Mithu Sen challenges her audiences to explore the in-between spaces of social conventions and interactions. She uses poetry, drawing, objects, text and performance to investigate social behaviour. Sen’s works question and dodge meaning, and with a playful humour, she creates new possibilities of communication, and employs symbolic and linguistic devices, such as ‘(un)’, to explore social exchange. The artist describes her ongoing UnMYthU project as a ‘byproduct of twenty years of performance’ that draws on her career of making and sharing art.
For ‘The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT9), Sen created a series of large-scale drawings on handmade Kozo paper. These drawings are accompanied by diagrams, recorded performances and instructions that pose directions, questions, contracts and obligations for the audience. Like using ‘(un)’ as a device to open alternate understandings, in a similar manner, Sen explores concepts of artificial intelligence, experimenting with new identities beyond human logic.
UnMYthU: UnKIND(s) Alternatives (un)myths through the trope of A(I) – artificial intelligence – which (un)creates to allow for access and actualisation of the void where I locate the medium of life. The tactile byproducts that are exhibited and the performance taking place by each entity engaging with the installation are both creations of A(I). The pristine surface layer of the painted paper and the words and numbers floating around the surface together create the space of inbetweeness – a void – where the (un)mything takes place.
‘The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT9) profiled artworks by more than 80 artists, groups and projects from over 30 countries, and is presented across the Queensland Art Gallery and the Gallery of Modern Art from 24 November 2018 until 28 April 2019.
APT9 has been assisted by our Founding Supporter Queensland Government and Principal Partner the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body, and the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments.
Design Tracks is a highlight in the QAGOMA Learning calendar. Each year the Gallery works closely with program partners at GILIMBAA to bring together Indigenous Australian artists, designers and leaders in the creative industries to connect with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander high school students.
Now in its fourth year, 2019 will see alumni return with new voices from the performing arts, media, fashion and visual art between 27 – 29 August. Jo-Anne Driessens, one of five lead mentors from Design Tracks 2018 shares her experience of last year’s program.
In 2018, Design Tracks students gathered again at QAGOMA during July which is a great time of year in Brisbane, the winter months create stunning blue skies, a hype of fitness activity along the Kurilpa boardwalk, the buzz of cars driving on the freeway and occasional waves washing up from the City Cat. With the perfect setting, all dedicated QAGOMA staff and mentors are prepped and equipped to receive the next generation of committed Design Tracks students ready to explore, gather, create and connect towards a unique public art pitch relevant to the Cultural Precinct.
There is a true sense of ‘teen spirit’ and eagerness to understand the challenges that lie ahead over the three day program and an obvious sense of enthusiasm for everyone involved. With five Indigenous mentors assigned to a small group each, it was important to make an immediate bond so the work towards the design challenge was instant. Being one of the five mentors involved it was just as a rewarding experience for myself as it was for the students involved, allowing the conversations to flow more freely as the time passed by throughout the program.
The fact that the Design Tracks program is all about challenging young minds to think out of the box towards their own design concepts, the environment to do this was ideal and there was no shortage of resources. The students were able to experience first-hand public art examples such as Judy Watson tow row, 2016 work that welcomes all foot traffic in, out and around GOMA’s front entrance. The benefit of the tow row work also provided a strong link between QAGOMA and the Queensland Museum as the original fishing net that Watson referenced for the bronze sculpture was presented during the students visit to the back storage areas of the Museum. It was so good to see an Indigenous staff member at each major institution receive all of the student’s. Each Indigenous staff member holds an important role and are able to share not only the story of the collections they are in contact with, but their own story and journey into those roles – which was just as important for a program designed to highlight career opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth.
When the floor talk with Bruce McLean and Tony Albert occurred, I remember standing up the back with a colleague of mine and we both commented on how great it was for the students to experience this moment in time with someone like Albert and at this stage of his career and wondered whether the students might reflect back on to draw on this type of inspiration one day.
The icing on the cake was revealed at the end of day three when all mentors and students had to finalise their public art commission and present to an industry panel being the Gilimbaa team who provide ongoing support for the program and are practically an integrated part of the Cultural Precinct based on Grey Street.
The results were impressive and innovative with all students congratulated with detailed feedback provided by the panel which helped the groups understand a final and important layer to completing the challenge. Who knows? Each original mini-model from the groups could very well be archived and possibly accessioned one day to sit amongst the other significant Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander objects in the collection for many more generations to enjoy.
Go on a musical journey through ‘The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT9) with our ‘Let’s Make Noise’ tours. Led by pied-piper John Patterson from iconic Brisbane band The Grates, the special tour encourages you to do something that doesn’t come very naturally in a gallery setting – make as much noise as possible. An outing definitely for the whole family.
Throughout the tour kids and adults alike are invited to discover more about four artists in the exhibition and respond with a sound inspired by the artwork. Stomp your way through the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), and from one artwork to the next make sound noise and be creative.
‘Let’s Make Noise’ is part of Curiocity Brisbane, a citywide event celebrating imagination, interaction and innovation from 15 March to 3 April 2019.
Join our ‘Let’s Make Noise’ tours Sat 30 Marat either 3, 4 or 5pm. Free
Listen to John Patterson’s collective song
Here’s some inspiration… on a previous ‘Let’s make noise’ tour, each of the sounds created along the way were recorded by John Patterson and have been turned in a collective song, which you can now listen to.
SUBSCRIBE to QAGOMA YouTube to go behind-the-scenes at events and exhibitions / John Patterson from Brisbane band The Grates
See if you can find the queen bee in Anne Noble’s bee colony when you visit. The cabinet is opened daily for 20 minutes at 11.45am, 12.45pm, 2.45pm and 3.45pm.
Subscribe to QAGOMA YouTube and go behind-the-scenes of events and exhibitions / Watch APT9 videos or Read about artists in APT9
Buy the APT9 publication
APT9 has been assisted by our Founding Supporter Queensland Government and Principal Partner the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body, and the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments.
Anne Noble has been supported by Creative New Zealand.
Yuko Mohri has been supported by the Ishibashi Foundation, Japan Foundation and the Australia -Japan Foundation
Michaela-Sophie Chin is A/Public Programs Coordinator, Public Engagement, QAGOMA
Now in its 4th year – the World Science Festival in Brisbane explores and celebrates the relationship between science and art. Science and art are more closely related than you might think as both attempt to understand and explain the world around us. Both scientists and artists strive to see the world in new ways, explore and then communicate their insights.
In the 50 years following the first moon landing by the Apollo Lunar Module Eagle on July 20, 1969, humans have sent crafts to other moons and planets, filled Earth’s orbits with satellites and probed the universe to search for our very beginnings. Since the beginning of cinema we have been fascinated by the vast unknown, and the films selected for ‘Far From Home: Cinema’s Fascination with Space’ are bold and fantastical imaginings of journeys to the moon, life on Mars and the psychological impact of travelling through space. Browse the film program to see a range of science fiction films, from one of the first ever made, A Trip to the Moon, created in 1902 by French illusionist and film director George Méliès to a selection of the winners of NASA’s 2018 Project Mars short film competition.
Sunshine 2007 M / 3.30PM SAT 23 MAR / Ticketed
In Sunshine 2007 the sun is dying, and humankind is dying with it. The last hope is a spaceship and crew carrying a device that will breathe new life into the star. But deep into their voyage, out of radio contact with Earth, the crew’s mission starts to unravel.
There’s a reason why many directors only make one science-fiction film. It’s because you exhaust yourself… spiritually. The interesting thing is that the more commercial sci-fi films tend to go for Hell in space. But maybe it’s more ambitious to aim for Heaven… Danny Boyle (Director)
Screening from 35mm film print
Cowboy Bebop: The Movie 2001 M / 8.00PM THU 21 MAR / Ticketed
Spike Spiegel and the crew of his spaceship, Bebop, an intrepid band of bounty hunters, land on Mars in the year 2071 chasing an enormous cash reward.
Screening from 35mm film print / English Subtitles
Discover more at GOMA
Exclusive to QAGOMA, the latest chapter in the Gallery’s flagship exhibition series ‘The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT9) includes new and recent work by more than 80 emerging and established artists and collectives from more than 30 countries. APT presents a wonderful opportunity for visual artists from across Australia and the Asia Pacific to collaborate and share works that are a powerful expression of their cultures and experiences.
Many of these artists share their concerns with the topics of the 2019 World Science Festival. Besides the themes such as life on earth and beyond, and the story of space that the Australian Cinémathèque are presenting in ‘Far From Home: Cinema’s Fascination with Space’; explore the challenges confronting humankind in the face of over-population and escalating climate change, and how we maintain a delicate balance between nature and humanity’s progress through the art on display in APT9.
4 artists exploring technology and science in APT9
1. Cao Fei
Asia One
Cao Fei’s Asia One depicts a near-future scenario that offers a perspective on the impact of automation, artificial intelligence and advances in logistics on human relationships.
Cao works in video, installation and digital media and explores daily life in a rapidly changing world. Cao’s latest project focuses on the futuristic logistics hub of online retail giant Jingdong, or JD.com, one of the most technologically advanced manufacturing and distribution facilities in China. What role does these present-day glimpses of sophisticated automated logistics with mass consumption, globalisation and technological acceleration play in the evolution of industry. The company’s operations suggest myriad possibilities, but also significant changes for the daily experience of its workers.
Logistics — the link that binds contemporary industries in a global marketplace — might also connect the present and the future.
In collaboration with Dr Uncle Stan Grant Snr AM Jonathan Jones’s untitled (giran) 2018 is reminiscent of a map of intersecting wind currents, evoking birds in flight, and draws on the culture, language and philosophy of the Wiradjuri people of New South Wales.
Understanding wind is an important part of understanding country. Winds bring change, knowledge and new ideas to those prepared to listen. Jonathan Jones
Giran describes the winds, change, as well as feelings of fear and apprehension. Traditional tools are at the heart of the artwork, made of roughly 2,000 sculptures and a soundscape. Bound to each tool with handmade string is a small bundle of feathers – found treasures – carefully gathered and sent to Jones by people from across the country.
The circling murmuration of flying ‘birds’ is composed of six tool types. Like the winds, Wiradjuri philosophy divides them into male and female groups: bagaay – an emu eggshell spoon, bindu gaany – a freshwater mussel scraper, waybarra – a weaving start, bingal – a bone awl, dhala-ny – a wooden spear point, and galigal – a stone knife. Each tool has limitless potential.
Jones worked with family, Wiradjuri community members and long-time artistic collaborators to make the tools and to craft the feathers into tiny ‘wings’. The process of making – gathering and transforming the raw materials – brings people together, enhances connections to land, culture and language, and strengthens ties to generations who have passed on.
Contemporary photographer Anne Noble’s Conversatio: A cabinet of wonder is not only created by the artist after collaborations with scientists, it also encourages appreciation of how art and science, when bought together, are productive in generating knowledge on our world from different perspectives.
Noble has created a multi-part project at the heart of which is Conversatio: A cabinet of wonder, a functioning beehive or ‘living photograph’. Bees can be observed entering the Gallery, before disappearing inside the cabinet and going about their normal activities; they are also visible when the cabinet is opened. Noble’s works form a visual ode to an insect symbolic of our world’s wellbeing – their complex ecosystem is at severe risk of collapse as a direct result of human intervention in the environment.
Having previously engaged with scientists and explored how photography intersects with other disciplines, for this project, Noble collaborated with scientists from the Queensland Brain Institute to design the hive and its transparent passageway, which allows the bees to navigate from the outside world to their hive inside the Gallery.
Museum: For a time when the bee no longer exists comprises portraits of bees that recall dust covered artefacts from another time, together with a 3-D printed insect, resembling the ghost from the portraits. In addition, the Bruissement photograms are enlargements of images capturing the light around the wings of dead bees – bees that died from pesticide poisoning.
An insect revered historically in myth, religion and literature, as well as in present-day science and industrial research, Noble’s project stimulates awareness of this species whose essential global existence is threatened by pests, chemicals and disease.
Although humankind has compromised this species of pollinators with chemicals and pesticides in the interests of agriculture, bees are, more than ever, the subject of research that is advancing fields such as flight, navigation and communication. Anne Noble’s work engages with this complexity and our multifaceted relationship with the natural world.
Free talk: The hive mind and driverless technology
Qiu Zhijie’s Map of Technological Ethics depicts a dizzying array of challenges and moral questions facing humanity, as they pertain to scientific and technological development.
Painted directly on to the gallery wall, 18 metres in height and 38 metres long, the map depicts an archipelago of moral quandaries in applied science. Islands and landmarks are named for activists and political lobbies, contentious issues in medicine and biology, and looming fears of technocracy and anthropogenic climate change.
Qiu Zhijie touches on the implications of artificial intelligence and computer technologies, from the impact of automation on labour to the use of facial recognition software in drone warfare. Assigning imagined geographies to a range of expressions of ethical anxiety throughout history and across cultures, Qiu suggests expanded possibilities for established categories of knowledge.
In the sheer scale and breadth of his map, he offers a graphical account of the potential for technology and its conundrums to pervade every aspect of human life.
Watch our time-lapse, recorded over a period of five days
Read about APT9 artists / Watch APT9 videos / Subscribe to QAGOMA YouTube to keep up-to-date with our latest artist videos
Buy the APT9 publication
APT9 has been assisted by our Founding Supporter Queensland Government and Principal Partner the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body, and the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments.
Anne Noble has been supported by Creative New Zealand
Feature image detail: Production still from Sunshine 2007 / Director: Danny Boyle / Image courtesy: Fox Searchlight Pictures
‘Stories of this Land’ recognises the artistic and social contributions of Lardil man Goobalathaldin Dick Roughsey (1920–1985), a revered elder, artistic pioneer and legend of Queensland Aboriginal art. The exhibition features more than 70 of the artists works, including early barks, paintings, ceremonial and historical objects, original illustrations from his picture books and three story book films.
Roughsey was well-known for his landscape paintings featuring North Queensland ancestral narratives and scenes depicting life on Mornington Island both before and after European contact. He is probably best known for his illustrated children’s books, notably The Rainbow Serpent – first published in 1975 and still in print today. Roughsey truly understood the power of storytelling, for thousands of children The Rainbow Serpent remains an important first encounter with Indigenous Australian culture and an introduction to some of the key Indigenous narratives of this land.
Born in 1920 at Gara Gara (Karrakarra), a remote site on the coast of Mornington Island, his extraordinary life over sixty five years had taken him on journeys throughout Cape York and Far North Queensland, to major cities in Australia and internationally.
Dick Roughsey sitting beside the tent in artist Percy Trezise’s camp, Cape York 1971 / Photograph courtesy: Jennifer Isaacs
As a young boy Roughsey was removed from his family and taken to the newly established Presbyterian Mission dormitory on Mornington Island. Growing up he worked on cattle stations, as a deckhand and then as a yardman on the coast of the south-eastern Gulf. It was here that a chance meeting with the pilot and artist Percy Trezise would develop into a lifelong friendship, with Trezise encouraging him to further explore art-making practices.
Soon after, together with his brother Burrud Lindsay Roughsey, he began to develop a unique style of Lardil bark painting which is now well-known for its stark white background over which traditional Lardil stories are painted in a unique silhouetted figurative style. In 1971 Roughsey was among the first Aboriginal people to publish an autobiography and in 1974 he became the first chairperson of the Aboriginal Arts Board of the Australia Council.
Goobalathaldin Dick Roughsey ‘Tribe on the move in the past, Cape York’
‘Goobalathaldin Dick Roughsey: Stories of this Land’ / Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane / 30 March until 18 August 2019 / The first major retrospective celebrating the work and life of Roughsey (1920-1985).
‘Goobalathaldin Dick Roughsey: Stories of this Land’ is a collaboration between Cairns Art Gallery and QAGOMA.
Acknowledgment of Country The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) acknowledges the traditional custodians of the land upon which the Gallery stands in Brisbane. We pay respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander elders past and present and, in the spirit of reconciliation, acknowledge the immense creative contribution Indigenous people make to the art and culture of this country.
It is customary in many Indigenous communities not to mention the name of the deceased. All such mentions and photographs on the QAGOMA Blog are with permission, however, care and discretion should be exercised.
Feature image detail: Goobalathaldin Dick Roughsey’s Tribe on the move in the past, Cape York 1983
In 2018 for ‘The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT9), New Zealand photographer Anne Noble created a multi-part project at the heart of which is Conversatio: A cabinet of wonder 2018 (illustrated), a functioning beehive or ‘living photograph’. Bees can be observed entering the Gallery, before disappearing inside the cabinet and going about their normal activities; they are also visible when the cabinet was opened daily for 20 minutes.
Watch: Anne Noble introduces ‘Conversatio: A cabinet of wonder’
Anne Noble’s Conversatio: A cabinet of wonder 2018, installed at ‘The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT9), GOMA
Watch: Anne Noble discusses the origins of ‘Conversatio: A cabinet of wonder’
Anne Noble’s Conversatio: A cabinet of wonder 2018, installed at ‘The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT9), GOMA
Anne Noble ‘Museum: For a time when the bee no longer exists’
Museum: For a time when the bee no longer exists comprises portraits of bees that recall dust-covered artefacts from another time, together with a 3-D printed insect, resembling the ghost from the portraits. In addition, the luscious Bruissement photograms from the ‘UMBRA’ series of 2015–17 are enlargements of images capturing the light around the wings of dead bees — bees that died from pesticide poisoning — as the artist held them in her hands.
Noble’s works serve as a catalyst for discussion regarding our complex relationship with the bee. An insect revered historically in myth, religion and literature, as well as in present-day science and industrial research, her project stimulates awareness of this species whose essential global existence is threatened by pests, chemicals and disease.
Anne Noble ‘Museum: For a time when the bee no longer exists‘
APT9 has been assisted by our Founding Supporter Queensland Government and Principal Partner the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body, and the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments.
Anne Noble has been supported by Creative New Zealand.
We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art stands and recognise the creative contribution First Australians make to the art and culture of this country.
