Stop! Reflect!
APT3 - Queensland Art Gallery
Real Time, September 1999

Entering the Queensland Art Gallery to attend the media launch of the Asia-Pacific Triennial has an air of occasion about it. Two gigantic red inflatable pillars, Hao Bau, a Chinese totem by Sang Ye and Geramie Barmé frame the entrance and a bamboo bridge arches over the watermall. Crossing the Bridge by Cai Guo Qiang's provides gentle passage which connects across time, culture and place.

At the launch of the Third Asia Pacific Triennial, members of the press are herded into an outside courtyard, to listen to welcoming addresses from QAG Director, Doug Hall, Chair of the Board of Trustees, Wayne Goss and Minister for the Arts, Matt Foley. Scattered throughout the courtyard are Michel Tuffery and Patrice Kaikilekofe's 'povi' (bulls) made of corned beef cans. Virginia Baxter quips that she feels like she's part of a muster, caught up in this tight crowd.

Expressions of Asia-Pacific regionalism ensue: building bridges, creating links, diversity, dialogue, exploration, analysis...East Timor. The happenings in East Timor haunt this event and each speaker ensures its tragedy is profoundly felt. Concluding his speech, Foley "calls for hope, life and peace in East Timor."

Hovering in the background during the speeches was the ghostly figure of someone wearing the chicken skin costume from Mella Jaarsma's Hi Inlander. These works, coupled with performances involving cooking and eating, stem from the artist's concerns about colonisation, cultural difference and conflict in Indonesia. Like veils, the skins cover the body and head with an opening for the eyes. They take me by surprise, despite the preliminary media coverage which should have prepared me, and I have to look twice to comprehend. This comprehension takes the form of both curiosity and repulsion. Abject encounters with the costumes-a manifestation of radical strangeness-are prompting questions about what it means to walk around in someone else's skin and what inhibits or prohibits cross-cultural congress.

This is the third and final APT with the theme of 'beyond the future.' Perhaps it's an indication that the intercultural and multicultural is the way of the future. It's not so much about time but about the options and changes which might be encountered or the thresholds which might be crossed. However, as I took my first sweep around the gallery, I observed that much of this work was addressing very current issues and concerns: perhaps grounded in a sense that change was imminent, that the implications of change (and change itself) are ongoing.

Interestingly, in a number of works-I found four-artists had constructed intimate spaces of solitude, peace and healing. Bathed in red light, Rummana Hussain's installation, A space for healing, provides a moment for reflection. A murmuring soundtrack-perhaps prayer-rolls around the room while various rusty old hand tools are arranged on its walls suggesting the flow and fall of Arabic script. Brocade hospital stretchers and equipment are on the floor. The artist draws on her experience of illness and Sufism, of marginalism and secular violence in India, to construct this healing space, both medical and spiritual, both hospital and shrine. It seems to establish a very personal site of restoration-despite the ravages of both sickness and fundamentalism-for the reconnection of spirit and body.

Surasi Kusolwong wishes Have a nice day (Brisbane). Interviewed by the QAG's Rhana Devenport, the artist explains he has recreated a comfortable terrace respite, complete with fish pond, cushions and mats. He invites us to stop and enjoy the serenity of this private space. Are you really in such a hurry? Children are invited to draw pictures of the fish. The outside-in structure is a welcoming and ambient interruption to the smooth interior of the gallery, confounding notions of public and private space and protocol. Sit. Think. Meet. Talk. Draw. Enjoy.

Or you could participate in Lee Mingwei's Letter Writing Project and write. The artist has provide three letter writing stations made of wood and translucent glass and invites us to take our place (standing, sitting or kneeling) at desks and write those letters we always intended to. The letters remain in the booths and the audience are invited to read and share the poignant contents of those which are unsealed. Writing is from the heart. Writing is like weeping, an outpouring and cleansing of personal pain and loss. It's an opportunity to clear your conscience of regret for past mistakes, expiate grief or make a plea for a troubled world, like the one envelop addressed to 'all of us' and the single imploring word 'peace' carefully written on the page inside.

Six at a time, you are invited to experience Karen Casey's Dream Chamber. Produced with Tim Cole, this work provides a six minute meditation featuring an ephemeral symphony of the PNG highland flute, a rippling water pond, lighting effects and images reminiscent of a rock surface. It is a changing cave-like space which relies on soft and slow movement and sound to form an enticing and shielded mental space for the viewer's participation. The pebbled pond is the centrepiece of the installation and the water provides the surface for reflection and ripples. The work references Aboriginal culture's spiritual and dreaming connections with the water as regenerative. Casey and Cole share its power with those in need of renewal.

APT3 is teaming with urgency as so many works speak to the injustice, suffering and repression in our region. As references to the theme 'beyond the future', these works disrupt the temporal and change the tempo, urging us all to Stop! In what seems like a 'world gone mad', compelling us to act constantly, it's easy to forget that we also need stillness, that we need to pause. These works remind us, drawing us into tranquil and safe havens so that we might act again with renewed compassion and conviction, hope and vigour.