The last couple of editions of the Asia Pacific Triennial (APT) have struggled to find their footing, perhaps overshadowed by the successes of early editions and a straying from the exhibition’s origins.
Considering this is a three-year cycle, that means it’s taken well over a decade to re-find that momentum, especially with the impacts of the COVID pandemic on the 10th edition. And, while I will posit that APT11 does manage to do that, it does so in a very different way.
Recently opened at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), the exhibition has a very different tone. It is subtle, sensitive and does not rely on spectacular (social media friendly) hero works by big name artists, which are often the cornerstones of biennales and triennials. Rather, it returns the APT to a softer, more collegiate sense of discovery.
That said, the exhibition does not skimp on scale or ambition. Testament are the two installations that welcome visitors to each building: Māori artist Brett Graham’s installation Tai Moana Tai Tangata at GOMA, and the Papua New Guinea men’s collective project, Haus Yuriyal at QAG, led by Yuriyal Eric Bridgeman.
Both are multi-part projects. Haus Yuriyal was created by 28 artists (Jiwaka/Simbu Province), and is centred by a meeting house, a floor-to-ceiling display of vibrant painted Kuman (fighting shields) and bilum (woven bags and matting), and spills over to a garden in QAG’s sculpture courtyard. It simply says this is a living culture, and that is the very foundation of the Triennial.
Graham’s work is another great example of how traditional narratives, and contested colonial histories, find fresh expression in contemporary art. First encountered by visitors at GOMA is the sculpture Cease Tide of Wrong-Doing (2020), reaching over nine metres tall and referencing carved niu poles – those sacred structures that capture divine messages. It is a fitting entry point for visitors entering the conversations this exhibition offers.
Moving into the GOMA atrium, Graham’s installation continues with two timber sculptures carved in Ātiawa style and linked by a carpet. One is a wagon that references the displacement of Māori as the colonisers usurped their lands. The other references an armed watchtower/lighthouse over Taranaki coastal lands. Walking the path of a black carpet carrying the insignia of the British armed forces, visitors symbolically reenact that invasion of lands. And yet, in all its scale and symbolism, this installation has a soft, sensitive touch.
APT11 marks 31 years since the first Triennial in 1993, and what is consistent is that sense of discovery and shared storytelling. Some years you may only know a handful of artists on the list. And, in many ways, that democratises the Triennial experience. It also allows visitors, especially diasporic audiences in Australia, to find their own connection within the gallery environment.
Read: Charting a region impacted by COVID, we look at the 10th Asia Pacific Triennial
In this article:
Navigating APT11
Each APT introduces a new focus area and this year it expands to include Uzbekistan (with stunning textile works by Madina Kasimbaeva and video by Saodat Ismailova), Saudi Arabia (with a floor-based installation by Dana Awartani and textiles by Filwa Nazer) and Timor-Leste (with performative videos by Etson Caminha, and an especially beautiful presentation of carved objects by the Ataúro sculptors and Mariano Lafu, which demonstrate the long-held practice of woodcarving and cultural continuity).
Video almost takes a back seat in this edition and, while there are a few standout pieces, such as from the ever-popular Thai artist Kawita Vatanajyankur, and an enigmatic installation by Singaporean Dawn Ng, the sense of hand – both in material use and as drawing – is the real hero.
A great example is the work of Bard man Darrell Sibosado at GOMA, which takes drawing into an expansive metal and LED sculpture that uses new forms of expression to enliven ancient riji, the mark making on pearl shells.
Sibosado first started reframing riji designs in metal in the 2019 exhibition, Desert River Sea at the Art Gallery of Western Australian, then moved those motifs to LED light for the Ceremony Indigenous Triennial at the National Gallery Australia (2022), taking them larger again in the 2023 Biennale of Sydney. His APT11 piece, Ilgarr (Blood), embodies that evolution and innovation, backlit with neon LED in a first.
It captures that perpetual desire to reconnect culture with new generations and new making. This is what APT is all about – that long look at a practice, and how it fits within a broader conversation of making in this region today.
Standout installations
In the upper galleries of GOMA, Mai Nguyễn-Long’s installation of totemic clay figures is a sure highlight. Her work picks up on dinh carvings and the rustic village clay aesthetic of Bát Tràng, where she did a residency in 2014 after a decade-long absence from Việt Nam.
Making that tradition her own, her Vomit Girl Project speaks to a silencing and untranslatability that comes with dislocation, and the role that contemporary art can play in ushering a reconnection with language, cultural practice and healing.
In a new move for APT11, she has added fibre, fabric and new glazes, and we are seeing more drawn elements, harking back to a foundation that has always been a constant across her career.
Nguyễn-Long’s career has been on double-speed since her inclusion in the 2022 Berlin Biennale, and I am delighted that Australia is finally recognising her work. And, with this installation moving into museum collections, it again underscores the role the APT plays in ensuring these conversations enter the establishment.
Another highlight is Jasmine Togo-Brisby’s impressive installation, Copper Archipelago (2024), which hovers overhead, forcing the viewer to move under it and look up. While feeling somewhat ominous, the work offers a potent narrative that fuses the form of a boat and architectural patterning – both symbols of colonial domination.
Togo-Brisby’s great-great-grandmother was clutched from her homelands of Vanuatu to work as a domestic servant for the Wunderlich family – the colonial empire responsible for pressed metal ceilings.
The orientation of this APT work is a superb development from her installation earlier this year at the Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art, which was floor-based. The shift in perspective adds to her narrative, and our emotional response.
Printmaking has long been a celebrated process across the region for storytelling, and this APT11 reiterates its strength and continuum as a practice. Among the highlights are the works of Joydeb Roaja (Tripura people), who chonicles human rights in remote south-eastern Bangladesh, an area plagued by military coups and war, land grabs, dam projects, displacement and media scrutiny. I love that these contemporary turmoils are dwarfed by the calm, power and dignity of the Tripura people, who remain culturally resilient against such odds.
Perhaps a quieter highlight is Tru’o’ng Công Tùng’s installation at QAG, Khu Vuōn Lac Huöng (A disorientated garden) (2023-ongoing), where unexpected natural and man-made elements are paired, from plastic tubes to gourds. It riffs off indigenous farming methods of north Việt Nam to consider technologies, erosion and rain patterns, as well as legacies of chemical warfare, the spirit world and archival record.
This co-existence of past and present on equal footing, and with a contemporary reworking, is the thread that pulls this disparate region together, and it feels a particular strong and evolving dialogue in this APT.
Further pieces to seek out are Zac Langdon-Pole’s ‘paintings’, which use jigsaw elements and scientific imagery to explore spirituality in our times, the tiny gouaches of Wardha Shabbir, which originate from the miniatures tradition of Lahore and are punched into vibrant colours and contemporary narratives of her city surroundings, and the incredible multi-channel video installation by Singaporean artist Dawn Ng, with her hypnotic, time-delayed film of a melting block of ice, which has been infused with colour pigment.
Read: Radical Textiles blockbuster poses hard questions around supposedly ‘soft’ medium
Materiality is king
Textiles, weaving and object-based making have always been strong threads through the APT across its history, reflective of the region itself. A cluster of works in the upper-level galleries of GOMA perhaps best demonstrate that nuance of material, beautifully curated to create sight lines and considerations between the works.
Here, the epic textile suzani (needlework) by Madina Kasimbaeva sits alongside an expansive wall-piece of 3000 clay hands and pods by Indonesian-born, Tokyo-based artist Albert Yonathan Setyawan (pictured top). He says in the exhibition catalogue, “I see clay as an extension to the human body – a repository of memories.” The symmetrical, geometric patterning across the two have a lovely connection.
In next room, a curtain of 1967 aluminium skulls by Mongolian artists Nomin Bold and Ochirbold Ayurzana, titled Life Cup (2023), fuses a Tibetan thangka motif with the skull’s adoption by contemporary subcultures. Arranged in Morse code, the message warns of karmic cycles. It sits in the space with two artists working in textiles, Saudi Arabia-based Filwa Nazer and Mongolian artist Dulguun Baatarsukh, again blurring introspection and public space.
Nazer’s installation Five Women (2021) repurposes domestic fabrics into a hovering sculptural piece that comments on the public and private personas women have to navigate. Similarly, Baatarsukh takes her cue from garments too (she is also a fashion designer), creating stylised, abstracted portraits that use fabric as a vehicle for memory and fragility.
Further tipping the weighting to textile-based works for this APT, are Thai artist Mit Jai Inn, Sri Lankan artist Hema Shironi, Haocha (Taiwan) artist Eleng Luluan, Iranian artist Shahla Hosseini, Cambodian artist Yim Maline, Japanese artist Haji Oh, and a collective from Mindanao (Philippines) and the Sulu Archipelago.
It is interesting to see these works, in the context of a zeitgeist around contemporary textile practice, of note Radical Textiles at the Art Gallery of SA, which opened the same week, and earlier this year, Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art at Barbican Art Gallery in London. What is exciting is that the ethnographic lens has finally been relegated to the background, and the strong tenants of contemporary practice and reimagination is celebrated.
As well as textiles and fibre, clay is strong across this Triennial.
Read: Exhibition review: Julie Mehretu: A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory, MCA
And the verdict on APT11?
Overall, this is not an exhibition that is demanding of the viewer. It is a highly nuanced, tactile exhibition and, moving through the spaces, it is aesthetically easy, while also allowing for those deep dives and learnings.
There has been criticism in the past that the APT curatorial model has been largely overshadowed by the institution or the inner circles of regional curators. That has been shaken up over recent editions and, if anything, at times the pendulum swing has gone too far, with the results feeling too ethnographic in the ‘white cube’ gallery environment. Getting that balance right has long been a challenge for the APT, but I would argue it has been arrived upon with APT11.
Evolution is the key here – both as an ongoing series, and in terms of making in the region itself, driving cultural renewal and innovation in a contemporary context.
Apart from a few names, I love that this list of artists is fairly unknown. Care and inclusive conversations are paramount. It is far more than just a show mounted for the summer months. It is a network; it is a community; it is a learning and a head space.
In conclusion, the APT has proven with its 11th edition that it is one of the most important exhibitions staged, not only in Australia, but in the region. Testament is that, in a first, the APT will tour to the northern hemisphere in 2026, with a survey exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum (London). It will be extremely interesting to see what works will be chosen to tour to define this region.
The 11th Asia Pacific Triennial
Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
Brisbane
30 November – 27 April 2025
Free
