine-year sentence on a conviction of sodomy, though this was later overturned on appeal. Later, Najib too saw Anwar as a threat and continued to persecute him.

In 2015, Anwar was brought before the court for a second sodomy charge, and received a sentence of five-years imprisonment. Following the victory of the opposition coalition in the 2018 general election, Anwar was free after being pardoned by the King.17 Mahathir’s years in power had been a story of invidious political manoeuvres and machination. However, what took place—the repression of civic liberties, the struggle within UMNO, the imprisonment of Anwar—make us forget the larger picture. Wawasan 2020 had drawn up a map for a more equitable future for Malaysians. In truth, the drumbeat of bumiputra special rights was toned down but not silenced. Mahathir remained a champion of Malay supremacy, and this was to play out in the demise of the government he briefly led from 2018 to 2020. *** The 1971 National Culture Policy was formulated in an effort to appease the Malay supremacists after the 1969 race riots, and all subsequent governments have followed it tout court. It states: “1. The National Culture must be based on the indigenous (Malay) culture 2. Suitable elements from the other cultures may be accepted as part of the national culture 3. Islam is a major component in the moulding of the National Culture.”18 Islam and Malay culture were made the nation’s foundation (though, multiculturalism was given a nod of approval), the justification being that Malays are indigenous people and their religion, language and culture would be rightly made the cornerstone of national identity. However, this posed a significant contradiction in a modern nation-state that formally guarantees equal rights for all citizens. Every government since has had to enact this double act. As the bumiputera policy favoured the Malays, the minority communities—the Chinese and 110 | 111

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Indians—still needed to be mollified; their interests could not be sacrificed for the sake of national unity. To manage the contradiction, the government relied heavily upon the economy. As evident during the Mahathir years, an expanding economy would spread the prosperity and mitigate the financial inequality and moral decrepitude of the race-based policy. The economy became the key to nation-building. As one analysist writes, “Meeting the aspirations of both Malays and non-Malays meant that political legitimation and economic performance had become two sides of the same coin.”19 The economy aside, Mahathir understood that to safeguard Malay rights and privileges “invariably means preserving and defending the status of Islam.”20 When he took office in July 1981, the Islamic resurgence was at its height, following the Iranian Revolution and the mujahideen insurgency against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. However, his approach to Islamisation carried a significant modern twist. He wanted an Islam that is a marriage of piety and industrial work ethics in order “to underscore the modernisation of Malaysia.”21 He had in mind a modern Malay race, pious and imbued with the culture of hard work and industrial discipline—like the non-Malays, principally the ethnic Chinese. A champion of Malay Supremacy, he aimed to reshape and modernise Malay identity and the institutions that defined it. It was a delicate and risky double-move.

The May 2018 general election was remarkable, even miraculous, on a number of scores.

The first is the massive losses of the UMNO-led coalition Barisan Nasional (BN) which had dominated Malaysian politics for over sixty years. After a night of ballot counting, the tally showed the opposition Pakatan Harapan, together with an allied party in Sabah, had won one hundred and twenty-one seats, against BN’s seventy-nine seats. The challenger had safely crossed the threshold to form government. Pakatan Harapan consisted of Bersatu, Malaysian United Indigenous Party, People’s Justice Party (PKR), Democratic Action Party (DAP) and National Trust Party (AMANAH).

Their constituents varied: Bersatu is pro-Malay and led by Mahathir and disaffected UMNO exmembers; PKR is reformist and multiracial, the party of Anwar; DAP formed in 1965, is multiracial and under ethnic Chinese and Indian leadership; and AMANAH, of reformist Islamists whose leaders had broken ranks with the orthodox Malaysian Islamic Party, PAS. As a coalition Pakatan Harapan is in name and in agenda multi-ethnic and progressive. This, as much as its opposition to Barisan Nasional, had been its electoral appeal.

After the swearing in, the new government cabinet included Mahathir as Prime Minister; Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail (Anwar’s wife and leader of PKY) as deputy PM, with Anwar to take over the role of Prime Minister within two years; the post of Finance Minster went an ethnic Chinese; the Attorney General was an ethnic Indian. One would have to be a Malaysian citizen to register how radical all this was. The election, a tsunami loss for UMNO, had heralded a government filled with traditionalists and reform-minded Malays and middle-class professionals, including women.

Mahathir was at the time ninety-two years old, he had left retirement to take the helm of a splintered opposition. He had made it clear that the election was “personal”, vowed to take down Najib Razak, in power since 2009.22 Najib was once Mahathir’s protege whom he had groomed to take up office. But Najib’s performance had been lacklustre, dogged by allegations of corruption (along with alleged links to the 2006 murder of a Mongolian model associated to a close associate), with countries including the US and Singapore investigating the US$4.5 billion missing from 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), a state investment fund.23 The US Justice Department declared that some US$30 million from the fund was used to buy jewellery for Najib’s wife.24 To bring down his “corrupt protégé”, Mahathir had formed Bersatu and joined the opposition.

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When the Pakatan Harapan government fell apart less than two year later in February 2020, there was much soul searching amongst Malaysians. Had the appointment of a Chinese Finance Minister and an ethnic Indian as Attorney General been too radical? Were the Malays threatened, fearing that their rights and privileges would be compromised under the new government? Was it due to the failure of Mahathir’s leadership and the struggle within Pakatan Harapan?

In a way, Mahathir was an unlikely choice to lead. But pragmatism prevailed. For he had his own share of corruption and other scandals during his twenty-two-years in power, and some of his coalition partners had suffered arrests and imprisonment by his government. Nonetheless, the Pakatan Harapan coalition believed, with Anwar in prison, it could not capture the Malay votes without Mahathir. On his part, Mahathir had hoped he would retake power and clean up UMNO and realise some of the agendas he outlined in his Wawasan 2020 plan. Throughout all this, he remained a Malay nationalist; his disaffection had been with UMNO and its backward thinking and corrupt elite—not with the party itself. It was a fact few in the coalition were prepared to contemplate at the time.

There was a good deal of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.25 The collapse of the government was riven by rumour and conspiracy. In the final analysis, there are several considerations—Mahathir was unsure if his successor would carry on his agenda, particularly reforming UMNO—why he procrastinated in announcing the date of Anwar’s takeover.

Two decades after his first premiership, as one commentator explains, Mahathir had held onto his vision of removing “the kleptocrats within UMNO” and returning the country “back in the hands of those who genuinely support the agenda to protect and develop the Malay bourgeoisie.”26 The Anwar factor haunted him still, as did what he had proposed in Wawasan 2020. Looking at the Pakatan Harapan government, it is remarkable how its multiracial, reformist aims had echoed Mahathir’s obsessions over the years. Whatever he had in mind was to be achieved within a Malay Supremacist framework. In his second premiership, (Mahathir) is apprehensive that the Pakatan Harapan leaders—Lim Guan Eng and Anwar Ibrahim—[are] too cosy with Chinese capital and foreign investors. He needed to pass the government to a Malay majority government which would be committed to continuing the ‘Malay Agenda’. This is why he brought in MPs from UMNO to bolster Bersatu, and why he cozied up with UMNO and PAS.27

In subterfuge against subterfuge, Mahathir the champion of Malay Ascendancy had played his role, the Malay voters’ “perception was that [Pakatan Harapan] is committed to ‘meritocracy’, trimming subsidies to poorer sectors, promoting market based solutions and downsising the public sector.”28 They may have disliked Najib, but they quickly reevaluated the situation and readjusted their allegiances. Without Malay support, which Mahathir’s opponents were quick to exploit, Pakatan Harapan’s legitimacy and political base suffered significantly. 2020 is a significantly different era to that of the 1980s and 1990s. Mahathir had enjoyed enormous power and popularity, but he now faced a slowing economy, rising costs of living and high unemployment. The hatred for Najib had united the voters—Malay, Chinese and Indian alike. Talking to informants, it is complicated to describe the disillusionment and sense of betrayal. Everything—social justice and equality, a truly multiracial Malaysia—about the Pakatan Harapan government had been over-ambitious. In some ways it echoed Wawasan 2020. For many Malaysians, the idea of the government as a force of betterment for all citizens was shown to be a fantasy: this may well be Mahathir’s ultimate legacy. l

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Looking back to the censorship of Ahmad Fuad Osman’s artworks it felt like business as usual. Wawasan 2020 was silent on the arts, but it had promised a “psychologically liberated” and “mature democratic society”. Ever since independence the state had suppressed the media and artistic expression, and during the Mahathir years films like Goodfellas (1990) and Pulp Fiction (1994) were banned for their depiction of violence, as was Schindler’s List (1993) for its sympathetic rendering of the Jews and The Holocaust.29 So the National Art Gallery’s dealing with Osman’s art is nothing new. One may well ask: aren’t free, vibrant, artistic practices a crucial aid to the making of a modern and progressive society Mahathir had in mind?

Ahmad Fuad Osman’s work for the 2019 Sharjah Biennial was the Enrique de Malacca Memorial Project (2016-ongoing),30 a mixed-media installation including videos, archival material, photographs and ancient maps. Enrique de Malacca is best described as an erasure of historical memory through the resurrection of the new and the neglected. At the Biennial articles of ‘evidence’ that debunk an enduring myth were hung on the wall, displayed in glass cabinets, and streamed over headphones; and still more, embodied in the sculpted figure of a half-squatting man, his eyes looking ahead like a ship captain scanning the sea for the horizon. This figure dominates the room, his vision ties the elements—the maps, the tools and weapons, the prints and paintings, the documents—that constitute the project into a single web of significance.

Who was Enrique de Malacca? What was the myth that his character stands against?

Osman ‘discovered’ him in the novel Panglima Awang (Commandant Awang) (1957) by the Singaporean writer Harun Aminurrashid.31 The novel introduces an alternative account of the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the world. Magellan died in Mactan Island, in the Philippines, in 1521. A myth emerged that it was Enrique, the Portuguese captain’s slave and guide, who completed the voyage. Enrique was from the Indonesian archipelago, and Magellan was the conqueror of Malacca. This became the thrust of Osman’s project: to reconstruct a mythohistory about the first circumnavigation of the world from the view of Maritime Southeast Asia —Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia.32 In this context, whether Enrique is real or a fiction is less important than his representation of a shared history and identity in the region. And this shared history and identity is superimposed on the conventional narrative of Magellan’s heroic voyage that opened the door to European conquest of the New World. The result is a postcolonial rewriting of the history of Southeast Asia. In this revision, the European role is played down, and so is the possible claim of the Nusantara sailor-explorer as belonging to any of the Southeast Asian maritime nations. Panglima Awang, based little on historical evidence, was “meant to provide imaginative support to the Malay struggle for independence as well as the post-independent nation-building in Malaysia.”33 But the artist is adamant that Enrique does not ‘belong’ to one nation alone, but to all nations of the Southeast Asian sea lanes. The Enrique de Malacca Memorial Project has shifted from a sole ‘Malaysia focus’ and given the Magellan-Enrique voyage a postcolonial and regional tint.

Ahmad Fuad Osman is no Malay racialist.

The strength of the Enrique de Malacca Memorial Project lies in its handling of history and collective memory, and its denying of its use for nationalist aims. For someone like Mahathir, his anti-West, postcolonial outrage always ended up in hoisting a nationalist, pro-Malay position.

Osman has a different, more sophisticated take. Reflecting on the 2020 National Art Gallery exhibition, it is difficult to pin it down in terms of a single discursive strategy. Like all brilliant artwork, it encourages interpretive freedom. The pigs (of Mak Bapak Borek, Anak Cucu Cicit Pun Rintik) circumnavigating the gold rock: only the crudest cultural chauvinist might read it as an attack on 114 | 115

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a wealth-loving community—perhaps the Chinese? And it was left to the Islamic zealots to incite resentment and religious sensitivity that inevitably led to censorship. As to the photographs of Mahathir and Anwar, it may be argued that they have to feature in a contemporary artwork simply because they were key figures in a momentous time in the nation’s history. The artist’s approach may be deconstructive, but the slashing and the muted tone of the portraits reins in the sense of approval the artist may have of his subjects. The controversy would have been much of nothingness in a different context. But the irony is that it is given to the professional curators and gallery officials to take up the role of Islamicists and UMNO racialists to force a singular meaning, to coerce an ideological and anti-Islamic intent onto the artwork and the exhibition itself.

In example and style, one recognises this had been Mahathir’s approach to governance during his two decades in power. There was suppression of political dissent and censorship of films and publications. However, it is safe to think these measures were not so much removed from Wawasan 2020 as imbedded in its agendas. The power of Wawasan 2020 lies in its over-promises and no less in its concealment. Like the Enrique de Malacca Memorial Project, Wawasan 2020 is mythorealism, a narrative of the nationalist fiction of race. All the grand pronouncement of Bangsa Malaysia and the creating of a just, equitable society built on an advanced economy: the worm of racial inequality and Malay Supremacy ate away at its core. Race baiting had brought Mahathir power.

For all his efforts to modernise Malay culture and identity, communalism had driven him in his two premierships. The result has been costly; the vacuousness of his political ambitions had the effect of destroying the hope of reform, of causing distrust in parliamentary politics, and of impeding the artistic expression of one as astute as the maker of the Enrique de Malacca Memorial Project and the emblematic work in the 2019 National Art Gallery exhibition, At the End of the Day Even Art is Not Important.

Notes 1 Sod Wern Jun, ‘Four artworks removed from Ahmad Fuad Osman’s National Art Gallery show’, Malay Mail, 10 February 2020; https://www. malaymail.com/news/malaysia/2020/02/10/four-artworks-removed-from-ahmad-fuad-osmans-national-art-gallery-show/1836161; accessed 3 June 2020 2

Ibid.

3

‘Malaysia’s top cartoonist says he’ll miss PM who tried to jail him for 43 years’, The Guardian, 24 June 2018; https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2018/jun/24/malaysia-top-political-cartoonist-zunar-will-miss-pm-najib-razak; accessed 4 June 2020 4

‘Economy of Malaysia’; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Malaysia; accessed 29 May 2020

5

‘Wawasan 2020’; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wawasan_2020; accessed 4 June 2020

6 ‘Malaysian economy in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s: Mahathir, the Asian Financial Crisis and after Mahathir’; Facts and Details; factsanddetails.com/southeast-asia/Malaysia/sub5_4e/entry-3694.html; accessed 4 June 2020 7

Michio Kimura, ‘Foreign direct investment in Malaysia’, Southeast Asian Affairs, 1991, pp. 180-195

8

Walt Crowley, ‘President Clinton convenes APEC summit on Blake Island on November 20, 1993’; https://www.historylink.org/File/5333; accessed 4 June 2020 9 Philip Shenon, ‘Malaysia premier demands apology’, The New York Times, 9 December, 1993; https://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/09/world/ malaysia-premier-demands-apology.html; accessed 4 June 2020

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10 P.N Balji, ‘Dr M on Kuan Yew: strangely similar, yet decidedly dissimilar’, Malaysiakini, 1 August, 2019; https://www.malaysiakini.com/ news/486172; accessed 4 June 2020 11 ‘History of violence overshadowed generosity’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 3 February, 2010; https://www.smh.com.au/national/history-ofviolence-overshadowed-generosity-20100202-nayz.html; accessed 3 June 2020 12 Shad Saleem Faruqi, ‘A precedent but no blanket pass’, The Star, 23 June, 2016; https://www.thestar.com.my/opinion/columnists/reflectingon-the-law/2016/06/23/a-precedent-but-no-blanket-pass-article-66-4a-permits-the-king-to-be-bypassed-but-cannot-apply-to-ot; accessed 4 June, 2020 13

In-won Hwang, Personalised Politics: The Malaysian State Under Mahathir, Singapore: ISEAS, 2003, p. 151

14

Lalang is a type of weed, and so the meaning was clear, a “weeding operation”

15

Barry Wain, Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p. 75

16

Andrew T. Kenyon, Tim Marjoribanks & Amanda Whiting, Democracy, Media and Law in Malaysia and Singapore: A Space for Speech, Routledge, 2013, pp. 13-14. Also ‘Operation Lalang’; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Lalang; accessed 3 June 2020 17 ‘Malaysia: Anwar Ibrahim released after getting full pardon’, Al Jazeera, 16 May, 2018; https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/05/malaysiaanwar-ibrahim-released-full-pardon-180516050149731.html; accessed 4 June 2020 18

‘National Culture Policy’; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Culture_Policy; accessed 4 June 2020

19

Michael Garry O’Shannassy, ‘Imagining Identity: Visions of Malaysia and the Interrelationship Between State, Society and the Global’, PhD thesis, Australian National University, 2012, pp. 212-213 20

Joseph Chinyong Liow, Piety and Politics: Islamism in contemporary Malaysia, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, p. xvii

21

Ibid., p. 46

22 ‘”This election is personal”: Mahathir Mohamad, 92, vows to stop “corrupt” protégé’, The Guardian, 2 May 2018; https://www.theguardian. com/world/2018/may/02/mahathir-mohamad-92-vows-to-stop-corrupt-protege-malaysia; accessed 4 June 2020 23 ‘1MDB scandal: A timeline’, Channel News Asia, 22 May, 2018; https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/1mdb-scandal-atimeline-10254406; accessed 5 June 2020 24

Ibid.

25

The more things change, the more they stay the same

26 Dr Jeyakumar Devaraj, ‘The meltdown of Pakatan Harapan’, Malaysiakini, 4 March 2020; https://www.malaysiakini.com/news/513137; accessed 4 June 2020 27

Ibid.

28

Ibid.

29

‘List of films banned in Malaysia’; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_banned_in_Malaysia; accessed 2 June 2020

30

Also shown at the 2016 Singapore Biennale: An Atlas of Mirrors

31

Harun Aminurrashid, Panglima Awang, Singapore: Pustaka Melayu, 1957

32 See the 2019 Sharjah Biennial website; https://universes.art/en/sharjah-biennial/2019/calligraphy-square/calligraphy-museum/ahmad-fuadosman; accessed 3 June, 2020. The reading of the artwork is mine 33

‘About the Memorial Project’; https://www.enriquedemalacca.com/about.html; accessed 4 June 2020

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Into the Void: Concealed Histories, Buried Memories

With large-scale contemporary art exhibitions in suspension or incomplete everywhere, the interruption of the 2019 Aichi Triennale now seems a portent of things to come. Though its derailing was political rather than epidemiological, it weirdly anticipated the current vacuum of suddenly truncated, delayed, downscaled, virtualised and abandoned biennials and triennials worldwide.

In one of the highlights of that exhibition, Tadasu Takamine’s upturned swimming pool in a derelict Toyota City High School, the critic and philosopher Akira Asada observed “a silent epitaph for the coming Olympic Games.”1 That the Tokyo Olympics remain yet to come, and that this coming is hardly guaranteed, gives added weight to arguments of art’s uncanny ability to predict the future, as if receptive to emanations from the forces of a different kind of time. “It heralds, for it is prophetic,” as Jacques Attali noted in his political economy of music: in a society devoid of meaning, background noise holds the key to the meters, rhythms and tones of the social structures of the future.2 l

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Asada’s observation came in conversation with the Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen, whose gesamtkunstwerk, Hotel Aporia (2019) had, along with Takamine’s intervention, been roundly declared one of the highlights of the Triennale. For Asada, the noise of Takamine’s work was its overwhelming, imposing silence—one might say like a sky bereft of air traffic. Ho’s noise was of a different order, a “wind and clattering” passing through “the echoes of various contradicting voices,” an apt description for the particular kind of sonic space at which Ho has arrived after nearly two decades of experimentation. His artwork, centring of an historic Toyota City inn, is on its surface explicitly backward looking, the product of one of a number of recent video practices predicated on synthesising historical research. Its most recognisable device, erasing the faces of actors in the films of Yasujirō Ozu, appears at once an act of obfuscation and the creation of a void into which a constellation of obscure and forgotten moments might rush. It is hard not to perceive Ho’s hotel having access to the same portentous time as Takamine’s pool, and that this time runs in more than one direction, where troubled pasts, vexatious presents and indistinct futures operate in consonance and dissonance.

Ho Tzu Nyen is part of a generation of overseas-educated Singaporean artists, born in the 1970s and coming to prominence in the 2000s, who have remained particularly mobile, and whose careers have grown in parallel with the maturation of the city-state’s aspirations to becoming a ‘Global City for the Arts’. A graduate of the University of Melbourne’s Victorian College of the Arts with a fondness for European cinema, Ho made his breakthrough in 2003 with a solo exhibition at Singapore’s longstanding alternative space The Substation, exploring the mythology surrounding the Sumatran prince Utama, credited with founding the Kingdom of Singapura at the turn of the fourteenth century. Ho received further praise for his presentation at the first Singapore Biennale in 2006, with a videoed staging at the former Supreme Court of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody (2006), which for all its theatrical pomp and heavy metal bluster remains a song about the death penalty, a taboo subject in Singapore. Ho proceeded through a series of expansive, philosophical short films, among them Newton (2009), Earth (2009/10) and Zarathustra: A Film for Everyone and No-One (2009/10), characterised by an increasing attention to looming, powerful soundscapes, composed and occasionally revisited with collaborating musicians and sound artists. His attention returned to Singapore with Ten Thousand Tigers (2014), an ambitious theatrical piece following the symbolism of the tiger in the construction of Singaporean and Malayan history, which engendered a series of operatic videos focusing on encounters during the European colonial period. In the same period he produced the complementary compilation films The Nameless and The Name (both 2015), respectively concerning the mysterious Sino-Vietnamese Malayan communist, collaborator and colonial agent known as Lai Teck, and the Area Studies expert Gene Hanrahan, who appears to have been a pseudonym for a number of figures connected with US intelligence; both projects form part of Ho’s broader project, A Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia.

As Asada notes, Ho’s current work aligns him with a tendency for artists to direct historical, anthropological and folkloric research into the creation of videos, a mode of working that became pronounced with the advent of affordable production equipment and the proliferation of the biennial form in the 1990s and 2000s. Ho’s approach to locality through a regional lens, however, is closer to a specifically Asian trend that explores the construction of nationality along transnational lines, following mercantile patterns of colonial trade and the colonial projects of the Second World War. Artists operating in this vein include multidisciplinary practitioners like Singapore’s Shubigi Rao and Malaysia’s Ahmad Fuad Osman, filmmakers like Beijing-based Hao Jingban and Tokyo’s 118 | 119

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Hikaru Fujii, and Taiwanese artist Chia-Wei Hsu, Ho’s co-curator for the 2019-20 Asian Art Biennial in Taichung. The relevance to Japan of this kind of work is twofold. In the first instance, it is sympathetic to the emergence within contemporary art of challenges to cultural essentialisms and historical revisionisms that became hegemonic in the public sphere during the Heisei period, expressed widely by the Japanese artists included in the 2019 edition of the Aichi Triennale.3 Secondly, it provides an occasion for an artist like Ho to explore in greater depth the discursive and cultural lines that flow into and out of the Japanese occupation of Singapore and other parts of Southeast Asia during the Second World War.

Housed on the grounds of the Toyota Industrial & Cultural Center, and used primarily for community events such as tea ceremonies and flower arranging, Kirakutei is a fine example of the Taishō era large-scale architecture that once dominated the commercial centres of central Japan.

Its history as a restaurant and inn dates back to the late Meiji period, but the current building was constructed in stages in late Taishō and early Shōwa, with the finishing touches applied as late as 1940. Having served as a private residence for some years, it was donated to the Cultural Center by its owner in 1982 and moved to its current location as an example of the architecture of Toyota City prior to the urbanisation of Japan’s post-war reconstruction. Toyota is an industrial city in the northern part of Aichi prefecture, where agricultural flatlands merge with the vertiginous terrain of bordering Gifu and Nagano. Under its original name of Koromo, it flourished as a sericulture centre during the Meiji Restoration, when Japan sought to dominate global silk markets and secure valuable foreign currency. As the silk industry declined in the face of trade embargoes and the invention of cheaper synthetic alternatives, the Toyoda Automatic Loom Corporation diversified into automobile manufacture, establishing Toyota Motor Co, Ltd. in 1934. So significant was the company as an employer during Japan’s 1950s manufacturing boom that the city of Koromo changed its name accordingly. Kirakutei’s well-to-do clientele reflected these broader shifts, drawn from the silk trade in the decades prior to the Second World War, and the auto industry afterwards.

Hotel Aporia is most concerned with Kirakutei’s guests in the intervening years, the naval officers of early Shōwa’s militarisation, and in particular a kamikaze squadron who received their final, ceremonial dinner in the building during the last, desperate months of Japan’s Pacific War. From this point the work takes in the periods in which Yasujirō Ozu and the cartoonist and animator Ryūichi Yokoyama served in wartime propaganda units in Southeast Asia, the aesthetic considerations of the novelist and essayist Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, and the ambiguous political thought of the Kyoto School philosophers, with attention to their shifting conception of “absolute nothingness.” It takes the form of a series of four video installations staged over the two levels of Kirakutei, which, when presented in-situ, offered an enveloping viewing experience quite distinct from the theatrical devices of gallery-based ‘immersive’ installation, its piquancy achieved through site-specificity.

The convention of removing one’s shoes in the genkan, negotiating narrow hallways and staircases, and inhaling the scent of tatami and old pine in the sultry Japanese summer were integral to its impact. The Aichi Triennale has presented works in this kind of unconventional, though highly appropriate, venue before—Lieko Shiga’s free-standing, atmospheric photographs in the eeriness of a gutted upper level of a once high-end department store down on its luck, or Kohei Nawa’s low-lit primordial bubble pool above a former bowling alley—but never with such an alignment of location and content.

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Indeed, Ho mentions Tanizaki as a guide for how to treat the inn, from attention to materials used in constructing projection screens to careful concealment of electrical cables in a traditional Japanese setting. At a total running length of eighty-four minutes, with time added for traversing and enjoying the space, Hotel Aporia demands as much of the viewer as a short feature film or an intercity flight. The script for each video is based on email correspondence between the artist and two principal interlocutors, Aichi Triennale curator Yoko Nose, based at the excellent Toyota Municipal Museum of Art (‘Yoko’), and Tzu’s dramaturg and researcher Tomoyuki Arai (‘Tomo’).

In a small room on the ground floor Ho offered The Waves, a kind of overture introducing the principal themes of the project beginning with Nose’s proposal that Ho consider Kirakutei—“the Japanese house that I told you about”—as a venue. Nose recounts information gleaned from an interview with a former landlady, including the story of the kamikaze squadron, the Kusanagi Unit, named for a sword regarded as a national treasure that is housed in nearby Atsuta Shrine, and of their families, who used the restaurant as a site of mourning after the war.

Immediately in this introduction, Ho’s aesthetic strategies, used across the installation, are also made apparent. Like The Nameless, which was constructed from films featuring Hong Kong actor Tony Leung, and The Name, a montage of cinematic depictions of solitary writers in the West, the videos in Hotel Aporia are largely created from pre-existing material. Scenes from Ozu’s films feature heavily, with Ho cleverly combining repeated motifs like women switching overhead lamps on and off, and groups of men singing together over meals. The gendering is significant, and largely aligns with subjects mentioned in the text. Most striking, though, is the erasure of the faces, which Ho has explained as a way to “make them anyone and no one at the same time.” For Asada, this is a means of removing the specificity of actors well-known to a Japanese audience, so that attention may focus on a closer reading of Ozu’s work. There is, however, a haunting aspect to the gesture, as the figures go through everyday activities with either no awareness of or complete comfort with their empty visage. The effect is disconcerting, alienating. This is intensified by the soundtrack, where the affable reading voice is accompanied by a choir of electronically treated whispers and hisses that presents them as multiple—‘legion’ for those with a taste for biblical histrionics—as if issuing from some abyss, across dimensions, across time. Wind effects and ominous drones loom in the spaces between words, such that Ozu’s warm, sunny exterior shots register as depictions of bleak, nuclear winters.

The Waves also introduces the Ōshima Memos, discovered in 2000 and published the following year, which detailed secret meetings between the Yonai faction of the Imperial Navy, and the philosophers of the Kyoto School. As its name suggests, the Kyoto School was primarily based around Kyoto University, which served as a meeting point for followers of the philosopher Kitarō Nishida. Nishida was a brilliant product of Meiji modernisation, a student of both zen and continental philosophy whose 1911 An Enquiry into the Good is credited with being the first original contribution by a Japanese philosopher on terms established by European thought. Central to Nishida’s system were the ideas of “absolute nothingness” and “contradictory self-identity”, which initially corresponded to transcendent unities of subject and object expressed in German idealist philosophy, and more sympathetically Heidegger’s later conception of being, but which by the end of the 1930s had come to stand for the figure of the Japanese Emperor. While made up of a diverse and heterodox array of thinkers operating across a range of philosophical disciplines, riven with critical disputes, multiple generations and even a Marxist left wing, the Kyoto School is principally remembered for its ambiguous relationship to Japan’s militarist state, and accordingly for providing moral justification for the country’s colonial adventures in Asia. The Ōshima Memos revealed a l

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verifiable level of political engagement, even if this occurred at the behest of a particular faction of the armed forces, rather than that of the school itself.4

The Japanese military was riven with factions. The officers of the Imperial Japanese Navy tended to be less aggressive than their army counterparts, and the navy was itself factionalised.

Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai had been a major figure in the pre-war Treaty Faction of the Imperial Navy, arguing that the composition of Japan’s navy was not suited to military adventure, functioning primarily as a deterrent to invasion. His brief term as Prime Minister in the first half of 1940 was marked by a pro-British, pro-American stance, distancing Japan from Germany and Italy in order to avoid war. He was forced to resign in July when pro-war factions in the army refused to serve under his leadership; the Tripartite Pact was signed several months later. With the demise of Hideki Tōjō following the fall of Saipan in July 1944, Yonai returned to cabinet, arguing in favour of peace treaties whenever they were presented by the Allies. The meetings detailed in the Ōshima Memos present the role of the Kyoto School as a sort of think-tank for these intrigues, first in ultimately futile attempts to prevent the war, then in plots to overthrow Tōjō—which necessitated the secrecy of the memos—and finally in a transition to a post-war order.

It is also worth noting the participation of Kyoto School philosophers in another forum, the Shōwa Research Assocation, effectively the ‘brains trust’ of Fumimaro Konoe, who served as Prime Minister three times between the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of 1931 in China and the end of the war in 1945. Konoe had promoted the dovish Yonai to a prominent role of cabinet in his first term, but it was also Konoe who succeeded Yonai’s brief Prime Ministership and ratified the Tripartite Pact, cementing the Axis in 1940. To add to the complexity, the Shōwa Research Association contained at least two Marxists: the first apostate, in the person of Kyoto School member Kiyoshi Miki, who developed the idea of an East Asian Cooperative Community; the second clandestine, in the figure of journalist Hotsumi Ozaki, an agent of the Soviet master spy Richard Sorge.5 It was Ozaki who encouraged the evolution of Miki’s idea of a Cooperative Community into the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere and backed the navy’s plan to push south to secure Southeast Asian oil supplies against army agitation to expand the continental war in Russia.6

As Arai notes in his correspondence with Ho, the notion of ending the war detailed in the Ōshima Memos only ever extended to the United States and its European allies, and never to Japan’s Asian neighbours, members of a Co-Prosperity Sphere under the moral leadership of Japan, furnished by the philosophical positions of Kyoto School. These are explored in depth in Hotel Aporia’s longest video, The Void. In contrast to the other videos that make up the work, the majority of whose imagery is drawn from the films of Ozu and Yokoyama, as well as archival photographs and documents, The Void is completely black, with the exception of subtitles along the lower edge of the frame. In Aichi, it was projected onto an enormous fan in a tatami room, producing a continuous blast of air and sound, with the subtitles appearing on a low partition in the centre.

Asada reads it as the propeller of a jet aircraft, turning Kirakutei into a fighter plane. The observation is not without irony, for The Wind, one of two double-sided videos in the installation, details the grizzly death of the originator of the use of the term “kamikaze” in aviation, the pioneering longdistance pilot and Europhile Masaaki Iinuma, who is said to have been so punch-drunk at the news of the attack on Pearl Harbour that he stepped into the path of an oncoming propeller. The Void serves as both a meditation on the malleability of the concept of “absolute nothingness” within Kyoto School philosophy, and as the abyssal centre of Hotel Aporia, the source of its hellish winds and echoing voices.

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With the suggestion of a push into Southeast Asia, it is also the origin of Ho’s own reflections of art drafted into service of the state. His curiosity about Ozu’s time in Singapore and Yokoyama’s sojourn to Java manifests in the two slightly different readings, presented back-to-back in the twoscreen video The Children. Ozu had himself served as an infantryman in mainland China, but his Singaporean posting seemed like an idyll: he played tennis and watched hundreds of confiscated American films, including Citizen Kane. The biography about the Indian nationalist and Japanese collaborator Subhas Chandra Bose, for which he had been commissioned, was unforthcoming.

As Ho notes, Ozu never depicted the war directly, but his works are replete with references to it, both overt and coded: returned soldiers, old songs. Yokoyama, on the other hand, did complete his work.

With popular strip Fuku-chan, in print from 1936 to 1971, Yokoyama had revolutionised manga storytelling with its simple narrative of a young boy and his family in everyday surroundings.

In 1944, however, Fuku-chan went to war. Fuku-chan’s Submarine is a spritely adventure in which our amiable hero participates in the sinking of an enemy supply ship. There is a chilliness to Ho’s representations of Yokoyama’s animations that exceeds even the haunted character of Ozu’s actors. Without the familiar features of the happy-go-lucky Fuku-chan, the film echoes the antiindividualism expressed across Japanese war propaganda, from painting to cinema, which favoured an inconspicuous commitment to the collective machine—Mayu Tsuruya calls this “the ideology of self-effacement”—over the dramatic depictions of individual heroism typically found in the West.7

Ozu, Yokoyama and the Kyoto School are examples of the many artists and intellectuals who found themselves working within the Japanese war machine. The dynamics of collaboration were complex and wide-reaching. For every figure like the avant-garde playwright Tomoyoshi Murayama, who suffered arrest, harassment and exile for his opposition to the war, there are countless others who succumbed to the campaign for tenkō—apostasy or conversion—which through coercion and inducement brought leftist intellectuals ‘back into the fold’, or who, like the Marxist economist Kōzō Uno, concealed themselves from public life in the civil service and the zaibatsu system.8 Artists were by no means immune to these pressures or to the turbulent passions of the era, leaving a complicated legacy to subsequent generations. This is true for any creator who finds themselves at the mercy of state forces, whether through censorship for supposed offences to the l

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sensibility of the people, through valorisation in the pursuit of regional or global hegemony, or, as was sometimes the case with tenkō, through both. This is a tension that pulses through time, from the abyss of the past whose voices haunt Hotel Aporia, to the current era in which they were made manifest.

In The Children, Ho details a further case of the uncanny prescience of art, a sign of war in the cinema of Yasujirō Ozu that anachronistically predates its advent. The 1932 silent film I Was Born, But … concerns two boys whose bullying by a neighbourhood gang convinces them of the need to grow strong. Perceiving their father as weak in his dealings with his boss, who happens to be the leader of the bullies, they rebel, and declare their intention to become generals. Though it was released in the year following the annexation of Manchuria, it is perhaps too much of a stretch to see this light-hearted comedy as a metaphor for Japan’s vexed project of emulating the colonial powers of Europe. But it does point to art’s unusual access to the sensibilities of its time, to its tendency to articulate them, consciously or unconsciously, as historical forces. So to the wind and clattering noise that passes through the contradicting voices of Hotel Aporia. As it turned out, events to which its ghosts of history might have spoken transpired almost immediately on its presentation, so quickly that very few of those involved had found the time to listen to what they might herald. And that, in turn, prefigured something unimaginable. If the ghosts of the past and present have the power to harrow us with fear and wonder, those of the future are of another order altogether. If art has a role in the struggle to devise forms of resistance that might elude the coercions and inducements of the void, it is in providing a means of understanding what these ghosts have to say, and of speaking back.

Notes 1 Akira Asada in conversation with Ho Tzu Nyen, 13 October 2019, Small Hall of Toyota Industrial & Cultural Center, Toyota City, Japan, transcribed and translated in Realkyoto, 31 March 2020; http://realkyoto.jp/en/article/ho-tzu-nyen_asada02/. All subsequent references and comments by Asada and Ho are drawn from this text 2

Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985, p. 4

3

The periodicities used here are those of the Japanese imperial calendar, whose era names correspond to the reign of the emperor.

Meiji (1868-1912) marked the end of self-imposed isolation, rapid modernisation and aspiration to Great Power status. Taishō (1912-1926) is typically regarded as a flourishing of liberalism and democracy, undercut with political uncertainty. Shōwa (1926-1989) encompasses the intensification of Japan’s military adventures, defeat, reconstruction and rise as an economic and cultural superpower. Heisei (1989-2019) saw economic stagnation and the beginning of the ‘lost decades’, accompanied by a rise in previously taboo historical revisionism.

The current era, Reiwa, began on 1 May 2019, three months before the opening of the Aichi Triennale 4 On the political uses and abuses of Nishida’s conception of absolute nothingness, see Kojin Karatani, History and Repetition, New York: Columbia University Press, 2012, pp. 182-186. A general introduction to the Kyoto School, including discussion of the Ōshima Memos, can be found in Bret W. Davis, ‘The Kyoto School’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer 2019 edition; https://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/sum2019/entries/kyoto-school/ 5

Karatani, p. 41-42

6

Owen Matthews, An Impeccable Spy: Stalin’s Master Agent, London: Bloomsbury, 2019, p. 205

7

Mayu Tsuruya, ‘Sensō Sakusen Kirokuga: Seeing Japan’s war documentary painting as a public monument’ in J. Thomas Rimer (ed.), Since Meiji: Perspectives on the Japanese Visual Arts, 1968-2000, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2012, pp. 114-119 8 The most accessible account of tenkō can be found in Marius B. Jansen’s authoritative The Making of Modern Japan, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000, pp. 609-613

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Frangipani on the Grand Canal: The Art of Yuki Kihara1

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Although progress is slow and often token or an act of commodified exoticism, there is a growing visibility of indigenous artists in what I am going to call the Dickie-Danto axis. That is, George Dickies’ definition of an “artwork” as, “1. an artifact 2. on which some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld) has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation”2 and “artworld” in this context is Arthur Danto’s coining of a critical/institutional context, an “atmosphere of art theory”3—i.e. the white cube and surrounding culture. There has also been much progress in the visibility of art by and about trans and non-binary gender identity on that axis, in the context of contemporary art that goes back further than one might think. Putting aside the predatory and exploitative lens of Andy Warhol, the Berlin-based collaborative duo Eve & Adele have been around since 1989. Chris E. Vargas’ Trans History in 99 Objects Series project has been going since 20154 and in 2019 the thoroughly establishment McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas, presented a landmark exhibition, Transamerica/n: Gender, Identity, Appearance Today, showcasing forty years of trans and trans-inspired art from fifty-nine international artists.5 What hasn’t had much penetration into the Dickie-Danto axis is where indigenous and trans/non-binary identities intersect, the difficult to define category of traditional alternative indigenous gender identities.

From the outset it is important to acknowledge that this is a grouping of convenience, common to many indigenous cultures, but also unique to those cultures in the individual details.

They do not map one to one onto Western ideas about gender diversity, often have distinct niches within their home cultures as a recognised third gender or gender-liminal identity, and often suffer from being trapped between the rock of Christian hostility brought by colonists and missionaries, and the hard place of assimilation by Western trans/non-binary political activism and theory.

The term “two spirit” with its shamanic associations has gained currency in Native American discourse. In the Polynesian Pacific, the two most familiar terms are the Sāmoan fa’afafine (loosely, “in the manner of a woman”, sharing a root with the Tongan fakaleiti, Cook Island akava’ine, Niuean fiafifine, Tokelauan fakafāfine, Tuvaluan pinapinaaine, Wallisian fakafafine and Gilbertese binabinaaine, and cognate with Hawai’ian and Tahitian māhū, “in the middle”)—people who are biologically male but adopt a traditional female role in the community, often performing femininity, and the less known modern repurposing of the Māori word takatāpui (traditionally an intimate companion of the same sex), which is less precise as it covers the gamut of LGBTQIA+ identities, encompassing the modern categories whakawāhine (trans women) and tangata ira tāne (trans men). Pacific art historian Karen Stevenson notes that, “the role of fa’afafine, traditionally, was quite important in Polynesian societies. Most labour tasks were divided by gender (not sexuality). If a family did not have a daughter (or enough daughters) to complete all of the women’s tasks, a son would be used.

In essence he would be raised as a girl.”6

Admittedly, this is an appreciable background exposition, though necessary, as I would like to get as far away as possible from casting this in an anthropological and/or clinical gaze, nor will I defer to Western gender protocols where they are at odds with those Sāmoan or Pasifika,7 or the artist’s own preferences.8 Fa’afafine have a slightly higher visibility on the Dickie-Danto axis than one might expect: the American Sāmoan writer, artist and filmmaker Dan Taulapapa McMullin, who has a considerable exhibition history in the United States, and the Melbourne-based performance artist Amao Leota Lu. In New Zealand there is the FAFSWAG collective which encompasses a number of gender identities, of whom the photographer Pati Solomona Tyrell (he takes a playful approach to gender, though not fa’afafine) was nominated for a prestigious Walters Prize in 2018, and most prominently, Yuki Kihara, the first Sāmoan artist to have a solo exhibition, Living Photographs, at 126 | 127

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the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2008, and selected as the New Zealand representative artist for the 2022 Venice Biennale. She is represented in many prestigious collections around the world and is currently Thonelaar van Raalte Research Fellow (2017-20) of the National Museums of World Cultures in The Netherlands. Additionally, Kihara is a curator, writer and public speaker in international demand. As the Venice Biennale, in the cringe-inducing terminology of the media, is “the Olympics of the art world”, the choice of Kihara is a charged one, and politically astute on the part of Creative New Zealand and Australian curator Natalie King. (King, it will be remembered, curated Tracey Moffatt’s exhibition at the Australian pavilion in 2018). It is a context that will have profound importance for Kihara’s career, and she has the hustle to make the most of it. It behoves a closer examination of the artist’s work and the cultivated persona attached to it. The infamous hustle is an important part of that persona, which Kihara attributes to having a polytechnic training in fashion design rather than the traditional art school system. In response to a question about what she learned from not going to art school, she said: How to generate a practice with more than one outcome. I find the pedagogy in art schools heavily theoretical whilst polytechnics are more pragmatic. I think the teaching in art educational institutions should be shaped in response to who is it for; what outcome and what audience each student is aiming for rather than making students aim for an audience expected by the art world.9

Kihara consistently identifies herself as an outsider in relation to the Dickie-Danto axis, fa’afafine in a predominantly binary world, Sāmoan/Japanese in New Zealand, in a Europeandominated art world, self-made, and while I don’t dispute that, given the way an artworld hungering for novelty has sought her out, on top of exhibiting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and selection for Venice, international biennials and triennials and multiple exhibitions, at what point does one become an insider? Who is the audience for these assertive messages? Perhaps we need to think more in terms of the vā, the Sāmoan concept of a space between, described by Sāmoan New Zealand writer Albert Wendt as, “Not a space that separates but relates, that holds separate entities and things together in the Unity-that-is-All, the space that is context, giving meaning to things.”10 Kihara’s art and activism is often critical of New Zealand’s white hegemony and exploitation of the Pacific and the marginality of Pasifika peoples within it. Paradoxically, it is New Zealand’s legal protections of artistic and intellectual culture that has nurtured it. Art is ever paradoxical.

Central to Kihara’s practice is the body as a space between contested multiple discourses and agendas, first coming to public attention with typical bluntness with the photographic series Fa’afafine: In the Manner of a Woman (2004-5). The monotone photography is relatively functional, although inverting Marshall McLuhan (“the message is the medium”11), its technical concerns less important, evoking the ethnographical and erotic interests of photographers working in Sāmoa, like Thomas Andrew and Alfred John Tattersall during New Zealand’s colonial administration (which lasted from 1914 to 1962), and playfully referencing the tendency of such photographers to pose their ‘dusky maidens’ according to Western art-historical and erotic tropes. The eponymous work in the series is a triptych self-portrait of Kihara deliberately embodying male, female, the in-between and the other. It is a striking image of the artist, bare breasted and grass-skirted, and skirtless (tucked and untucked), resplendent in all the clichés of nineteenth century exoticism, a South Seas princess-cum-orientalist odalisque with a dash of Gauguin, assertively meeting the Western gaze with one of her own, like Manet’s Olympia (1863), (incidentally inviting comparisons l

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with Yasumasa Morimura’s 2018 version of same). As Kihara observes, “Colonial administrators and missionaries enforced rules on Sāmoans to appear civilised, including wearing clothes. Only in the photography studio were we asked to take off our clothes and become the noble savage, dusky maiden, heathen cannibal, for the gaze of photographers who wanted to make money from the postcard boom.”12

Erika Wolfe identifies Kihara’s persona in these images as a tāupōu, the “ceremonial titled village virgin of high rank.”13 To paint a more evocative picture, a tāupōu is usually the daughter of a high chief, trained from a young age to dance the taualuga, the centrepiece of Sāmoan traditional performance. The tāupōu often outranks many men in the Sāmoan village system, combining the roles of hostess, mistress of ceremonies and diplomat, adept at controlling and guiding the male gaze. As Wolfe notes, this was frequently misinterpreted by missionaries and colonial agents in an eroticised way,14 a projected Western fantasy of loose Pacific sexual mores that begins with French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville describing Tahiti as a “New Cythera” in 1768, and reaches apotheosis with Margaret Mead’s book Coming of Age in Samoa in 1928. Some of these attitudes also persist in the erotic-exotic cringe-voyeurism depiction of fa’afafine in Western media, as is the case with Australian director Heather Croall’s documentary Paradise Bent: Boys Will be Girls in Samoa (1999), complete with coconut brassieres as a touristic gaze edges fa’afafine into the realm of a tikilounge drag show.15 A Pasifika renaissance in New Zealand has permitted (and I use that word deliberately, given the dominance of colonial cultural authority) more nuanced representation, as in David Fane’s, Oscar Kightley’s and Nathaniel Lees’ 2012 play When the Frigate Bird Sings. Set in Auckland, the play centres on Vili, who is fa’afafine, and her struggle between tradition in wanting to take care of her father and brother after the death of her mother, and wanting to have a life of her own in the context of Auckland’s LGBTQIA+ nightlife and other fa’afafine who have adapted to it.

To be Sāmoan in New Zealand is already complex. It is a subject that has been explored by a number of New Zealand artists of Sāmoan descent, including Michel Tuffery, and Lonnie Hutchinson who balances it with her Māori identity. At the end of the nineteenth century Sāmoa was gripped by civil war and then carved up by the colonial powers of Great Britain, the United States and Germany.

At the end of the First World War, Germany was forced to cede Western Sāmoa to New Zealand.

Sāmoans resented New Zealand control, particularly following the huge losses of life due to mismanagement of the 1918 influenza pandemic, leading to the Mau Movement against New Zealand rule, and police and military atrocities committed against Sāmoans (New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark formally apologised to Sāmoa for New Zealand’s involvement in these events in 2002).16 Mass migration from Sāmoa to New Zealand for better economic opportunities began in the 1950s and continued after Sāmoan independence in 1962. In the 1970s Sāmoans, who overstayed their visas, were subjected to the notorious “dawn raids” by police and other law enforcement. Some Sāmoan New Zealanders joined the “Polynesian Panthers” movement, inspired by the Black Panthers in the USA, supporting their community and informing others of their legal rights. Some Sāmoan-born residents were granted citizenship under the New Zealand Citizenship (Western Samoa) Act 1982 and since 2002 Sāmoan immigration to New Zealand has been regulated by quota.17 Sāmoan New Zealanders, despite being one of New Zealand’s larger demographics (182,721 identifying in the 2018 census, from a population of just under five million18) and a Pacific people with high public and cultural visibility, sit awkwardly outside the official Māori/European biculturalism established by the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. Fa’afafine sit at an even more complex degree of intersectionality, often fleeing the growing Christian conservatism in Sāmoa post128 | 129

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independence, and the legacy of Western missionaries, particularly following New Zealand’s Homosexual Law Reform Act 1986. It is only since the 1990s, however, that fa’afafine in New Zealand have been able to create a space for themselves where formerly the defaults were mediated by Western notions of transgender identity, drag shows and sex work. At the age of fifteen Kihara migrated to Wellington from Sāmoa in 1990, to further her studies in fashion design, and early on began producing t-shirts about power structures and the pride and frustration of Polynesian youth in the Western urban environment. One of these t-shirts was purchased in 1995 by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, in Wellington, while she was still a student.19 The tāupōu reference in Fa’a fafine: In the Manner of a Woman is more obvious in images where Kihara wears the tuiga, the elaborate headdress of the tāupōu, but when explained to Wolfe a broader interpretive schema of the work and her instrumentalisation of her fa’afafine identity materialises within it: As an artist and a fa’afafine (in this case as a “Pacific Island woman of transgender experience”), the idea of beauty and harmony across the Pacific and specifically to Samoa is possessed through a dual combination of both male and female energy. Hence, the reason why people like myself are allowed to exist within the context of my Samoan culture is for living in the va or space between men and women… Through Samoa’s encounter with introduced religion, colonialisation and globalisation, the dual energy has been challenged by the Western binary opposition of gender and sexuality. My fa’afafine series exposes and shatters these colonial constructs imposed upon many indigenous cultures in the Pacific.20

Kihara continued to use photographic tableaux to interrogate the trope of the Victorian colonial gaze in a further three bodies of work: Taualuga: The Last Dance (2006-11), Siva in Motion (2012) and Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (2013). In these works Kihara appears in a Victorian mourning gown (a reference to the photograph Sāmoan Half Caste, c. 1890, by the Victorian New Zealand photographer Thomas Andrew), evoking the image of the Pacific body colonised by nineteenth century colonial nudity taboos, as well as a symbolic mourning for Pacific autonomy and pre-colonial life. Wendt describes this colonisation of the Pacific body: I reminded them that before the missionaries and the other Victorians made us ashamed of our lack of clothing we wore little clothing (in Papalagi [European] terms) but we believed ourselves ‘clothed’. I reminded them that the tatau for men and the malu for women—in our dance team at least five of the male dancers had tatau and two women had malu—were considered ‘clothing’, the most desired and highest-status clothing anyone could wear. When warriors went into battle with their penis sheaths and tatau they were ‘clothed’, fully clothed, fully armoured.21

Kihara calls this black-dressed persona “Salome”—she first appeared in the dance/ performance part of Taualuga: The Last Dance that the artist performed at the New York exhibition, dancing the Taualuga, not in light traditional garments and playfully accompanied by two subordinate male dancers, but alone and in a restrictive black bodice and long gown.22 The biblical character of Salome in the story of John the Baptist’s beheading, has been through many iterations in the arts—seductress, manipulated naïf, etc. Kihara identifies with Salome as a woman who influenced politics through dance,23 the colonised and constrained tāupōu forced in an act of Bhabhaian mimicry to imitate the appearance and manner of the oppressor in order to survive.24 Here we may also invoke the Sāmoan concept of taufa’ase’e, the game of deception that protects l

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the secret, such as that played on Mead, rendering her research nonsense. The settings deliberately discard the stereotypes of the idyllic island paradise. In the series Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (2012)—the title being a reference to the Gauguin painting of the same name—Kihara photographs a Sāmoa devastated by Cyclone Evan in 2012, still recovering from Tsunami Galu Afi in 2009. The exotic/touristic photographs taken by New Zealand photographer Alfred Burton in 1884 are a compositional touchstone, Burton having travelled to Sāmoa on the Union Steam Ship Company’s first Pacific cruise, but as Kihara keeps her back turned to the camera, I am more often reminded of the lone romantic figure contemplating the power of nature in Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (c. 1818). Sometimes these images—whether this is deliberate or not I cannot say—become frustratingly unreadable, either bogged down in a palimpsest muddle of tropes and allusions, or in their spartan inscrutability as in the de Chirico-esque ruined emptiness of Roman Catholic Church, Apia (2013). The architectural ruin does a lot of the work.

Perhaps this is a conscious gesture of defiance to the hegemonic Western gaze rather than a reaching of stylistic limitations or a tipping into visual clichés, and this is more a matter of Kihara not giving a damn what her audience thinks and/or the ignorance of that audience, than her misjudgement of it. If that reduces its effectiveness, so be it—the drama of the image remains unaffected.

We see something of that reduced effectiveness in Kihara’s 2017 photographic and looped video series A Study of a Sāmoan Savage. These works, a response to Western media-promoted reductive stereotypes of Sāmoa men as rugby warriors, again invoke the colonised Pacific body through the prism of early motion photography à la Edward Muybridge, and anthropometry (the quasi-pseudoscience of studying ethnic types through anatomical measurement—New Zealand Māori photographer Fiona Pardington explores adjacent territory in her 2011 series The Pressure of Sunlight Falling recording the phrenological life casts taken of Pacific peoples during French explorer Jules Dumont d’Urville’s 1837-1840 voyage). Kihara’s model is New Zealand Sāmoa artist Iaone Iaone, in a collaboration of sorts, representing the Polynesian demigod-trickster-culture hero Māui. Māui/Iaone enacts movements and strikes classical academic attitudes while being analysed with rulers and wicked-looking callipers. The message is straightforward, but is somewhat overwhelmed by Iaone’s magnificent physique and performance of insouciant virility. It becomes difficult to see the wood for the trees, or the allegory for the nude, and one is left wondering why, when there’s nothing to indicate it in the image, Iaone needs to be Māui in the first place when he’s quite capable of being an idealised Polynesian alpha everyman in his own right. It may be deliberate that Iaone’s body is doing most of the work—mocking the fetishising Western gaze.

I’m not sure that I can bring myself to agree with gallery director Adnan Yıldız’s assertion that: “Yuki Kihara’s A Study of a Samoan Savage, with its multiple layers of presentation and meaning, not only brings for the dark history of our colonial past, but also sounds the alarm for a future scenario founded on racial prejudice, one which may not be far away. Through the subtle tone of the relationship created with its audience, it offers an anarchic transition between past and present.”25

For one thing, the racist future is already here—it is merely, to paraphrase William Gibson, not evenly distributed.26 Indeed, acknowledging the Polynesian vā i tā approach to time (altogether too complicated to go into here, but essentially comprehending time in spatial terms and allowing for an understanding of past and future being simultaneous with the present)27 and the late-colonial history which is still with us, and to paraphrase James Joyce, is the nightmare from which we are trying to awake.28 It never went away. Just to be excessive, as Christopher Marlow has Mephistopheles say, “Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed/In one self-place; for where we are 132 | 133

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is hell,/And where hell is, there must we ever be.”29 It is precisely because all the devils are already here, that Kihara’s Study of a Samoan Savage has all the subtlety of a half-brick in a sock applied to the back of the head—it is urgent, simple and immediate because the stakes are so high. Kihara is not one to mess around.

As noted above, Kihara’s formal training is in clothing design, and although this informed earlier works, often with reference to Western clothing as an act of colonisation as in her early t-shirts, the muʻumuʻu or Mother Hubbard dresses and Salome’s Victorian mourning gown in Taualuga: The Last Dance, that background is powerfully present in サ-モアのうた (Sāmoa no uta) A Song About Sāmoa (2019). Whereas previous work has tended to express more general messages, A Song About Sāmoa is much more personal and autobiographical, strongly referencing Kihara’s JapaneseSāmoan hybridity. The installation, part of a five year project to produce twenty kimonos which debuted at Milford Galleries in Dunedin in New Zealand’s South Island, consisted of five kimonos made from siapo (bark cloth, the Sāmoan equivalent of Tongan tapa cloth) decorated with a combination of upeti (siapo leaf/flower patterns), seigaiha (Japanese pattern of semicircles representing sea waves), and figurative imagery of the islands, sea (stylised in the manner of Hokusai with a Pasifika twist), and a cross-section of underwater life in the surrounding reefs. When placed in a row these form a continuous scenic strip. Kihara was inspired by finding her paternal grandmother’s kimono in storage and being intrigued by it being in brown and earthy tones like siapo. Both kimono and siapo are traditionally heavily coded and full of messages about gender, identity and status.30

Previously, Kihara hasn’t referenced much about her Japanese side, preferring to focus mainly on her Sāmoan identity in her work. The title サ-モアのうた (Sāmoa no uta) derives from a popular Japanese song taught to children in elementary schools. “The lyrics,” says Kihara, “describe Sāmoa as a single island and a paradise on earth settled by ‘noble savages’—a typically romantic, Orientalist imagining of neighbouring Pacific Island nations held by Japan dating back to the seventeenth century.” She goes on to say: The exhibition consists of Japanese kimonos made from Samoan tapa presented as sculpture; accompanied by a silk kimono formerly worn by my Japanese grandmother Masako Kihara; and a photograph of Masako and Nobuo Kihara (my grandfather)… For me, the Samoan tapa and the Japanese kimono are customary regalia which are repositories of ancestral stories. They extend my interest in textiles. The series sheds light on the lived experience in the Pacific while reframing the vā or relationship between Japan and the Pacific—specifically Sāmoa.31

The work consciously draws a connection between the Sāmoan vā and the Japanese concept of Ma.32 Ma is the aesthetic and philosophical concept of negative space between structural or compositional elements that is experienced by its absence, a liminal space. Sāmoan poet and writer Albert Wendt made a conceptual connection between the two ideas,33 and Kihara further links this to the Sāmoan concept of vasa or open ocean, “For Sāmoa the vasa is land, an oceanscape that is not a barrier but an opening to another world.”34 This connects well to the ideas explored by the Papuanborn Tongan-Fijian writer and anthropologist Epeli Hauʻofa in his landmark 1993 essay ‘Our Sea of Islands’35 in which he reimagines the Pacific Ocean as a great blue continent uniting Polynesian and Melanesian cultures rather than separating them as do Western colonial geographical divisions.

Kihara’s kimonos are technically exquisite and very powerful, and that sort of virtuosity in combination with the more overt activism in Kihara’s other work, and the kind of budget the l

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New Zealand Government makes available for Venice will make an excellent basis for a Biennale project. Earlier I intimated Kihara’s selection for Venice as politically savvy, and this is true. It is expedient for New Zealand to exploit exoticism as much as artistic sophistication in stamping its brand in Venice. Gender, identity and colonialism are also very much of the zeitgeist. That is small nation realpolitik. New Zealand has tried to maintain an inclusivity of Māori artists in its Venice representations since its first invitation, previously sending Peter Robinson and Jacqueline Fraser (2001), Michael Parekōwhai (2011), and Lisa Reihana (2017), so it is agreeable to see other ethnic groups being represented. At the same time Kihara’s selection acknowledges the ugly history of New Zealand’s own little Pacific empire and ongoing legacy of hegemony, bringing Pasifika and Sāmoan identity and experience to the centre of that Dickie-Danto axis, even as it blows that axis apart. It also highlights the little-considered danger of assimilative Western ideas about gender and sexuality to those indigenous.

The Venice Biennale is a reciprocal and critical context that brings with it incredible resources and intense scrutiny. The “ethical” (some might say activism, others, political correctness) emphasis of curatorship and criticism of art by indigenous and diasporic communities in the last fifteen years is something of a double-edged sword. While focusing on the political and identity issues surrounding such work is of course valid, the soft-pedalling around whether the artwork itself is successful has suffered. That is not fair on artists of colour on the Dickie-Danto axis, and an example of, if we may repurpose a phrase from Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for US President George W. Bush, “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”36 Emphatically that does not mean reverting to a petulant paternalistic reactionary reversion to only talking about the object independent of context. David Garneau, artist, curator, writer, and Associate Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, a Canadian of Métis descent,37 writes: 134 | 135

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Non-critical art writing about indigenous art favours with recognition only those aspects of indigenous persons that are other to the dominant. It encourages indigenous folks to occupy the appearance of a position rather than to earn one. The refusal to engage Indigenous art and persons critically positions us as permanently in a representational rather than a dialogic mode, as transmitters rather than generators of knowledge… Critical art writing is needed if we are to deepen the discourse around indigenous art beyond private judgement, competent understanding, polite appreciation, the commercial market, grant-writing rhetoric and as illustrations of existing theory. However, if non-indigenous folks are to do so without instrumentalising, being patronising or other flavours of rude, and if indigenous people are to engage this work at all, we need to develop non-colonial forms of critical art writing.38

These observations on the way indigenous art is written about applies equally to the way it is curated and exhibited. Ultimately we must ask how Venice will see the artist, as an exotic distraction or an artistic force to be reckoned with.

Notes 1 My title, inspired by the title of Kihara’s 2017 exhibition Yuki Kihara: Coconuts that Grew from Concrete at Artspace in Auckland, in turn inspired by Tupac Shakur’s 2000 album Roses that Grew from Concrete, in reference to her selection to represent New Zealand in the 2022 Venice Biennale, the Frangipani flower common in Samoa with its connotations of femininity and beauty, which in turn was named after a sixteenth century Italian-French nobleman, the Marquis Muzio Frangipani, who invented a bitter almond perfume which the flower reminded botanists of. The Frangipani is returning to Italy 2

George Dickie, Aesthetics, An Introduction, Cambridge UK: Pegasus, 1971, p. 101

3 Thomas Adajian, ‘The Definition of Art’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 23 October, 2017; https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/artdefinition/ 4

See https://www.motha.net/transhirstory-in-99-objects

5

See https://www.mcnayart.org/exhibitions/current/transamerica-n-gender-identity-appearance-today

6

Karen Stevenson, The Frangipani is Dead: Pacific Art in New Zealand 1985-2000, Wellington: Huia, 2008, p. 211

7 The official designation for people living in New Zealand who have migrated from the Pacific Islands or who identify with the Pacific Islands because of ancestry or heritage, most usually Polynesian 8 For a thorough, non-anthropological treatment of fa’afafine, see Yuki Kihara and Dan Taulapapa McMullin, Samoan Queer Lives, Auckland: Little Island Press, 2018 9

Mark Amery, ‘Things I learned from not going to art school: Yuki Kihara, New Zealand’s next artist in Venice’, The Spinoff, 30 November, 2019; https://thespinoff.co.nz/art/30-11-2019/things-i-learned-from-not-going-to-art-school-yuki-kihara-new-zealands-next-artist-in-venice/ 10 For this and definitions of other Samoan concepts, see Albert Wendt, ‘Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body’, Span 42-43, April-October 1996, pp. 15-29 11

“The medium is the message” is a phrase coined by McLuhan in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York: Mentor, 1964

12

Adam Gifford, ‘Shigeyuki Kihara: A lament for the lost’, New Zealand Herald, 8 September, 2012; https://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/ news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=10832438 13

Erika Wolfe, ‘Shigeyuki Kihara’s Fa’a fafine, In the Manner of a Woman: The Photographic Theatre of Cross-Cultural Encounter’, Pacific Arts (New Series), vol. 10, no. 2, 2010, p. 23

14

Ibid. l

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15 Johanna Schmidt, ‘Redefining Fa’afafine: Western Discourses and the Construction of Transgenderism in Samoa’, Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, 6 August, 2001; http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue6/schmidt.html 16 ‘Apia: Our Story’, New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade government webpage; https://www.mfat.govt.nz/en/about-us/ mfat75/75-our-story/apia/ 17 Misatauveve Melani Anae, ‘Samoans–History and migration’, Te Ara–the Encyclopedia of New Zealand; http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/ samoans/page-1 18

Statistics New Zealand; https://www.stats.govt.nz/news/new-zealands-population-reflects-growing-diversity

19

Owen Leong, ‘Shigeyuki Kihara’, Peril, May 2009; https://peril.com.au/back-editions/edition07/shigeyuki-kihara/

20 Wolfe citing a personal communication from Kihara, ‘Shigeyuki Kihara’s Fa’a fafine, In the Manner of a Woman: The Photographic Theatre of Cross-Cultural Encounter’, p. 24 21

Wendt, ‘Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body’

22

Wolfe, p. 23

23

Artist statement for Shigeyuki Kihara’s Taua-luga: The Last Dance (2006); www.youtube.com/watch?v=ev-vIeSDb4I

24

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994, passim

25

Adnan Yıldız, ‘The Body Politic: Yuki Kihara’s Pacific’, Art New Zealand, Winter 2017, p. 64

26

Gibson’s original comment, “The future is already here–it’s just not evenly distributed” first appeared in The Economist, December 2003

27

See Bernida Webb-Binder, ‘Pacific Identity through Space and Time in Lily Laita’s Va i Ta’, The Space Between: Negotiating Culture, Place, and Identity in the Pacific, Marata Tamaira (ed.), Occasional Paper Series 44, Honolulu, Hawai‘i: Center for Pacific Islands Studies, School of Pacific and Asian Studies, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, pp. 25-34 28 Joyce’s original phrase, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” is uttered by the character Stephen Dedalus in the second episode of Ulysses, 1922 29

Marlowe, The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, 1592, Act 1, Scene 5, ll. 124-5

30

Lisa Wilkie, ‘An octopus, a wave’, Art News New Zealand, Autumn 2020, pp. 72-73

31

Amery, ‘Things I learned from not going to art school: Yuki Kihara, New Zealand’s next artist in Venice’

32 Yuki Kihara, artist statement, 2019, cited in the exhibition wall text, Milford Galleries; https://www.milfordgalleries.co.nz/dunedin/ exhibitions/10614-Yuki-Kihara-S-moa-no-uta-A-Song-About-S-moa 33

Ibid.

34

Ibid.

35

Epeli Hau’ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’, first published in A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, Vijay Naidu, Eric Waddell and Epeli Hau‘ofa eds, Suva: School of Social and Economic Development, The University of the South Pacific, 1993 36 A line altogether too good for Bush fils, first used by him in 2000 in a speech to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People 37

Métis are people of mixed European and indigenous ancestry, and one of the three recognised Aboriginal people in Canada

38

David Garneau, ‘Writing about Indigenous Art with Critical Care’, C Magazine 145, Spring 2020; https://cmagazine.com/issues/145/writingabout-indigenous-art-with-critical-care

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IMAGE NOTATIONS

Cover Ali Cherri, Grafting, 2019 Head of a Lobi protection figure–Sandstone Buddha bust (Thailand, Ayuthaya Kingdom, XVth century) Image courtesy the artist and Imane Farès, Paris Ali Cherri’s work explores the temporal shifts between ancient worlds and contemporary societies whose logics tend between the constitution of a foundation origin and the myth of unlimited progress. His work explores the links between archaeology, historical narrative and heritage, taking into account the processes of excavation, relocation and museification of funerary remains, which are a violence to timeless cultural practices in the very sense of archaeological sites… His various artistic gestures, starting from the observation that archaeological history manipulates artefacts of ruin and survival, invite us to reconsider our apprehension of objects and spaces and the way they mediate stories of power, identity and belonging; https://imanefares.com/en/artistes/ali-cherri/

Page 6 Rokni Haerizadeh, Life is Perhaps That Enclosed Moment when My Vision Destroys Itself in the Pupil of Your Eyes, 2012 Image courtesy the artist and Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai Fictionville’s status as art is not so easy to pin down.

Are the works intended as social commentary, as politically motivated interventions in news media?

“I’m all for violence,” Haerizadeh has remarked.

“The violence of nature, for example–a female, primal violence, like a thunderbolt. But human violence that can be produced with the push of a button, the violence of an unjust law, how do you respond to that?” Violence demands a like response, he seems to imply, but here, one that is expressed by the aggressive and intense deformations of Haerizadeh’s representations of power… The work’s bitter representation of the world, and its intense–if morally ambiguous –condemnation of the state of events is hard to deny. In framing the language of social violence through drawings and paintings, Haerizadeh also makes a case for the power of deformation, manipulation, and artistic license. Media Farzin, ‘Of Bombs and Barks’, Fictionville: Rokni Haerizadeh, London: Koenig Books, 2014

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Page 13 From top: N. M. Petit, Nouvelle-Hollande, Nlle. Galles du Sud, Ourou-mare, dit Bull-dog par les Anglais, jeune guerrier de la tribu des Gwea-Gal, 1807-17 Image courtesy private collection, Melbourne John Rogers, Captain Cook, ob. 1779, from the original picture by Dance. In the Gallery of Greenwich Hospital, c.1851 Image courtesy private collection, Melbourne Mervyn Bishop, Gough Whitlam pours soil into the hands of traditional owner Vincent Lingiari, 1975 Image courtesy The Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney From 1974 Bishop established the position of staff photographer at the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in Canberra during an important era in Indigenous self-determination. Here he covered the historical moment at Wattie Creek on 16 August 1975 when Prime Minister Gough Whitlam poured a handful of Daguragu soil back into the hand of Vincent Lingiari, Gurindji elder and traditional landowner. Whitlam said: “Vincent Lingiari, I solemnly hand to you these deeds as proof, in Australian law, that these lands belong to the Gurindji people and I put into your hands part of the earth itself as a sign that this land will be the possession of you and your children forever.” Lingiari, having received the crown lease of his ancestral land, simply replied, “We are mates now.” When interviewed in 2000 Bishop explained that he asked the two leaders to re-create the handover away from the shaded shed where it took place, saying: “We’ll get away with a nice blue sky behind it. I asked Mr Whitlam and Mr Lingiari to do it again, and so they did.” This image became an icon of the land rights movement in Australian political photography. The bright blue sky and red earth gives an immediate sense of place.

The years of struggle are engraved on Lingiari’s face and slightly bent back, whereas Whitlam stands confident and optimistic. The white papers and words are meaningless compared to the physical action of the dry red earth falling from Whitlam’s hand to a growing mound in Lingiari’s palm. In a few minutes the two hands in the shape of an hourglass symbolically rectified the years of injustice for the Gurindji people by giving them access to their ancestral lands.

Art Gallery of New South Wales Photography Collection Handbook, 2007 https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/ works/58.2000/ Roy Blakey, Two male nudes, 1980 Image courtesy private collection, Melbourne Powerful Objects are a selection of archives and objects from private and public collections, shown across the many venues of NIRIN. Powerful Objects offer experiences that riff off and add substance and complexity to surrounding artworks and exhibition geographical and architectural sites. Collectively, they accentuate a kaleidoscopic effect within NIRIN. These processes and discussions can be painful, productive and/or confronting. For hundreds of years some objects, including human remains, have been smuggled or officially transported across borders, checkpoints and quarantines.

They have been documented, protected or hidden in museums, with provenances forgotten, made-up or created through conservation and registration protocols. As such, so are our futures.

It is important how we choose to acknowledge and remember this entangled mess of connections.

Healing is an essential commitment for us to make, and in the context of exploring Powerful Objects this might involve a mix of reflective and ceremonial gestures. Some cultural objects carry physical and psychic traces of cultural meaning and action, requiring careful protocol to assist our comprehension of their complexity.

22nd Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN catalogue

Page 18 Above: Josep Grau-Garriga, Retaule dels penjats (Altarpiece of the Hanged People), 1972-76 and Màrtir (Martyr), 1972 Image courtesy Esther and Jordi Grau, and Parròquia Sant Josep Oriol de Santa Coloma de Gramenet, Barcelona, Spain Installation view Art Gallery New South Wales, Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN The Altarpiece of the Hanged People is a monumental tribute to all unknown martyrs throughout time. Beginning in the early 1970s, Grau-Garriga created three-dimensional woven characters, each a paradigm of anguish, torment and suffering; innocent victims of the actions of others. 22nd Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN catalogue Below: Meraj ud Din, Sumit Dayal and Showkat Nanda, Shaheed / Witness / Kashmir, 1992-2014 Installation view Cockatoo Island, Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN Image courtesy the artists The images here were made in Kashmir between 1986-2016. These were decades of strife that came as the culmination of an older discontent, one that had simmered for more than a century, first against the feudal order of a Maharaja, and after the partition of British India in 1947, with Indian rule. This anger and restlessness broke out in mass protests on the street, and by 1990 this had metamorphosed into an armed uprising. This is what Kashmiris call the “militancy”, marked by bloody gun-battles with Indian soldiers and frequent (and mysterious) street-side killings.

These troubled decades had also held out a heady promise of azadi/freedom. That euphoria was short-lived, for India launched a brutal counterinsurgency campaign in Kashmir, directed at what it saw as an insurrection by its largely Muslim population… These images were first brought together in the photobook Witness (2017).

The men who took these pictures… had drifted –untrained–into photojournalism, and for the most part seen it as job, not an artistic practice. But to feed the insatiable appetites of the global hunger for images meant going out every day, forced to look at their own world, and relentlessly pushed to engage with a story that in many ways was also about themselves. The curation of images for Witness was a search for the language in which a generation of photojournalists in Kashmir described themselves, making pictures as a way of translating what they were enduring. That is the “witness”, giving up to the reality around, and offering the self to it.

22nd Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN catalogue

Page 28 Elicura Chihuailaf Nahuelpán, Machiluwvn/Iniciación/ Initiation, 2020. Installation view Art Gallery NSW, Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN Image courtesy the artist Chihuailaf Nahuelpán’s poem ‘Machiluwvn / Iniciación/Initiation’, taken from his book Of Blue Dreams and Counterdreams, transforms the façade of the Art Gallery of New South Wales across five large banners… At the threshold of the gallery, these words enfold dreams into the world and the eternal into the present, inviting an attentiveness and a quietness to those passing through into the many worlds opened up by artistic creations within the gallery, and their intertwining of deep ancestral pathways into contemporary ways of being.

22nd Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN catalogue

Page 37 Arthur Jafa, The White Album, 2018-19 Installation view Art Gallery of NSW, Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN Image courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York/Rome

Page 41 Joël Andrianomearisoa, There Might Be No Other Place In The World As Good As Where I Am Going To Take You, 2020 Installation view Art Gallery of NSW, Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN Image courtesy the artist and Sabrina Amrani Gallery, Madrid Page 34 Eric Bridgeman, Rot Bung (Junction), 2019-20; Kulimoe’anga Stone Maka, Kuini Haati 2 (Two Queen Heart), 2008-10 and Togo mo Bolataane (Tonga and Britain), 2008-10; and Frederick McCubbin, A bush burial, 1890 Installation view Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN Image courtesy the artists, and Geelong Gallery

Page 37 Nicholas Galanin, Tsu Héidei Shugaxtutaan (We Will Again Open This Container of Wisdom That Has Been Left in Our Care), Part I, 2006 Installation view Art Gallery of NSW, Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN Image courtesy the artist I am inspired by generations of Tlingit and Unangax̂ creative production and knowledge, connected to the land I belong to… I use my work to explore adaptation, resilience, survival, active cultural amnesia, dream, memory, cultural resurgence, connection to and disconnection from the land.

22nd Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN catalogue

Page 42 Reetu Sattar, Harano Sur (Lost Tune), performance Dhaka Art Summit, 2018 Supported by Dhaka Art Summit and Liverpool Biennial as part of New North and New South in association with Archaeology of the Final Decade.

Image courtesy the artist A performance artist working with video, text, objects and photography, [Reetu Sattar] makes time-based pieces exploring presence and absence, memory, loss, resilience and the ephemerality of existence. Sattar is interested in the similarities, overlaps and clashes of forms in theatre and performance art, and the relationship between the body and ego. She dissects the traditional tropes of theatre through conversations, space and sculptural elements… Harano Sur (Lost Tune) brought together many performers, each playing three of the seven notes of the harmonium.

The artist uses the sustained droning sounds as a way to explore the violence and social upheaval that have recently affected Bangladesh and as a wider metaphor for issues of cultural control, diasporas and partition. By playing a sustained note, the performers make the powerful statement that they and their traditions are here to stay; https:// biennial.com/2018/exhibition/artists/reetu-sattar

138 | 139

Page 45 Above: Rashid Talukder, Arms drill by women members of the Chatro Union (students union) 1st March, 1971, 1971/2010 Image courtesy Drik Picture Library, Dhaka Fed up with being oppressed linguistically, economically, and culturally under the rule of West Pakistan (1947-1971), masses of people in what is now Bangladesh rallied in support of an independent sovereign country. People coming from all walks of life engaged in protests finally leading to the liberation war. This bloody war was catalysed when West Pakistan refused to hand over power to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1971, despite his having received the majority of the democratic votes in general election of Pakistan. Rashid Talukder dedicated himself to capturing the mass revolution of the East Pakistani people and their fight to maintain freedom as a newly independent nation…

Rashid Talukder was a photojournalist whose images represent a significant contribution to the collective memory of Bangladesh. Among many other defining events in the history of the nation, he documented the struggles of East Pakistan in the 1960s that led to the liberation war and the formation of Bangladesh. His photographs immortalise mass uprisings, resistance movements, and the participants, of whom many were killed.

Below: Bharti Kher, Yes No (2020) from the Intermediaries series Installation view 2020 Dhaka Art Summit, Seismic Movements Image courtesy the artist, Nature Morte, Galerie Perrotin and Samdani Art Foundation Made by traditional idol makers, Kher’s painted mud and clay sculpture rises from the earth and will return to it through the natural process of entropy, speaking to the many layers of religions and cultures that have existed on the land that is now Bangladesh. Her work reminds us that there are multiple selves within us and that we are in a constant state of transformation. Kher’s way of working is radically heterogeneous, encompassing painting, sculpture, text, and installation. Central themes are the notion of the self as formed by multiple and interlocking relationships with human and animal bodies, places, and readymade objects. The body, a central element to her work, is one of the many tools she uses to transform metaphysical narratives into forms of hybridity.

Both 2020 Dhaka Art Summit, Seismic Movements catalogue

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Pages 48, 49 Mahbubur Rahman, Transformation (video stills), 2018-2019 Images courtesy of the artist Since 2004, Mahbubur Rahman’s performance, sculpture, and video work has been embodying the popular folk story of the hero Nurul Din from the Rangpur Peasant Rebellion of 1783, specifically drawing references from the late Bangladeshi writer Syed Shamsul. Just as Haq revived Nurul Din as an allegory to fight back against the military rule of the 1980s, Rahman evokes this figure to encourage standing up against the injustices of today. Rahman created this two-channel video from a performance he realised with Bangladeshi indigo farmers of today, Bihari migrant rickshaw pullers in Kolkata (likened to human horses), and horse riders on the bank of the Padma river in Bangladesh (the same source of water as Kolkata’s Ganga river) surrounding the Farakka Barrage that has divided these once continuously flowing waters between India and Bangladesh since 1975. These locations and stories link East and West Bengal via their shared British colonial history; times have changed, but the stories of oppression of the working class persist. Rahman’s Transformation is a call to rise up, remembering brave figures whose ghosts (that live on through stories) can’t rest until justice is served… He pushes the experience of art beyond visual pleasure, addressing wider social responsibilities in reference to his personal experience of anguish and anxiety in the context of contemporary Bangladesh. 2020 Dhaka Art Summit, Seismic Movements catalogue

Page 55 Above: Shumon Ahmed, Metal Graves 4, 2009 Below: Shumon Ahmed, Metal Graves 6, 2009 Images courtesy the artist and Project 88, Mumbai Chittagong in the Bay of Bengal marks the journey’s end for many of the world’s ships. Having out-served their function as working vessels, they are disassembled to their basic element: steel.

Steel is the metonym of modernity, the element that makes the entirety. The shipbreaking yards in Chittagong mark Bangladesh’s progress in the modern world, as measured by urban growth and industrialisation. Progress is insatiable, fuelled by the profits to be made in the desire to reshape the future. Cheap, expendable labour and disregard for environmental contamination conspire to sustain a profitable industry and 90 per cent of Bangladesh’s steel. Progress comes at a price. The beached and broken ships at Chittagong are monuments to the globalised world they helped create. They embody nostalgia for a lost past, journeys beyond the horizon, extending back beyond the life of any one vessel to the embryos of our modern world in Europe’s Age of Discovery, colonialism, conquest and commercial rivalry. Just as modernity transforms and remakes all that it touches, these ships in their metal graves, like all monuments, stand mute between the past and an uncertain future; https://www.samdani.com.bd/shumonahmed-at-kochi

Page 57 Ranjit Kandalgaonkar, Shipbreak-I (CAD sound map drawing), 2016 Image courtesy the artist

Page 60 Hira Nabi, All That Perishes at the Edge of Land (video still), 2019 Image courtesy the artist In this docu-fictional work, ‘Ocean Master’ a container vessel is anthropomorphised, and enters into a dialogue with several workers at the Gadani yards. The conversation moves between dreams and desire, places that can be called home, and the structural violence embedded in the act of dismembering a ship at Gadani. As the workers recall the homes and families they left behind, the long work days mesh indistinguishably into one another, they are forced to confront the realities of their work in which they are faced with death every day, and how they may survive and look towards the future; Hira Nabi, http://www.hiranabi. com/work/all-that-perishes-at-the-edge-of-land/

Page 64 Gustave Courbet, The Stone Breakers, 1849 The Stone Breakers, destroyed during the bombing of Dresden in 1945, was the first of Courbet’s great works. The Socialist philosopher Proudhon described it as an icon of the peasant world.

But for Courbet it was simply a memory of something he had seen: two men breaking stones beside the road. He told his friends the art critic Francis Wey and Champfleury: “It is not often that one encounters so complete an expression of poverty and so, right then and there I got the idea for a painting. I told them to come to my studio the next morning.” Many of Courbet’s paintings focus on everyday people and places in daily French life. Courbet painted these ordinary people in an attempt to portray the French people as a political entity. In this way Courbet’s republicanism showed through in his work. Courbet truthfully portrayed ordinary people and places, leaving out the glamour that most French painters at that time added to their works. Because of this, Courbet became known as the leader of the Realist movement; https://www.gustave-courbet.com/ the-stonebreakers.jsp

Page 66 Emanuel Phillips Fox, Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, 1770, 1902 Image courtesy the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Page 68 Daniel Boyd, We Call Them Pirates Out Here, 2006 Image courtesy the artist, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney

Page 71 Captain Cook statue, Hyde Park, Sydney c.1880s Image courtesy State Library of NSW, Sydney Image No. a325015

Page 70 Above: Daniel Boyd, Captain No Beard, 2006 Below: Daniel Boyd, Captain No Beard, 2006 Images courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Page 71 Nicholas Galanin, Shadow on the Land, an excavation and bush burial, 2020 Installation view Cockatoo Island, Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN Image courtesy the artist

Page 75 On 13 October 2015, Donald Trump tweeted an illustration of Pepe as himself standing at a podium with the President of the United States Seal; https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pepe-the-frog …in October 2015, Trump himself retweeted the image, along with a parody video compilation called “Can’t Stump the Trump” made by Donald Trump fans on 4chan. At the time, this got almost no attention. Trump was still one of 17 contenders for the Republican nomination, and Pepe was still the most popular meme on Tumblr, not an avatar of the alt-right. A few publications used Trump’s tweet as an entry point to writing about his popularity on 4chan: “Trump’s affiliation with the site might end up hurting the candidate given that racism is virulent on the message board,” Vocativ noted, but continued: “It could also help him: Twitter users responded to Trump’s initial twitter post with additional memes offering encouragement”; https://www.vox.com/2016/9/21/12893656/pepefrog-donald-trump It’s not uncommon to find replies to Trump’s tweets filled to the brim with Pepe avatars, and the frog is a fixture in alt-right breeding grounds like 4chan and Trump’s dedicated Reddit community, r/The_Donald… Pepe’s connection to white supremacy and other alt-right ideologies has been subject to scrutiny. The meme gained mainstream notoriety thanks to an article in The Daily Beast back in May detailing its connections to online hate groups. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton then linked to that article in her widely read explainer on the alt-right, which was itself a response to Trump’s retweet of an image blending his likeness with Pepe’s. Alt-right members and pro-Trump online militants are eager to suggest that the connection is tenuous at best, and mostly the product of two online trolls who tricked The Daily Beast; Nick Statt, 27 September, 2016; https://www. theverge.com/2016/9/27/13083400/anti-defamation -league-pepe-the-frog-trump-alt-right-hate

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Page 76 Image courtesy Matt Furie and Fantagraphics Books, Inc., Seattle The authorship of endless permutations of Pepe are, apart from the originals, anonymous; their reproduction on websites/blogs etc. mostly without accreditation to Matt Furie: for example, the original Feels Good Man cartoon see eg., https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ feels-good-man; https://funnyjunk.com/funny_ pictures/1614999/Feels/; http://ipkitten.blogspot. com/2017/09/furie-ous-creator-of-pepe-frog.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/09/pepe-thefrogs-creator-matt-furie-discusses-trump-memes. html; https://nymag.com/tags/pepe-the-frog/ https://me.me/i/later-that-day-hey-pepe-i-heardyou-pull-yer-32b913c875c644009a0f223109d4ff16 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/615106574/ save-pepe; https://forums.nasioc.com/forums/ showthread.php?t=2053330; https://9gag.com/gag/ avOOvDW; https://www.vox.com/2016/9/21/ 12893656/pepe-frog-donald-trump, and more

Page 84 Left: ‘You were born too late to explore the world, you were born too early to explore the stars, you were born just in time to fight racewar’ Images via Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter c. 2016, Image courtesy the ICP Museum, New York; https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-pepescreator-save-lovable-stoner-frog-alt-right Right: ‘#SavePepe–We’re taking Pepe the Frog back from the alt-right racists’. https://thehill.com/blogs/ pundits-blog/campaign/301875-savepepe-weretaking-pepe-the-frog-back-from-the-alt-right Credited to Youtube.

Page 80 Rare Pepe memes from Rare Pepe Collection; https://rare-pepe.com

Page 87 Left: WhatsApp Pepe emoji stickers used by pro-democracy Hong Kong protesters Right: ‘Activists Adopt Pepe Memes in Hong Kong Protests’. A young woman was injured after being struck in her right eye during an anti-extradition bill demonstration.Video of the woman was widely circulated online, leading protesters to cover their right eyes with bandages as a sign of solidarity; https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/ in-the-media/activists-adopt-pepe-memes-inhong-kong-protests

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Pages 95, 97 John Young, Lambing Flat (details), 2018 Images courtesy the artist The series of demonstrations, disturbances, and riots by miners and settlers at Lambing Flat from November 1860 to July 1861 were the most protracted violence perpetrated against Chinese miners in the state's history. These riots demonstrate the prejudices and racial antagonism that were present on the NSW goldfields and harboured across society in nineteenth century Australia. The riot that occurred at this site on the evening of Sunday 14 July 1861 was the culmination of rising tensions between the European miners, the gold commissioners, and the police, as the government attempted to restore law and order. It was the first major confrontation between European miners and police on the NSW goldfields and involved the second reading of the Riot Act in NSW history. As the final conflagration of the Lambing Flat Anti-Chinese Riots it is regarded as a defining moment in the history of Chinese settlement in Australia. It led to the NSW Government enacting discriminatory and racist legislation to restrict the immigration of Chinese to the state and curtail their movement and rights on the NSW goldfields; https://www.environment. nsw.gov.au/heritageapp/ViewHeritageItemDetails. aspx?ID=5066415

Page 99 John Young, The Field (video still), 2018 Image courtesy the artist

Page 99 The Roll Up Banner, painted on a tent-flap in 1861, is now on display at the Lambing Flat museum in Young, New South Wales. Bearing a Southern Cross superimposed over a St. Andrew’s Cross with the inscription, “Roll Up No Chinese,” the banner has been claimed by some as a variant of the Eureka Flag. It served as an advertisement for a public meeting that presaged the infamous Lambing Flat riots later that year. Painted by a Scottish migrant, it is a testimony to the transfer of cultural practices and values through migration.

Though it has been claimed to be an example of Chartist art, the Chartist movement was not racial in nature and sought only to protect the poor from the rich. Nevertheless, along with the Eureka Flag it is a rare example of an historic Australian banner designed to rally support to a cause; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambing_Flat_riots.

The banner used in the riot created a symbol that began to crystallise the ideologies of racism, nationalism and exclusive egalitarianism in a conceptual process that would manifest itself in the New South Wales Chinese Immigration Act of 1861 and later the Federal Immigration Restriction Act of 1901. The banner’s historic significance lies in its relationship to the themes of the gold rush experience, racial antagonism, the fear of the exotic and unknown, and exclusive ideologies that fostered racially discriminative trade unionism and the development of Colonial policies culminating in the first act of the newly Federated Commonwealth of Australia, the Immigration Restriction Act 1901. The banner has aesthetic significance in the design, language and the appropriation of the Southern Cross emblem as a symbol of racially exclusive working class rights and trade union solidarity in nineteenth century Australia… The banner has an intangible significance to Chinese communities to recognise and acknowledge the violence and racism dished out to their ancestors… It was made on the Lambing Flat gold fields by Tom McCarthy and was held in a private collection after the Lambing Flat riots. It was bought by Lambing Flat Museum c.1958. The banner is rare because it was made for a specific purpose and event. Other banners and flags include the Southern Cross flag of the Eureka Rebellion at Ballarat Vic in 1854; http:// www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/exhibition/ objectsthroughtime/lambingflatsbanner/index.html

Page 104 Mural of Mahathir Mohamad, with the iconic Petronas Twin Towers and first national car Proton Saga, both of which were inspired by him, in his hometown of Alor Seta. Image sourced http://hellotalalay.blogspot.com/2017/

Page 106 ARTICLE 19 condemns the Malaysia High Court’s 29 November 2017 decision to maintain the travel ban on political cartoonist Zunar (full name Zulkiflee Anwar Ul Haque), whose satirical cartoons are sharply critical of the government…

Zunar faces investigation under Section 233(1) (a) of CMA, which deals with “improper use of network facilities or network service.”

The investigation is related to a cartoon on Malaysia’s 1MDB corruption scandal… Zunar already faces nine charges and up to 43 years in prison under the infamous Sedition Act 1948, and has faced continuous harassment from the government including the banning of many of his books, threats to revoke the license of his printers and intimidation against his booksellers. Freedom of expression is under increasing pressure in Malaysia, making the work of political cartoonists, human rights defenders and legislators’ work in Malaysia more challenging. “Although they might not be funny to the government, Zunar’s satirical cartoons are part of his right to freely express himself and provoke public debate. This type of artistic or political expression should certainly never be criminalised under broad ‘sedition’ or communication and media provisions. It’s clear that these charges and the travel ban are simply the latest attempts in the government’s longrunning efforts to silence Zunar and other human rights defenders who are critical of government actions. It’s time the Malaysian government brought these dated laws into line with international standards and ended these thinly veiled attempts to repress its critics,” said Thomas Hughes, Executive Director of ARTICLE 19; https://www. article19.org/resources/malaysia-cartoonist-zunarbarred-travel-facing-new-investigation/

Pages 108, 113 From top: Ahmad Fuad Osman, Dreaming of Being A Somebody, Afraid of Being A Nobody, 2019 Ahmad Fuad Osman, Untitled installation view, 2012 Ahmad Fuad Osman, Mak Bapak Borek, Anak Cucu Cicit Pun Rintik, 2015/2018 Images courtesy the artist and A+ Works of Art, Kuala Lumpur ‘At the End of the Day Even Art Is Not Important 1990-2019’, the title of Ahmad Fuad Osman’s midcareer survey at Malaysia’s National Art Gallery, reflected his belief in art as first and foremost a public platform to address urgent sociopolitical topics. The exhibition of over 60 works was a brave undertaking by the institution, and one perhaps only deemed possible after 2018’s ushering in of a new government with a stated commitment to greater freedom… Three months into the show’s run, the Gallery removed four works… citing complaints and asserting their right to take down art that “touches the dignity of any individuals, religion, politics, race, culture, and the country”… This act of censorship and its reversal served to underline the key message of the exhibition: that art’s importance is as a public platform where different attitudes and forms of knowledge may be negotiated. Beverly Yong; http://artasiapacific.com/Magazine/WebExclusives/ AtTheEndOfTheDayEvenArtIsNotImportant19902 019AhmadFuadOsman

Page 118 Ho Tzu Nyen, installation view Hotel Aporia, 2019 Installation view Aichi Triennale 2019 Image courtesy the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong

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interview that took place after his museum in Kochi opened, and I think that the interviewer (Tomio Sakuramoto) took him by surprise. I don’t think Yokoyama wanted to be interviewed by him.

The interviewer asked Yokoyama how he felt about his participation in the war. For Yokoyama, there was no regret. He said that he would do it again if he was ever called upon by the state. I see Ozu and Yokoyama as examples not only of different choices but also very different strategies of life… the way I conceived of Hotel Aporia is that it was not so much a work about the Kyoto School or the Kamikaze pilots or Ozu or Yokoyama but rather, what I was interested in was something between them, or maybe, something below them.

But now that I think about it, when we say “below” it sounds like a deeper foundation in the ground, so perhaps I should avoid that and stick with something “passing between” them, like the wind, and the wind was a recurrent feature in the work, being the wind of the Kamikaze or the wind of emptiness in Keiji Nishitani. As I was working on Hotel Aporia, one of my biggest questions to myself was that I was never exactly sure what my point was. There did not seem to be a definite point that I was moving towards, and this worried me until the moment I had finished the work. At that point I realised that this absence of a point was the point of the work. Ho Tzu Nyen, Aichi Triennale 2019 talk with critic Asada Akira; http://realkyoto.jp/en/ article/ho-tzu-nyen_asada02/

Pages 121, 124 Ho Tzu Nyen, Hotel Aporia (video stills), 2019 Images courtesy the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong It must have been about 18 years ago that I was watching all of Ozu’s films. A particular type of scene recurs in some of these films–the male protagonist gets drunk with a former comrade-inarms and a war-time song breaks out. I remember getting very excited that one of these songs referred to Singapore. Later I found out that Ozu was in Singapore between 1942 and 1945.

So, since maybe 10 or 15 years ago, I always wanted to find out more about Ozu’s time in Singapore: what he did, and how he spent his time there. I began finding out about Ryuichi Yokoyama when we were researching about propaganda units that were sent to Singapore and Southeast Asia.Yokoyama makes for an interesting contrast with Ozu. While Yokoyama made the propaganda film Fuku-chan’s Submarine, it seems that Ozu, who was sent to Singapore to make a movie about the radical Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose, never did it. I read that he burnt the script before the British returned to Singapore. Ozu never, to my knowledge, ever spoke openly about his time in Singapore. In Singapore, it is recorded that Ozu drank a lot, swam a lot, played a lot of tennis, and watched American films that were confiscated by the Japanese military. He saw movies like Gone with the Wind, and Citizen Kane, which he found to be a masterpiece. So I think he had generally a good time during the war. I think it’s quite different with Yokoyama. There was one

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Page 132 From top: Yuki Kihara, My Samoan Girl, 2004-5 from the series Fa’afafine: In the Manner of a Woman Image courtesy the artist and Milford Galleries, Dunedin and Queenstown Postcard postmarked GPO Suva, 26 August 1908, Fiji Yuki Kihara, Ulugali’i Samoa; Samoan Couple, 2004-5 from the series Fa’afafine: In the Manner of a Woman Image courtesy the artist and Milford Galleries, Dunedin and Queenstown

Pages 126, 131 From top: Yuki Kihara, Nose Width with Vernier Caliper, 2015 from the series A Study of a Samoan Savage Yuki Kihara, Houngarea Marae, Pakipaki, 2017 Yuki Kihara, EFKS Church, Maraenui, 2017 both from the series O Le Taunu’u Mai O,Te Taenga Mai O,The Arrival of Salome Images courtesy the artist and Milford Galleries, Dunedin and Queenstown

Page 135 Yuki Kihara, Subnasale-nasal Root Length with Vernier Caliper, 2015 from the series A Study of a Samoan Savage Image courtesy the artist and Milford Galleries, Dunedin and Queenstown