Curated by Shelley McSpedden, The Charge That Binds targets a familiar range of ills (colonialism, the extractive logic of capitalism, our planetary emergency) with a familiar range of artistic buzzwords (relational, ecological, experimental). Moving through the first part of the exhibition at ACCA involves journeying from the hills of Coranderrk to the depths of an intercontinental sea under a looming sky. While in the second part, the exhibition turns speculative in its exploration of liminal zones.
The Charge That Binds stretches vast geographical distances but feels loosely bound. While many works reflect on the fragility of ecological integrity in a local environment, the tie between the works is tenuous. What remains consistent is the effort to chart the significance of place, especially as inhabited by non-human creatures.
Brooke Wandin’s biiknganjinu ngangudji – hear our Country (2023) invites us into the exhibition with a recording of Woiwurrung place names from Wurundjeri Country, interweaving moments of song with discussion about pronunciation and location. The work has an educative function, grounding visitors with the enumeration of names. Some speakers are more fluent than others, as if accepting the unpractised tongue of the visitor to learn.
The work is accompanied by Mapping Coranderrk no.1 (1863-2024), which employs ‘Coranderrk yellow’ pigment on fabric to reflect on the loss and reclamation of land. Five strips of thin white fabric hang in a historical sequence depicting the dimensions of Coranderrk since 1863, mapped against the grid lines of a contested territory. Wandin also presents a collaboration with Quandamooka artist Megan Cope titled biiknganjinu ngangudji – see our Country (2023), making use of ‘Coranderrk yellow’ to delicately panorama the landscape of Coranderrk.
Next, viewers are confronted with Brett Graham’s forbidding Ka Wheekee (2024), a densely black wooden construction recalling the shape of a gun turret used by British colonists in violating Māori territory. It speaks to a spirit of resistance and solidity in an era of conservative pushback. Above Graham’s sculpture, Mel O’Callaghan’s monumental My Heart Beneath the Earth (2023) is painted onto the wall above eye level – its black ground colourfully dotted with ancient minerals in a constellation clustered towards the centre of the painting. It’s a quiet explosion of the atomic ingredients for life, a melancholic firework suspended in an abyss.
Sorawit Songsataya’s Unnamed Islands (2023) and Izabela Pluta’s Like folds in water (caustic network) (2024) investigate nature’s technological representations. Songsataya mixes footage of the kotuku, or white heron, which nests in Aotearoa New Zealand and migrates through Asia and the Pacific, much like the artist, with 3D renderings and digital animations of water creatures. Similarly, Pluta’s long hangings of mixed materials depict the aquatic world across many regions, as if to connect them. The work feels confined to the back of the gallery; it is, perhaps aptly, difficult to tell from where one can in fact ‘see’ the work as its thick metallic strands and screens glint and shimmer.
A highlight of the exhibition is Emilija Škarnulytė’s Æqualia (2023), a work which by virtue of simplicity, exceeds the layers of theoretical baggage. While adopting the role of a ‘post-human chimera’ called Æqualia, Škarnulytė swims along the Econtro das Águas in Manaus, where the silted milky white waters of the Rio Solimões collide and swirl into the darkly stained Rio Negro.
The film mixes bird’s-eye footage of the figure swimming along the meeting place of these two waters with immersive scenes encountering pink Amazon river dolphins, which congregate to examine the figure. The obscurity of the waters means the dolphins loom and suddenly appear – too close – questioning whether the intruder is food or a threat, a playfellow or a hunter. The piece reflects on the estranged intimacy of the creaturely world. Each unhurried scene allows an interaction to unfold, both immersing the viewer and providing context.
Intimacy with other life forms is taken further in Zheng Bo’s Pteridophilia 1 (2016), paired with Pseudocopulation (2010), exploring the capacity for desire to cross species boundaries. Zheng emphasises the lush, sensuous qualities of vegetation that arouses people, or in the case of Pseudocopulation, wasps and bees that are attracted to flowers and mimic the appearance of potential mates.
Sculptural works by Francis Carmody and Alicia Frankovich in adjoining spaces also link the organic and inorganic. Carmody’s Laschamp Cycles: Aurora I and Aurora II (2024) develop sculptural forms to represent genetic mutations possibly affected by changes in the Earth’s magnetic field. Frankovich’s Feather starshade (2024) combines astronautical technology with forms inspired by the underwater invertebrate known as a ‘feather star’.
A final room contains three paintings by Jack Green, a Garrwa Elder from Borroloola. The paintings speak directly to acts of spoliation and violation with works like Desecrating the Rainbow Serpent (2014) splitting with a dividing line the before and after of colonial impact on Country. Similarly, Ngabaya Ngyirridji gunindjba – The Devil that fiddles and digs in our country (2020) and Aboriginal Law protects water and people (2021) protests desecration by representing places of significance. The paintings emanate a strong sense of purpose, returning the exhibition from the realm of the speculative to the grounded historical representation of Country as living.
The living earth can be threatened, and threatening, as Tita Salina and Irwan Ahmett elaborate in their Tanah tumpah darah (The land of spilled blood) (2024), which witnesses anthropogenic environmental devastation and natural disaster in Indonesia and surrounds. Salina and Ahmett transvalue national symbols – here the words of Indonesia’s national anthem are used in the work’s title.
In the foyer of ACCA is the Climate Aware Creative Practice Network’s Relational Ecologies Laboratory (2024-2025), which displays materials that are (and will be) employed in performances and workshops during the exhibition. It is a humble collection of objects, itemised in a large chart that accounts for some of their qualities, from dimensions and textures to potential uses. Collecting items in this way reflects a DIY, improvisational aesthetic common to ecological activist art. Sometimes, one wishes for a more binding, consolidated response to ecological devastation than the haphazard, ‘experimental’ approach often taken, a hypothesis that may be proven or disproven in the laboratory.
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The Charge That Binds unites disparate strands of ecologically-engaged art, hypothesising connections between apparently incompatible intimacies and distances, global and place-bound, speculative and historical. It consistently reminds us that we need to take a parallax view with ecological art.
The Charge That Binds is on view at ACCA from 7 December 2024 to 16 March 2025; free.