Earth & Elsewhere

Earth and Elsewhere | Contemporary Works from the Collection 15

14 Earth and Elsewhere | Contemporary Works from the Collection

make visible the gaps in social and political histories. The body’s

material presence is given primacy in works that record its

imprint and allegorise the fragility of land with the bodies that

inhabit it. ‘Personal cosmologies’ examines the larger world of

emotions constructed through personal exchange, confession

and participation, with artists’ structures and archives

recovering lost pasts or imagining repositories for individual

and collective memories. Other works in this section encourage

activities in the gallery space that make empathy the subject

of art itself. ‘Farewell to the sea’ considers the vastness of

the earth’s liminal spaces: the sea and the sky are recurring

characters in the final section, as are metaphors for the

dissolving of physical and psychic boundaries and the infinite

possibilities offered by abstraction.

Throughout ‘Earth and Elsewhere’ artists seek to comprehend

the complex subject of memory and grapple with the

relationships between history and memory, testimony and

recollection. They move between firsthand experiences and

those expressed as second‑hand memories — by extension,

viewers and artists alike engage in acts of secondary

witnessing. For Dinh Q Lê, the impact of historical events

on individual lives carries a question of responsibility and

ownership: ‘We cannot keep all memories because not all

memories are meant for us to keep. The question then is

what memories to keep and what to let go of as the way

nature intended.’

Lê’s three‑channel video

The farmers

and the helicopters

2006 parallels the spoken testimonies

of Vietnamese farmers who survived the Vietnam–US War

(1959–75) with sequences from American films dramatising

these painful events.

The well-known southern Vietnamese

proverb ‘Dragonflies’ is sung to bracket these accounts,

creating a startling synthesis between the auspicious insects

and terrifying instruments of this predominantly air war:

‘When dragonflies fly low, rains will fall; When they fly high,

the sun will shine; When they fly in between, it will drizzle.’

Lê’s strategy stresses the complex way memories of war are

inextricably connected with their documentation — and for

viewers, the difficult question of how to engage with images

of violence experienced by others.

experience of memory’.

Bennett argues that art is rooted in

the practices of everyday life and that we apprehend the world

via ‘sense-based and affective processes — processes that

touch bodies intimately and directly but that also underpin

the emotions, sentiments and passions of public life.’

In this

context a transformation of affective memory into empathic

encounter can occur, such that we can make connections with

people in different parts of the world whose experiences differ

from our own.

Works by Sadie Benning and Jose Legaspi demonstrate the way

these connections manifest through acts of public confession,

with both artists using their own very different biographies to

describe sexual identities that have been framed by experiences

of shame and homophobia. Benning began making intensely

autobiographical videos at 16 that recorded her sense of

personal rebellion and nascent sexuality. Immense solitude and

frustration characterises videos such as

A Place Called Lovely

1991 and

It Wasn’t Love

1992, as Benning discusses her feelings

of difference and the contempt she encounters as a lesbian

and a woman. Jose Legaspi’s installation

Phlegm

2000–02

revolves around hallucinatory scenes of pain and physiological

trauma. In more than 1000 charcoal drawings, Legaspi plays

out nightmarish scenes that capture the isolating experience of

growing up as homosexual within the religiously conservative

society of The Philippines.

‘Earth and Elsewhere’ also features works by artists who have

sought to address the relational needs of viewers, creating

situations for exchange and emotional release within the gallery

space. These works form a social and psychological fabric

around the experience of looking at art by making the display

of empathy their subject. Lee Mingwei’s

Writing the unspoken

1999 asks visitors to connect with unexpressed memories and

emotions by writing letters to deceased or otherwise absent

loved ones. Lee asks that audiences simply ‘write the letters

they had always meant to but never taken time for.’

The three

writing stations — one each for sitting, standing and kneeling —

correspond to positions of meditation and offer the impetus

for letters concerning gratitude, forgiveness and apology.

Letters addressed are posted by the Gallery or visitors can

Susan Sontag wrote extensively on this emotional burden

in relation to images of war, in particular photography

and photojournalism. In asking if it was possible to truly

comprehend the pain of others through their representation,

Sontag noted that affect and memory animate each other

like the melody of a song. Sontag felt that the construction

of public memory invites affective responses in audiences,

but that the persistent presence of traumatic affect can never

be translated into cathartic relief.

This traumatising potential

leaves artist and viewers enmeshed in a crisis of retaining

and expressing memories to authenticate one’s experience

and transforming or absolving these memories as a means

of empathy.

These problems in reception and translation reveal the

powerful need for objects and images to describe or

translate a sense of embodied memory. Harun Farocki’s video

Übertragung

(

Transmission

) 2007 documents public memorials

and sites of religious and social significance, capturing the

ubiquitous presence of objects used as conduits to the past.

Artist and writer Chris Wiley has noted that ‘rather than simply

extolling the power of images to heal,

Transmission

can also

be seen as a tragic meditation on our inability to comprehend

those forces and events that are larger than us without the

aid of mediating objects.’

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Wall that bears the engraved names of the 58 249 Americans

killed during the Vietnam–US War features throughout the

video; Farocki observes visitors seeking to connect with the

dead through the process of taking graphite rubbings of names

or simply touching the wall’s polished granite surface.

The subject of trauma in contemporary art is explored

throughout ‘Earth and Elsewhere’, shifting from a direct

account experienced by artists, through to the viewer’s

reception as a form of secondary witnessing, and the

mediated representations of trauma itself in art. Theorist Jill

Bennett’s analysis of trauma and affect offers an important

framework for understanding the affective quality of art and

its relationship to the reconstruction of trauma — primarily

that the imagery of traumatic memory deals ‘not simply with a

past event or with the objects of memory but with the present

leave them open to be shared with others. Those remaining are

returned to the artist, who places them in a bonfire to purify the

emotions expressed in each; for Lee, ‘these thoughts and words

belong to the sky or the water’.

Dadang Christanto’s installation

For those: Who are poor, Who

are suffer(ing), Who are oppressed, Who are voiceless, Who are

powerless, Who are burdened, Who are victims of violence, Who

are victims of a dupe, Who are victims of injustice

1993 creates

a space to memorialise lives forgotten or unacknowledged

by history. The installation of 36 vertical rib forms and

accompanying single horizontal floating rib (

For those who

have been killed

1992) was handmade over the course of

a year in tribute to the patience of Indonesian author and

activist Pramoedya Ananta Toer who wrote on the polemics

of Indonesian independence during his ten years of detention

under President Suharto.

Christanto was also driven by

witnessing footage of the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre, in which

200 pro-independence East Timorese were murdered by the

Indonesian army. For Christanto, the work is an attempt to

translate these experiences into a methodology for creativity:

It is meant as a symbol of my empathy: an epigraph for the

victims of oppression . . . and those who have been waylaid by

the process of history and development. With my work I hope

to encourage a more comprehensive view — with a humanistic

dimension — towards this age of development.

Viewers are invited to write messages and leave offerings at

the base of the work — an action initiated by Christanto himself,

who in a performance at the exhibition opening paints himself

with white clay and throws a basket of rose petals in tribute.

In contrast to works that make explicit the interpersonal nature

of memory, or illustrate its contemporary landscape, the final

section of ‘Earth and Elsewhere’ features works that elicit

more spiritual ideas of experiential knowledge. Segar Passi’s

paintings archive aspects of Indigenous knowledge derived from

the skies. As curator Diane Moon has noted:

Passi learnt from an early age to read signs of rips and

whirlpools, the ebb and flow of tides and currents and their

intimate relationship with the movement of the stars and