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Since 1993, the Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art's (QAGOMA) Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) has attempted to recognise the great diversity of artistic talent and forms of expression across this vast geographic zone. In particular, over the eight iterations of the APT, the conundrums facing QAGOMA's Pacific curators and advisers have included how to enable APT audiences to experience art beyond the western orthodoxies of contemporary art and as expressions of distinctive cultural practices. Although the selection of artists and presentation of their artworks have continually morphed, individual and collective performative elements are now embedded as distinctive aspects of the Pacific presence in this flagship event.
With well over 70,000 Queenslanders of Pacific Islands origin, and the population rapidly increasing, APT curators have sought ways to engage with the local Pacific community who are not habitual art gallery audiences. Curated displays of aesthetic objects in an austere white setting, with the isolated guest artist making a transitory appearance is the western connoisseurial approach. This dislocation from community and ceremony has no particular appeal to Pacific audiences. Since APT2 in 1996, there has been an increasing rapprochement between Pacific artists and communities, collaborating with APT curators and advisers to create new opportunities and generate artistic activity. QAGOMA's curatorial teams have encountered Pacific art in its own settings and contexts, where genres blur and western conventions dissolve. Central to Pacific Islander artistic life is its connectivity to every aspect of cultural life - its groundedness in place, the consensus of collective creativity, the inter-animation of past and present, the fluidity between traditional and contemporary, and articulate responses to western practices and philosophies of art.
For Pacific artists who have participated in the APT over its 23-year history, the recent frisson over 'live art' in western art worlds may raise a wry smile. With opinions formulated by exposure to western contemporary art, many commentators and critics hark back to the 'happenings' of the 1970s, or follow exponents of the current fad for eclectic and momentary artist-audience 'live' engagement in their conceptualisation of performative art and the body. Such 'performances', 'live art' and 'embodiment', contextualised in westernised spaces and places, do not arise from the same experiences and meaning for people coming from indigenous...