the river project

the river project
In Volume 39.2 this year Broadsheet presented a transcript of the Edge of Elsewhere Cultural Futures Forum and an interview with Lisa Havilah, Director of the
Campbelltown Arts Centre. Below is an edited transcript from artist’s talks held on the 28 August for Campbelltown Arts Centre’s The River Project, with an
introduction by Lisa Havilah. The River Project considered the Upper Georges River that runs through south west Sydney within the larger context of river systems
of Asia and the Pacific by bringing together artists from Australia, China, India, Korea, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and Vietnam whose work explores river
systems, restating the important fact that nature and culture are not mutually exclusive, being interrelated and reliant upon each other.
Lisa Havilah
The River Project represents a continuation of Campbelltown Arts Centre ongoing
commitment to producing contemporary arts projests that place the community
and its issues at its core. As a key component of the Upper Georges River—Urban
Sustainability Initiative, The River Project extends upon its extensive on-site
groundwork and in-depth consideration of management strategies for the area by
examining and engaging with the social and cultural life of the river.
Significant new commissions have been realised by the participating
Australian artists—Graham ‘Nudge’ Blacklock, Elisabeth Cummings, Bonita Ely
and Mike Parr, and writer Sharyn Cullis, that directly engage and respond to
the contemporary reality of the local environment. Campbelltown Arts Centre’s
guidebook project to walks along the Upper Georges River, further profiles this
area by engaging the National Park and Wildlife Services with five local and Sydney
based writers. Within their chosen genre, each writer has produced an interpretive
text to accompany a walk offering unique insights and ways for us to engage with
the Upper Georges River. Together these projects form a broad and long lasting
portrait of the Upper Georges River at this moment.
In contrast to the bush around its upper reaches, the density of the
urbanisation surrounding the Upper Georges River’s end at Liverpool Weir
speaks to another reality of the catchment area, to its fast expansion and
redevelopment as the population of Greater Sydney continues to rise. As the
physical geography changes so to does the geography that these communities
engage with and reflect. Western Sydney is home to diverse cultural demographics
including large and established Aboriginal, Asian and Pacific communities.
The nature of this population requires an ongoing rethinking of strategies for
cultural exchange to accord with the diversity of social and cultural practices that
these communities engage with. The River Project follows on from Campbelltown
Arts Centre News From Islands (2007) and Edge of Elsewhere (2009-11) in
reconsidering Campbelltown’s geography to forge and reflect these connections
unbound by co-ordinates.
The River Project includes the presentation of the completed Waka,
a traditional Maori canoe created by master Ngati Kahunguna Woodcarver
Mr. Verdun Walker, Peter T. Elers and young people from the South Western Peer
Education Group over the last four years. The U-Turn/Restore Respect Waka
Project speaks eloquently to our interconnecting histories and shared futures, and
is contextualised within a larger suite of works and performances by artists from
Australia, Asia and the Pacific. By bringing together an outstanding group of senior
and emerging artists and writers from Australia, China, India, Korea, Papua New
Guinea, The Philippines and Vietnam, whose works engage with their native river
systems, the exhibition weaves a narrative which connects river systems across
countries. The River Project places local issues and action in the context of a
larger more collective whole, to investigate our relationship to our environment
and each other. Examining our contemporary relationships with river systems
through a contemporary art program helps us understand how we can sustainably
manage these dynamic, complex and changing landscapes in which culture and
nature are intertwined.
Graham ‘Nudge’ Blacklock was born in Gyura, raised in Western Sydney, and
currently lives and works on the Gold Coast. The stories that Blacklock paints are
from his mother’s and father’s countries: the Biripi people from Port Macquarie
and the Ngarabal people of Glenn Innes. His exhibitions include Graham & Alex
Blacklock, Gallery Tokonoma, Mudgerraba in 2008 and the Parliament of NSW
Aboriginal Art Prize 2008 and 2009. He was awarded the first prize in the Northern
Rivers Regional Aboriginal Art Prize in 2008.
Graham ‘Nudge’ Blacklock:
Usually when I paint I don’t put my name on the front because I don’t want to
spoil the painting, so I put it on the back. I go by the name of Nudge. I didn’t talk
until I was three years old; I just walked around nudging everyone, so that’s how
I got my name. In my painting The Point, I have depicted the Georges River as it
comes down to the ocean. In the top corner the pinks, purples and orange colours
represent the vegetation, flowers and different birds. The blue is the river. In
the top corner the dark green is thick vegetation. Then it turns to brown, which
is the earth and the river bank with its rocks and sandstone. In the middle are
the Aborigines; they live off the land, they stay for a certain time, and when it is
time to move on they set fire to it. Then when it rains it makes all the vegetation
beautiful and green again. This is what we call rejuvenation time. I have tried to
capture how the river changes, along with the depth and the sparkle from the sun.
I have painted a series of the four elements—earth, wind, fire and water. I have a
little bit of that series in this work.
In my family there was only one member who painted way back in the
late 1950s, and early 1960s. You couldn’t afford to buy a paintbrush back in those
days so he cut his hair and got a bit of string or elastic band and tied it to a stick.
That’s how he learned how to paint. It wasn’t until another thirty years that any
other family member began to paint. In about 2001 I had an accident at work
which meant I couldn’t do anything physical anymore, so that’s when I started to
learn how to paint. Dad was about seventy-five when he started to paint. He has
only been painting for a short time, about two years. He has a different style.
My son paints, mainly dots. So we have three generations and three different styles.
Ringo Bunoan lives in Manila and works as a researcher for the Philippines at
the Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. Her art practice addresses memory, shared
experience and community life through installations that use everyday objects to
create monumental forms. Her solo exhibitions have included Archiving Roberto
Chebat (2009) and Pillow Talk (2007), while she has participated in the group
exhibitions Everyday Miracles (Extended) (2009) at the San Francisco Art Institute
and REDCAT, Los Angeles, as well as the Gwanju Biennale (2002).
Ringo Bunoan:
My work in this project is really very simple—a makeshift bridge made from
wooden pallets. The first time I worked with pallets I used them as part of an
installation, but more like building a stage. For this work it has this Lego kind of
feel, from stacking them together, a very natural thing for pallets. The first time
I made it was in 2008 when my studio was in a warehouse compound surrounded
by pallets. I find them very interesting as objects, so I decided to do something
with them. I turned them into a bridge because there is an obvious link between
shipping pallets and bridges. I am interested in the idea of connecting people,
and places, going back and forth in time, in space and place. In a lot of my work
I use found materials, everyday objects that I collect from my neighbourhood or
friends, because I think it is a more sustainable way of working, almost a critique
of our very consumerist and capitalist culture. There is so much waste and excess
in the world and I don’t want to contribute to that anymore. Mostly, my works,
after the exhibition, get dismantled and return to being whatever they were.
Pallets become pallets. Pillows become pillows. I think that art is just for the
moment and I don’t want to be burdened with objects. I have nowhere to put
them, so I might as well let it go.
I wasn’t thinking about the Pasig River when I made this work. The Pasig
River cuts through the middle of Manila. I pass it on a regular basis when I have
to go from one end of the city to the other. The Pasig River used to be the main
thoroughfare for Manila in the Spanish period but now, as you can see in MM Yu’s
work, it is in a really bad state. People are doing what they can to clean it up,
but it is a lack of will by the government to do anything about it. People throw
things in the river while other people live right on its banks. For many Filipinos,
especially those living in Manila, we would rather not think about this; we just
want to erase it. But of course you cannot just ignore it. It is there. I think they do
have a plan of reviving the river.
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Tiffany Chung, who lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, is drawn to
the process of spatial and cultural transformations linked to economic growth.
Her work combines drawing, sculpture and video to create imaginary landscapes
based on her ongoing research on urban planning and its relationship with local
communities and natural environments. Two of Tiffany’s recent solo exhibitions
include Scratching the Wall of Memory, forthcoming at Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New
York, and Finding Galapagos: Fish, Pigs, Youngsters, Old Folks, Men, Women and
the Black Canals at Galerie Christian Hosp, Berlin.
Tiffany Chung:
I work a lot with urban planning and development and its relationship with
natural environments and local communities. For this particular work (in the River
Project) it started from a very personal place. It is based on a personal narrative
that for years I have completely forgotten. After the fall of Saigon many families
had to move to very middle-of-nowhere places. My mother also had to do that
because my father was in prison. We moved to the middle of the Mekong Delta
and happened to be there during the historic flood of the Mekong River in 1978.
As a very young child the only memory I had of this was an enormous broad sea of
water. So growing up I could never seem to be able to get rid of this image of rising
water. However, I forgot about this story until recently, when last year there was
considerable media attention in Vietnam about China building eight hydropower
dams in the upper reaches of the Mekong River and how that might affect the
lower region of the Mekong Delta. That’s when I started to remember this story.
For many years I had been thinking and dreaming about this crazy body of water
and I was curious, because as a child I didn’t know why there was a flood or how
scary it was for people. It was really exciting to play in the water—it was inside the
bedrooms, under the beds. It was a very playful kind of image in my mind. I started
my research based on the International Centre of Environmental Management in
Australia, which had been studying extreme flood predictions in Ho Chi Minh City
and the provinces of Vietnam. As you know the Mekong River goes from the plateau
in Tibet down through Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, finally branching
out into the South China Sea. When I was thinking about this I began to look at the
ICEM study maps and of Ho Chi Minh City, its main transportation networks and the
flood predictions in 2050. The other work is a more detailed map of a new airport,
subway and transportation systems. I have been developing this map series since
2007, focusing on the Mekong River and its lower region, and in response to the
potential impact of the Chinese hydropower dam projects.
I have also been working on urban planning maps, not just of Ho Chi Minh
City but other places such as Dubai, Los Angeles etc. with paint. Recently I began
working on this new series of maps on canvas, which revisits history in terms of
historical conflict of the twentieth-century, using metal buttons and piercing holes
one by one as a process-orientated project, to experience this physical pain, as
a reference to the psychological pain and mental scars that come when people
go through war. With one particular work I started to think about the women.
I remember growing up and seeing women doing embroidery and bead work. I can’t
find people who do that anymore. Mostly people use grommets and metal buttons,
like you use for shoes and jeans. I wanted to contrast those two mediums—one
that very traditional Vietnamese women have been seen doing in the past versus
all of these manufactured types of fashion.
I think that there is a major psychological element in my work, it has
that push and pull—it’s very personal but at the same time cold and objective.
I do that constantly because my work is a constant struggle, like having this rich
history but at the same time wanting to reject it; of being overt and also hidden.
There are both stories that are hard to tell and I want to talk about in my work,
and at the same time there is this personal narrative and history that I want to
hide, but I also want to show.
Also I always struggle with the choice of materials and for years I only
wanted to use industrial materials, masculine components, to build big things.
This was my response to being a feminist, but not in a feminine sort of way.
By using such materials I felt empowered but also I realised it was okay to be
quiet and soft. I think this is why I have been doing a lot of ‘quiet work’, like the
drawings and the embroidery.
Bonita Ely, who lives works in Sydney, has a diverse practice based on the premise
that a particular idea requires the deployment of particular mediums, contexts
and technologies. Her artwork of the 1970s was a warning of environmental
issues now in full focus and continues as the locus of her practice. A recent
solo exhibition, The Murray’s Edge, was presented in 2009 at the Art Gallery of
New South Wales and her work was included in the exhibition at the Museum of
Contemporary Art, In the Balance: Art for a Changing World this year. Bonita Ely
is the Head of Sculpture, Performance and Installation at the College of Fine Arts,
New South Wales, where she is also a founding member of the Environmental
Research Institute for Art.
Bonita Ely:
I came to the Georges River really knowing nothing about it. I probably took
thousands of photographs from which I selected fourteen from all the different
aspects I photographed. Eventually it coalesced into a narrative that initially show
the river in a fairly pristine state but then with signs of human habitation creeping
into it; for example, the photo of leftover camping material. It astonished me
the way it was left on the ground suggested a human figure. One photo is of a
beautiful pool, called Minerva Pond, where someone had left a frying pan in the
water. Another was of a little sculptural arrangement—which related to one of the
other ideas I had—made out of the rubbish I found along the river, so that anyone
following behind me might have a little sculpture show to look at. Then I looked
at the mining (of the river). The rocks are compressed and look as if they are
squashed down upon each other. Someone had written “grip” here, a wonderful
interpretation of this rock being gripped by the rocks on either side. Another rock
had “BIP” on it, again inscribing the landscape by our activities. There were all
kinds of mysterious things along the river where the rocks are starting to crunch up
and the water apparently drains down through cracks and comes back to the surface
and joins the river, becoming more chemically polluted. The mining company
fills up valleys with tailings and when it rains pollutants go down into the river.
The more I discovered the more distressing it became. My approach is always to
think of human beings as another species on this planet rather than dominant alltoo-smart and clever creatures. I equate us with cane toads really. I focus on seeing
the inscriptions that we make in the landscape, with the eye of an archaeologist,
seeing how we are in the landscape as a kind of creature. I think I am a bit of a
storyteller so I like to use photographs in this narrative way, coming together
and showing a bit, then a bit more; certain and different aspects. The other
consideration I have about my work is it is made as a sculptor. All the photographs
are of form and space. They are not of atmosphere or light. Why I am so interested
in and have such a strong feeling for environmental issues is that I was brought up
in the country. When I saw the Murray River start to get in such a bad state when
I returned to Australia in the 1970s I was compelled to start working around those
issues. I think the artist brings to environmental art the fact we are a witness.
Artists are artists twenty-four hours a day, we don’t clock on and off. We are
looking all the time. We are tuned in, thinking and responding, obsessive and
preoccupied, always making connections that maybe other people don’t have the
time or the interest to make. Hopefully artists in society can bring an insightful
perspective to what is going on because that is what may obsess us. I don’t know
that I would ever describe myself as an activist, more of an irritant perhaps.
Jeffry Feeger lives and works in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. His work
reflects the social and political realities of Papua New Guinean life, including the
convergence of traditional and with the contemporary. His recent solo exhibitions
are Jeffry Feeger–A New Bougainville Collection, Whitespace Contemporary Art,
Auckland, 2010 and Expo 2010, Shanghai.
Jeffry Feeger:
My first memories are of drawing and painting. It is something I have always done.
The work that you see in this project is the product of the time I have spent
painting, drawing and teaching myself—a lot of my work is self-taught. I have
always wanted to go to university to study art but I only went as far as my first year
at the University of Papua New Guinea in Visual Art. For the past eight years I have
been painting professionally full-time. It is only in the past three years that my
career has progressed and I have been able to venture out of Papua New Guinea
and exhibit in places such as Auckland, Brisbane and most recently Shanghai,
where I designed Papua New Guinea’s booth at the World Expo.
2 87 c o n t e m p o r a r y v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b r o a d s h e e t 3 9 . 4 2 010
Page 285: Tiffany Chung, Flora ‘n’ Fauna, 2010
Photo courtesy the artist
Above: MM Yu, Waste Living, 2010
Photo courtesy the artist
Opposite: Raqs Media Collective, Sleepwalkers’ Caravan (Prologue) (video still), 2008
Photo courtesy the artists
Page 288: Mike Parr, Pure Water Into Polluted Water, 2010
Photo courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney
So has been much said about Papua New Guinea being the last Stone Age
civilisation to be discovered in the world. This is quite incredible given the
connectivity between people. When a white man went to a remote village in 1998
the inhabitants thought he was a spirit and the planes they saw were thought to
be giant birds. This situation has much to do with Papua New Guinea’s terrain
—dense jungles and mountainous geography. As a result we have eight hundred and
fifty dialects, the most in the world for one country.
The Sepik is an amazing region with a rich culture and artistic culture.
It is mostly the men that engage in this work and there is a certain system that
they go through to become master carvers and painters. As an artist I was always
hoping that one day I would have the opportunity to meet these artists and
perhaps learn some of their skills. So when this opportunity came along it was
everything I expected and more. I was really impressed with how intact the culture
remains. Generally in Papua New Guinea culture is being lost rapidly because of
modernisation, but Sepik people have been able to continue their culture. I think
this has much to do with the interest that comes from the outside world and
anthropologists in particular. They keep Sepik people thinking about their own
culture and how important it is to the world. Dr Cochrane and I went there for a
week and met many of the artists in the middle Sepik region and selected the work
you see in this project. I then went back home to Port Moresby where I live, a more
urban environment, and began painting.
During the week I was in the Sepik I was able to do some live sketching
and every time I sketched the children and other people came to have a look. It is
quite fascinating for them because I am a Papua New Guinean, and they see me as
a Papua New Guinean, but I am able to do something that is quite foreign. I have
done that many times before, travelling through Papua New Guinea and sketching
people, and have slowly built up a bit of a reputation for doing that. When I was
living for three years in Bougainville, in a more remote place in a village, this was
looked upon as magic. People who lived in very remote places considered me a
sorcerer and they would travel for days to come and see me and say: “We heard
this magician guy lives here and we want to see what he does.” It was really quite
amazing. I adapted that and called my work “magic realism”.
My portrait works are done with the help of my son. He is four years
old and I have been working with him since he was about two, as soon as he was
able to pick up a pencil and scribble with me. He begins the process. For me
art is becoming more about process than what is on the wall. It is about selfsatisfaction, and building relationships with people. I am painting people but at
the same time I am sharing what I do with them. In the pictures in this project the
background is my son’s work. I tried to verbalise some control with him but he is
quite free in what he does. He brings a certain quality to the work and is able to
compose something I could not possibly do because he has a sense of freedom that
I think diminishes with age. As we grow older we become more constrained in what
we do and try to analyse everything we do, probably too much. He adds a certain
life and freedom to my work.
Reena Kallat lives and works in Mumbai, India. Her work addresses the loss of
faith across national borders where fraught relations are often held in check by a
series of treaties, agreements and protocols. Her recent solo exhibitions include
Drift, 2009 at Primo Marella Gallery, Milan and Subject to Change at No Notice,
Walsh Gallery, Chicago. Participation in group exhibitions includes The Empire
Strikes Back: Indian Art Today, 2010 at the Saatchi Gallery in London, and Indian
Narratives in the Twenty-first Century: Between Memory and History, 2009 at Casa
Asia, Madrid and Barcelona, Spain.
Reena Kallat:
Contemplating the work in this project, in the context of territories and maps I
was considering how we approach territories both from the perspective of maps
that we have seen and direct contact to places and regions. I’ve heard a very
well-known statement saying “the map is not the territory” and one realises that
our perceptions of territory are not the same. As much as maps serve to be a
useful tool to navigate, to traverse territories, they are not quite the territories
themselves and can never equal “the territory”. From that point of entry I enjoy
the way every artist has either lived in certain regions that are closely connected
to rivers or, like myself, doesn’t live by or have real contact with a river but
has grown an understanding through history of how civilisations have developed.
India was part of the Indus Valley civilisation and its name is derived from the
Indus River. My engagement with this project is based on how rivers bring people
together, the reason, the cause for communities coming together, those cradles
of civilisation. With India and Pakistan, within my own world, between political
agendas and myopic properties people are often pulled and pushed in continual
land troubles. In terms of material I have worked with—terracotta and red earth
—this artwork refers to a partitioning or division of waters, an international waters
treaty which India and Pakistan signed in 1960s, one of the many conflicts and
disputes between the two countries. The struggle over Kashmir has been the
predominant origin of this conflict, one of the reasons being over water, as Kashmir
is the source of the Indus River, with its tributaries running into India and Pakistan.
My artwork for this project, titled 2 Degrees, looks at the symbolism of the tree,
it’s made of henna: one half growing into the national tree of India and the other
growing into the national tree of Pakistan. At the Copenhagen Conference on
climate change, scientists spoke about how we cannot allow more than a two
degrees Celsius temperature rise without having a global catastrophe. So I was
interested in the idea of two degrees of separation between these civilisations.
Between India and Pakistan the relationship has been really close. Even as we
speak today the Indus River is an angry river. About fourteen million people have
been displaced due to the recent floods in Pakistan caused by an intense rain
was ten times what it used to be. Given our existential relationship to land, and
to water—I think we have over time abused our role as active agents who can
maintain the environment.
Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. His work
explores history and national identity and the constant movement of people.
His recent solo exhibitions include Breathing is Free 1200 756.3, Chicago Betty
Rymer Gallery, School of Art Institute of Chicago and Arizona State University Art
Museum, Phoenix, 2009-10 and MAM Project 002 Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2004,
with group exhibitions including 6th Asia Pacific Triennial, at the Gallery of Modern
Art, Brisbane, 2009.
Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba:
The video The Ground, the Root and the Air: The Passing of the Bodhi Tree (200407) is not my most recent work. It was finished over two years ago and shot in
Luang Prabang Province, Laos, along the Mekong River. It was a community project
where artists were invited to research and find a community with which to work.
I went to Luang Prabang four times, each for about two weeks to work out what
I could do. On my last visit I discovered that everytime I was there I was with
students from the Luang Prabang Fine Arts School. So I considered I could make
something with these art students.
Before this work I was making underwater films. I shot two in the
sea of Vietnam and two others in the sea off Japan. I wanted to do something
underwater in the Mekong River but the water is very brown, maybe red, so it is
almost impossible to see even one metre away. I had this idea to find some way
to filter through this brown-red sediment, to clear the water and work inside that
space to film. That costs so much money I decided to work on the river, not under.
In this work there are two different scenes, one where the students are
exercising or running and the other where they are on boats trying to paint and
draw the Mekong River. Eventually they arrive at this place where they see a large
bodhi tree, symbolising Buddhism, and here they begin to go through this process
of deciding whether to continue painting the landscape or stop, and some of them
jump into the river and swim towards the bodhi tree. Some of them don’t really
know what to do—they stop painting and stand on their boat which continues to
flow with the river. It is a film about decision-making for their future, how this
country is going through a shift in time.
In Luang Prabang there are many Buddhist temples (that are mostly
protected by UNESCO). It is the city of this particular religion. In living and growing
and going to school there these students are now experiencing a shift—there are
many tourists who come to see these temples. There are also many monks in the
city—it is like going to a campus of monks. So everyday they see many tourists and
monks. I think there must be some kind of struggle of understanding for them.
I wanted to capture that shift. The Luang Prabang sports stadium is hardly used,
only by teenagers to practise football. In their circular running around the stadium
and then linear journey down the Mekong River, I wanted to contrast that circular
motion, representing the spiritual aspect of their background (mostly Buddhist),
and their becoming modernised and a contemplation of what they might eventually
do with their futures.