This language that is every stone

12 February-16 April 2022

Vernon Ah Kee, Robert Andrew, Daniel Boyd, Megan Cope, Manthia Diawara, Taloi Havini, Koo Jeong A, Sancintya Mohini Simpson, Phuong Ngo, The Otolith Group, Philippe Parreno, Raqs Media Collective, Khaled Sabsabi, Anri Sala, Yhonnie Scarce, Latai Taumoepeau, and Shireen Taweel

Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Asad Raza, and Warraba Weatherall

Today, the question of preservation versus innovation seems to underlie much cultural discourse, as if a choice between cultural identity and a global homogeneity were possible. This language that is every stone examines this tension through the concept of creolisation: an idea brought to prominence by Martinican writer Édouard Glissant. Widely recognised as one of the most important literary figures of the Carribean, Glissant was a poet and philosopher whose body of work continues to inspire and influence artists across the globe.

Glissant defined creolisation as a constant state of cultural transformation, whereby endless local difference emerges from recurrent contact between people – with one another – as well as the natural world. As Glissant writes, creolisation is “a phenomenon that is real in the world: that is to say not one of us can pretend to be shielded from the good or bad influences of the world.”

Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Asad Raza and Kamilaroi artist Warraba Weatherall, This language that is every stone is the fourth iteration in a series of exhibitions conceived by Obrist and Raza that survey Glissant’s life and work. Developed specifically within an Australian context, This language that is every stone explores cultural synthesis and permeability through the works of Australian First Nations and diasporic artists, with contributions from international counterparts.

View assosciated programs, events, and resources via the IMA website.

This language that is every stone is supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund and the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.

Daniel Boyd

Untitled (27°27'34.9"S 153°02'12.4"E), 2022
Window installation, adhesive vinyl on glass
311.8 x 46.3cm; 311.8 x 20.4cm; 296 x 108cm; 296 x 108cm

Untitled (27°27'34.9"S 153°02'12.4"E) (2022), utilises space and surface to enclose and house the collective exhibition. Individuals are invited to perceive the outer space of the institution and experience the work in relation to place as a compass to navigate and understand the space and all the works displayed at the IMA.

In parallel to the work of Glissant, Boyd’s work brings awareness to the layered history of Australia and our places over time, by a process of both obscuring and revealing. In this light, the work contemplates how our focal points are influenced by our individual and collective experiences. In distorting our view Boyd offers an alternate perspective by reduction of visual information, which directs our attention to fragmentary elements instead of predetermined understandings of the whole.

Sancintya Mohini Simpson

Kāla, 2022
Sugarcane ash
70 x 70cm
Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

Kāla (2022) reflects on the traditional Tamil women’s artform kōlam—a daily practice of drawing designs in rice flour in the home. Symmetrical geometric line drawings sit at the threshold between inside and outside—welcoming visitors and attracting prosperity.

Kāla reconstructs the kōlam with the ash of sugarcane—replacing the medium of rice flour, a source of nourishment with burnt notes of loss, violence and trauma. The kōlam—drawn at the beginning of the exhibition—moves from geometric symmetry to a muddle a black dust as visitors travel cross the threshold into the gallery. The traditional practice of daily renewal is replaced with the work’s process of decay.

The work speaks to the history of the sugar industry and its dark history of labour exploitation—those of women taken from their homes and family, and the ongoing traces of loss felt by this history. It also references Édouard Glissant’s own connections to place, in Martinique, the Caribbean where the sugar industry was fuelled by slavery and later indentured labour.

3	Koo Jeong A FLAMMARIOUSSS, 2006 Paper, cotton, 9 x 25 x 33cm Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert

4	Daniel Boyd Untitled (EOTAEIAOOTA), 2020 Oil, acrylic and archival glue on canvas 58.5 x 82.5cm Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Untitled (UTCITM), 2020 Oil, acrylic and archival glue on canvas 162 x 130cm Private collection

5	Philippe Parreno Call Me!, 2018–2022 Sound recordings, printed poster Courtesy of the artist

6	Dir. Manthia Diawara Édouard Glissant: One World in Relation, 2009 Video, French with English subtitles 00:48:00 Courtesy of K’a Yéléma Productions.

Megan Cope

Kinyingarra Guwinyanba, 2021
Eucalyptus, Kinyinyarra (Sydney Rock Oyster) shell and stainless-steel trace wire
Dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

For This language that is every stone, Megan Cope has created a thriving sea garden that draws upon six years of research-led practice investigating the impact of the early colonial lime-burning industry and subsequent devastation to both Aboriginal middens and oyster reefs on Quandamooka Sea Country. Kinyingarra Guwinyanba (2021), which means ‘place of oyster rocks’ in Jandai and Gowar language, is a hand built sculptural formation that has been returned to Country and is envisaged as a living work that will last for time immemorial.

Resting on the intertidal zone near Myora, Quandamooka Sea Country (also known as Stradbroke Island) Cope has planted dozens of oyster rods, which in time will grow into an organic ecosystem, integrated into their natural environment. Building on the cultural practices of the artist’s ancestors—which were violently interrupted by colonisation—Cope’s work is an embodied and living monument to her Country and people. 

Cope takes her inspiration from Glissant’s, Ocean from The Restless Earth - Movement, far from Shores: 
The ancestor speaks, it is the ocean, it is the race that washed the continents with its veil of sufferings; it says this race which is song, the dew of song and the muffles perfume and the blue of the song, and its mouth is the song of all mouths of foam; Ocean! You permit, you are the accomplice, maker of stars; how is it you do not open your wings into a voracious lung? And see! There remains only the sum of the song and the eternity of voice and childhood already of those who will inherit it. Because as far as suffering is concerned it belongs to all: everyone has its vigorous sand between their teeth. The ocean is patience, its wisdom is the tare of time.

Kinyingarra Guwinyanba is a living, generative land and sea artwork that demonstrates how art can physically heal country that has been colonised, through the practice of ecologically restorative and ancestral processes. Through the process of planting these sea gardens, new life will rise from the mud and rocks and Kinyingarra shell.

Khaled Sabsabi

1008, 2020–2021
56 enamel and acrylic paint on paper and foam board
360 x 420cm overall
Courtesy of the artist and Milani gallery, Brisbane

Khaled Sabsabi’s 1008 (2020) is inspired by stories of myth and legend from Arabic, Indian and Persian folklore and literature dating back to the 9th century. Resembling a Persian rug, made from archival, hand-embellished photos, this work speaks to the divisive actions of the so‐called ‘developed nations’, who are often the masters of dispossession, appropriation, and loss. The work queries how these nations have legitimised repression and control, by disguising acts of violence as preservation of culture and traditions.

Sabsabi’s work creates movement and texture through a tapestry of bold colours, distorting black and white imagery in geometric rectangles. It plays on the traditional cultural practice of carpet weaving by capturing historical representations of monuments and scenes from daily life.

Sancintya Mohini Simpson

Abyss, 2022
Scent and scent diffuser
Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

Abyss (2022) evokes the ocean, the plantation, the boat, the body. This scent is made naturally using smoking and distillation practices by the artist. The work’s title is taken from an English translation of Glissant’s writing ‘The Open Boat’ in Poetics of Relation, which speaks to the ongoing impacts of slavery and the movement of people over oceans.

In the artist’s words: “This work is part of an ongoing effort to create an archive that sits against the traditional colonial archive that seeks to tell my familial history. Rather than looking at the archive through this traditionally western lens—I think about how a decolonised culturally specific archive is experienced. Through the intangible and sensory, and acknowledging intergenerational histories—through the body, through descendants of these histories.”

10	The Otolith Group @Glissantbot, 2017 Digital artwork Dimensions variable Courtesy and copyright The Otolith Group

11	Raqs Media Collective Tears (are not only from weeping), 2021 Video Dimensions variable Courtesy Raqs Media Collective and Frith Street Gallery, London

Shireen Taweel

Switching Codes, 2020
Directional sound sculptures, copper, steel, three channel audio
Dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist

Switching Codes (2020) unpacks the ongoing influence of Arabic, English, and French language-based cultural practices in Lebanon and its outcomes on the shared Lebanese cultural identity in Australia, Lebanon, and France. Code-switching has become a significant tool used to unify the varied and constantly shifting cultural interests bound within generations of the French, English, and Arabic languages and the influence of the associated cultural and political histories in Lebanon. 

The vocal composition projected from the three directional sound sculptures is an amalgam of the Arabic, French, and English languages. An ambience of lingual tonal relationships formed from dissolving words and shifting meaning, the work creates an audial environment of consistently unsettled familiarity.

Robert Andrew

Moving beyond the line, 2022
Book, water, aluminium, ochre, and electromechanical components.
360 x 80 x 60cm
Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

Robert Andrew’s practice unearths histories that have previously been denied or forgotten—constructing a foundation or knowledge system to move forward and build on. Andrew’s works reflect his personal relationship to land, culture and language, as well as wider narratives related to the encounter between Indigenous and colonial cultural heritages.

Knowledge systems are neither fixed nor fully predictable—each word can erode, build, and direct the path of history. Moving beyond the line mines cultural histories to uncover how the written word impacted the course of Andrew’s familial lineage. A constant slow drip erodes the principles expressed in A.O Neville’s publication 'Australia's Coloured Minority: Its Place in the Community' (1947). Neville was Western Australia’s Chief Protector of the Aborigines 1915–1936. Each word expresses and builds political and philosophical systems that directed and controlled the families, livelihoods, and the formation of history. This process obscures and reclaims these histories, re-inserting First Nations voices overwhelming the written word with ancient minerals to build new imagery in the pooled residues of ochre and ink.

Taloi Havini

Tsomi wan-bel, 2017
3 channel video
00:09:42
Courtesy of the artist

Tsomi wan-bel is an acknowledgment of the birthplace of the artist, displaying footage of people participating in a traditional mediation ceremony in Bougainville, an autonomous region of Papua New Guinea, where she was born. By recognising the sacred nature of traditional ceremony, Havini chooses to capture not the ceremony itself but the peoples of the village, their movements, and conversations before, after and during. The video is predominantly untranslated which allows for the viewer to watch, listen, and absorb her people’s faces, voices, and movements to navigate and ‘decode’ the story being told.

Tsomi wan-bel, focuses on how society might code in the future in terms of laws and language. Although predicting the future is impossible, Havini hopes that by revisiting the past, we can consolidate the present, and investigate how we might be able influence the future.

Phuong Ngo

Works from the series Lost and Found, 2019–

I have no intention of sharing my authority, 2020
Pigment print, found postcard
40 x 26.5cm
Collection: Murray Art Museum Albury. Purchased 2020

The Interest of the State must come first, 2020
Pigment print, found postcard
41 x 24.9cm
Courtesy of the artist

When everyone else is losing their heads, it is important to keep yours, 2020
Pigment print, found postcard
40 x 25.5cm
Collection: Murray Art Museum Albury. Purchased 2020

No one understands my ills, nor the terror that fills my breast, who does not know the heart of a mother, 2020
Pigment print, found postcard
40 x 25.5cm
Collection: Murray Art Museum Albury. Purchased 2020

There is nothing new except what has been forgotten, 2020
Pigment print, found postcard
22.5 x 41cm
Courtesy of the artist

It is legal because I wish it, 2020
Pigment print, found postcard
25.5 x 40cm
Courtesy of the artist

To an overwhelming extent the wishes of various populations prevailed, 2020
Pigment print, found postcard
40 x 26.4cm
Courtesy of the artist

Heart Breaking to see a house of God in flames, 2019
Pigment print, found postcard
35 x 35cm
Courtesy of the artist

It’s one of the greatest treasures of the world, 2019
Pigment print, found postcard
40 x 28cm
Murray Art Museum Albury. Purchased 2020

This is truly devastating, 2019
Pigment print, found postcard
26 x 40cm
Courtesy of the artist

Informed by the history of French Colonialism in Vietnam and drawing on the The Vietnam Archive Project (2010–ongoing) as source of images and materials; Lost and Found (2010-ongoing) is a series of works that uses found photography and global image archives (Google Images, Getty Images and others) interrogate the ways in which systems of colonialism, imperialism and eugenics continue to perverse the ways in which former colonised bodies relate to the world at large.

Following the French conquest of South Vietnam in 1862, the Roman Catholic Church established a community and religious services for French colonialists. The first church occupied a Vietnamese pagoda, abandoned during the conquest. This pagoda was eventually replaced by a wooden church, which in turn was replaced by the Notre-Dame Cathedral Basilica of Saigon, officially Cathedral Basilica of Our Lady of The Immaculate Conception. Established by French colonists who initially named it Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Saïgon, the cathedral was constructed between 1863 and 1880.

On 15 April 2019, a fire broke out beneath the roof of Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral in Paris. By the time it was extinguished, the building's spire and most of its roof had been destroyed and its upper walls severely damaged; extensive damage to the interior was prevented by its stone vaulted ceiling, which largely contained the burning roof as it collapsed. The outpouring of global grief was immediate and a fundraising campaign following the destruction brought in pledges of over €1 billion within a week.

Taking the above histories as a starting point Lost and Found is an ongoing body of work that seeks to question the ways in which colonial ideologies impacted the way in which people value various cultures and communities. Planned work in the series will focus on the transportation of culture, hybridity, lateral violence, and post enlightenment.

Yhonnie Scarce

Nucleus 9 & 10, 2020
Hand blown glass bush plums (2 pieces)

In her hand-blown glass sculptures and installations, Yhonnie Scarce often works with the shape of bush food, such as yams and bush plums. For Scarce, bush foods are “a perfect representation of us” and are a symbol for the history of displacement and exploitation of Aboriginal people from their ancestral homelands in Australia.

Nucleus 9 & 10 (2020) is part of the artist’s ongoing body of research that exposes the impact of nuclear testing on Aboriginal communities—including that of her grandfathers, Kokatha Country—in the 1950s.

Vernon Ah Kee

many lies, 2017
Acrylic and enamel on linen
720 x 240cm
Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

Vernon Ah Kee utilises text and language of the coloniser, with deep consideration of race politics, to explore the denial and pain experienced by First Peoples in Australia.  

The artist writes that “many lies is quite simply about the level of denial that Australia perpetuates,” adding that denial of an Indigenous history is “so deeply embedded in [Australia’s] culture that we are unable to have a rational conversation about it.” 

many lies demonstrates a cultural intersection of creolisation where the unknown is commonly supplanted with fear.  This text-based work subtly evokes the deception of our own emotion in making sense of our differences, in a way which delineates the self as normative and the ‘other’ as irregular and unequal.  These dynamics present the historical and contemporary underpinnings which identify and continue to frame difference as binaries of security and insecurity. 

Anri Sala

Làk-kat 2.0 (British/American), 2015
Two-channel video and stereo sound, 00:09:38
Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery

Làk-kat 2.0 (British/American) (2015) addresses the colonial inheritance in Senegal through a humble but powerful two-channel video and sound installation. In this work the artist, Anri Sala, explores themes of language, race and colonialism by juxtaposing two videos of a scene in which young schoolboys are instructed to repeat specific words in the Wolof language. The words repeated by the two boys have emerged from French colonialism and describe shades of skin colour, ranging from dark to light. The inclusions of subtitles, one in British English, the other in American English, emphasise the differences in linguistic coding that emerge in the translation of language, and that mirrors the differences between national hierarchies of skin colour, and cultural value.

Offsite

Printed posters will be temporarily and publicly hung over four weeks across Brisbane City

Khaled Sabsabi

Édouard Glissant’s ‘Poetics of Relation’ public activation by Khaled Sabsabi, 2022
200 single sided paper poster prints, distributed across Brisbane for the duration of the exhibition
100 x 140cm each
Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

Édouard Glissant’s ‘Poetics of Relation’ public activation by Khaled Sabsabi (2022) is a temporary work, transmitting ideas to be remembered. Commissioned for This language that is every stone, Sabsabi has created a facsimile of each page from Glissant’s seminal text Poetics of Relation. These large-scale posters can be found in public spaces across inner-city Brisbane throughout the duration of the exhibition.

Conceived as a homage, Sabsabi’s work reinforces the importance of art, philosophy and literature being accessible to all. The decision to leave the text as per the printed page means that the work cannot be mistaken for an advert or other kind of public announcement. By using photocopied text extracts from Glissant’s original translated ‘Poetics of Relation,’the artist seeks to send a jolt through the public imagination. These fragmented excerpts give passersby space to experience and interpret Glissant’s work within the familiar geography of everyday life.

Printed posters will be displayed over four weeks in the following locations across Brisbane City:

Fortitude Valley: including Brunswick Street, China Town, Valley Markets, James Street.

New Farm: including Merthyr Street, Wickham Street, Brunswick Street.

Paddington and Rose Hill: including Given Terrace, Latrobe Terrace.

West End: including Vulture Street, Boundary Street.

Brisbane CBD: including Eagle Street, George Street, Edward Street, Market Street, Queen Street Mall, Queen Street.

Artist Biographies

Vernon Ah Kee
Vernon Ah Kee’s conceptual text pieces, videos, photographs and drawings form a critique of Australian popular culture from the perspective of the Aboriginal experience of contemporary life. He particularly explores the dichotomy between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal societies and cultures. Ah Kee’s works respond to the history of the romantic and exoticised portraiture of ‘primitives’, and effectively reposition the Aboriginal in Australia from an ‘othered thing’, anchored in museum and scientific records to a contemporary people inhabiting real and current spaces and time.

Ah Kee is a descendant of the Kuku Yalandji, Waanji, Yidindji, Koko Berrin and Gugu Yimithirr peoples. Born 1967 in Innisfail, North Queensland, Australia. Lives and works in Brisbane, Australia. Ah Kee’s work has been exhibited in a number of significant national and international exhibitions, including: ‘A Year in Art: Australia 1992’ (2021), Tate Modern, London; ’unDisclosed’: 2nd National Indigenous Art Triennial’, National Gallery of Australia (2012); ‘SALTWATER: A Theory of Thought Forms’ 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015); ’Ideas of Barack’, National Gallery of Victoria (2011); ’Revolutions: Forms that turn’, the 16th Biennale of Sydney (2008); ‘Once Removed’, Australian Pavilion, Venice Biennale (2009); and ’Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art’, National Gallery of Canada (2013). Recent major group shows of his work include: ‘The National: New Australian Art (2020)’, Carraigeworks, Sydney; ’Body Language’ (2019), National Gallery of Australia; ‘When Silence Falls’, Art Gallery of New South Wales (2015-16); ‘Encounters’, National Museum of Australia (2015-16); ‘Brutal Truths’, Griffith University Art Gallery (2015-16); and ‘Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia’, Harvard Art Museums (2016). In 2020 Ah Kee presented a major new work as part of his solo exhibition ‘The Island’ at Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney. Ah Kee’s work is held in a number of major collections within Australia and overseas including the Tate Modern, London.

Vernon Ah Kee is represented by Milani Gallery, Brisbane.

Robert Andrew

Robert Andrew is a descendant of the Yawuru people, his Country is the lands and waters of the Broome area in the Kimberley Region, Western Australia. His work investigates personal and family histories that have been denied or forgotten. Andrew’s work speaks to the past yet articulates a contemporary relationship to his Country. His work often combines programmable machinery with earth pigments, ochres, rocks and soil to mine historical, cultural and personal events that have been buried and distanced by the dominant paradigms of western culture.

Born in 1965 in Perth, Australia, Andrew lives and works in Brisbane. His work has been presented in major exhibitions in Australia and Internationally including: TarraWarra Biennial: Slow Moving Waters, Tarrawarra Museum of Art, 2021; Overlapping Magisteria: The 2020 Macfarlane Commissions, Australian Centre of Contemporary Art, 2020; Jinan Biennale, Jinan, China 2020; Yokohama Triennale, Japan, 2020; The National: New Australian Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2019; Colony: Frontier Wars, National Gallery of Victoria, 2018; Experimenta Make Sense, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2017; and Ars Electronica, Austria, 2017. His recent solo exhibitions include: Inscribed, Milani Gallery, 2021; Our Mutable Histories, Ellenbrook Art Gallery, Perth, 2019; Data Stratification, Kapelica Gallery, Slovenia, 2018; and Our Mutable Histories, Museum of Brisbane, 2017. His work is held in the collections of National Gallery of Victoria, Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), St Andrew’s Hospital Collection, and Gadens Lawyers Brisbane. Andrew has a Doctor of Visual Arts (2019) and is currently undertaking a post-doctural fellowship from Griffith University, Brisbane.

Robert Andrew is Represented by Milani Gallery, Brisbane.

Daniel Boyd
Daniel Boyd is a Kudjla and Gangalu artist born in Cairns and currently living in Sydney Australia. Boyd is one of Australia's most acclaimed contemporary artists. Boyd’s practice is internationally recognised for its manifold engagement with the colonial history of the Australia-Pacific region. Drawing upon intermingled discourses of science, religion and aesthetics, his work reveals the complexity of perspectives through which political, cultural and personal memory is composed. Boyd has both Aboriginal and Pacific Islander heritage and his work traces this cultural and visual ancestry in relation to the broader history of Western art.

Daniel Boyd is represented by STATION, Melbourne and RoslynOxley9 Gallery, Sydney.

Megan Cope
Megan Cope is a Quandamooka (North Stradbroke Island in Southeast Queensland) artist. Her site-specific sculptural installations, video work and paintings investigate issues relating to identity, the environment and mapping practices. Cope’s work often resists prescribed notions of Aboriginality and examines psychogeographies that challenge the grand narrative of ‘Australia’ and our sense of time and ownership in a settler colonial state. These explorations result in various material outcomes.

In 2020, Cope presented newly-commissioned work at the 2020 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Monster Theatres. She has also featured work in the NGV Triennial 2020, the 2021 TarraWarra Museum of Art Biennial: Slow Moving Waters and in the 2021 exhibition, OCCURRENT AFFAIR: ProppaNOW at the University of Queensland Art Museum. Recent solo exhibitions include Fractures and Frequencies presented at UNSW Galleries as part of Sydney Festival 2020/21, and Unbroken Connections at Canberra Glassworks, following an artist residency.

Cope’s work has been exhibited in Australia and internationally including at the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art; Art Gallery of New South Wales; Gold Coast City Art Gallery; MONA FOMA, Hobart; ARC Biennial, Brisbane; Cairns Regional Art Gallery; Koorie Heritage Trust, Melbourne; City Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand; Para Site Contemporary Art Space, Hong Kong; Care of Art Space, Milan; the Australian Embassy, Washington and Next Wave Festival, 2014. In 2015 Cope’s work was curated into an exhibition at Musées de la Civilisation in Québec, Canada, which also acquired her work for their permanent collection.

Megan Cope is a member of Aboriginal art collective proppaNOW and is represented by Milani Gallery, Brisbane.

Manthia Diawara
Manthia Diawara (b.1953) is a writer, filmmaker, cultural theorist, scholar and art historian. Diawara holds the title of University Professor at New York University, where he is Director of the Institute of African American Affairs.

Taloi Havini
Taloi Havini (Nakas Tribe, Hakö people) was born in Arawa, Autonomous Region of Bougainville and is currently based in Brisbane, Australia. She employs a research practice informed by her matrilineal ties to her land and communities in Bougainville. This manifests in works created using a range of media including photography, audio – video, sculpture, immersive installation, and print.

She curates and collaborates across multi-art platforms using archives, working with communities, and developing commissions locally and internationally. Knowledge – production, transmission, inheritance, mapping, and representation are central themes in Havini’s work where she examines these in relation to land, architecture, and place.

Havini holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) from the Canberra School of Art, Australian National University. She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions and has exhibited with Artspace, Sydney, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Sharjah Biennial 13, UAE, 3rd Aichi Triennial, Nagoya, 8th & 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art Queensland Art Gallery | GoMA, Brisbane, and was recently commissioned by TBA21–Academy with Schmidt Ocean Institute at Ocean Space, Campo S. Lorenzo, Venezia for her solo at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, 2021. Havini’s artwork is held in public and private collections including TBA21–Academy, Sharjah Art Foundation, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, National Gallery of Victoria, KADIST, San Francisco, CA, USA.

She is a Board Member of Artspace, Sydney and Affiliated Researcher on the European Research Council funded project Indigeneity in the 21st century.

Koo Jeong A
Since the early 1990s, Koo Jeong A has made works that are seemingly casual and commonplace, yet at the same time remarkably precise, deliberate, and considered. Her reflections on the senses and the body incorporate objects, still and moving images, audio elements, and aromas. Many of her works are conceived within site-specific environments that question the limits of fact and fiction, the imaginary and actuality of our world. Koo considers the connection of energies between a place and people, relying on chance to drive her encounters.

She has been named ‘2016 Artist of the Year’ by the Korean Cultural Centre UK, celebrated with a solo exhibition in London in October 2016. Current solo shows include: Koo Jeong A., Galerie Eva Presenhuber, New York (2020) and OooOoO, La Triennale di Milano, Milano (2019). Recent solo exhibitions and commissions of her work include: ajeongkoo, Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2017); Enigma of Beginnings, Yuz Project Room at Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2016); Koo Jeong A x Wheelscape: Evertro, Everton Park, Liverpool (2015); Annual Journey, Pilar Corrias, London (2015); Oussser, Fondazione La Raia, Novi Ligure (2014); Koo Jeong A: 16:07, Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf (2012); OTRO, Centre international d’art et du paysageIle de Vassivière, Vassivière (2011); E opened his eyes he is now walking, CCA KITAKYUSHU Project Gallery, Kitakyushu (2011); Constellation Congress, DIA Art Foundation, Dia:Beacon, Beacon, The Dan Flavin Art Insitute, Bridgehampton (2010); Koo Jeong A, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2008); Flash Cube at Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2007).

Sancintya Mohini Simpson
Sancintya Mohini Simpson is a descendent of indentured labourers sent from India to work on colonial sugar plantations in South Africa. Her work navigates the complexities of migration, memory and trauma—addressing gaps and silences within the colonial archive. Simpson’s work moves between painting, video, poetry, and performance to develop narratives and construct rituals that reflect on her matrilineal lineage.

Simpson is an artist and researcher based in Brisbane, Australia. Recent solo exhibitions include: New Old Archives, Milani Gallery, Brisbane (2020); Kūlī nām dharāyā/ they’ve given you the name ‘coolie’, Institute of Modern Art Belltower, Brisbane (2020); Echoes Over Oceans, Firstdraft, Sydney (2020); Remnants of my ancestors, Hobiennale, Hobart (2019); and And words are whispered, 1ShanthiRoad Studio Gallery, Bangalore (2019). Simpson’s recent group exhibitions include: Staple: What’s on your plate?, Hayy Jameel, Jeddah (2021); AustrALIEN, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra (2021); On Earth, QUT Art Museum, Brisbane (2021); The National 2021: New Australian Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2021); The Past is the Present is the Future, The Granville Centre Art Gallery, Granville (2021); Making Ground, Constance ARI X MONA FOMA, Hobart (2021). In 2021 Simpson’s work was screened at Art Gallery of New South Wales as part of Projections #6 New Australian video art: Cycle 1. Her poetry has been published Cordite Poetry Review and Peril Magazine. Simpson’s work is held in the collections of KADIST, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, UQ Art Museum, and Museum of Brisbane.

Sancintya Mohini Simpson is represented by Milani Gallery, Brisbane, Australia.

Phuong Ngo
Phuong Ngo is a Vietnamese-Australian artist living and working in Melbourne, Australia. His practice is concerned with the interpretation of history, memory, and place, and how it impacts individual and collected identity of the Vietnamese diaspora. Through archival process rooted in a conceptual practice, he seeks to find linkages between culture, politics and oral histories and historic events, which intern dictates the materiality of his artistic output.

Ngo’s work often explores the complexities of conflict and war, displacement, inherited trauma, migration, and colonial legacies through a range of mediums including studio photography, vernacular photography, video, installation, sculpture, ceramics, performance and more recently painting. As an artist securely imbedded in the relationship between concept and material, Ngo often refers to artworks as residue of the ‘real work’.

Khaled Sabsabi
Born in Tripoli, Lebanon Sabsabi migrated to Australia as a child in 1976. His family settled in Western Sydney where he has continued to live and work for over 30 years. Sabsabi’s work is inspired by societal definitions and reflects human collectiveness, while questioning ideological principles and complexities of identity politics. His work aims to inform an understanding of universal dynamics, including the fluidity between the everyday and the metaphysical.

He was awarded an Australia Council for the Arts CCD fellowship in 2001, Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship 2010, 60th Blake Prize 2011, MCG Basil Sellers fellowship 2014, Fishers Ghost Prize 2014, Western Sydney ARTS NSW Fellowship 2015 and Sharjah Art Programme Prize 2016. Sabsabi has participated and presented in over 80 solo and group exhibitions in Australia and abroad, including 5th Marrakech Biennale, 18th Biennale of Sydney, 9th Shanghai Biennale, Sharjah Biennial 11, 1st Yinchuan Biennale, 3rd Kochi Muziris Biennale, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art 2018 and the 21st Biennale of Sydney.

Khaled Sabsabi is represented by Milani Gallery, Brisbane.

Philippe Parreno
Philippe Parreno is a French artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Paris. He graduated from Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Grenoble in 1988 and in 1989 from Institut des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. In 2016 Parreno presented the Hyundai Commission in the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London. He was the first artist to take over the entire 22,000 square metre gallery space at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris with his exhibition Anywhere, Anywhere Out of the World which opened in October 2013. Major exhibitions of Parreno’s work include: Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2018); Two Automatons for One Duet, Art Institute Chicago (2018); Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2017); uts, ACMI (2016); Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2015), Park Avenue Armory, NewRockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2017); Fundaciao de Serralves, Porto (2017); Thenabo York (2015), CAC Malaga (2014), The Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow (2013); Barbican Art Gallery, London (2013); Fondation Beyeler (2012); Philadelphia Museum of Art (2012); The Serpentine Gallery, London (2010); Witte de With (2010); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2009); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2009); Kunsthalle Zurich (2009); CCA Kitakyoshu, Japan (2006); Kunsthalle Zürich (2006); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2003); Musée D’Art Moderne de le Ville de Paris (2002), and Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2001).

Parreno’s work is represented in the public collections of: Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kanazawa Museum of the 21st Century, Japan; Musée D’Art Moderne de le Ville de Paris; Musée du Luxembourg, Luxembourg; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; LACMA, Los Angeles; MoMA, New York; MUSAC, Spain; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; and the Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis.

Anri Sala
Anri Sala was born in 1974 in Tirana, Albania. He lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Sala’s transformative, time-based works are constructed through multiple relationships between image, architecture and sound, utilizing these as elements to fold, capsize and question experience. His works investigate ruptures in language, syntax, and music to validate or invalidate narrative and composition, inviting creative dislocations which generate new interpretations of history, supplanting old fictions with new, less explicit, and less duplicitous ones.

Recent solo shows have been at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2021); Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern, Houston (2021); MUDAM, Luxembourg (2019); Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy (2019); Fundacíon Botín, Santander, Spain (2019); the Garage, Moscow, Russia (2018); Instituto Moreira Salles, Sao Paulo, Brazil; (2017-2018); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2017); Kaldor Public Art Projects, Sydney, Australia (2017); The New Museum (2016); Instituto Moreira Salles, Rio de Janeiro (2016); Teshima Seawall House, Benesse Art Site Naoshima, Teshima Island, Japan (2016); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2014); the French Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013); the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2012); The Serpentine Gallery, London (2011); The Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2009); The Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2008); and the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan (2005); among other venues.

Yhonnie Scarce
Yhonnie Scarce was born in Woomera, South Australia in 1973, and belongs to the Kokatha and Nukunu peoples. Recent international exhibitions include Pavilion of Contemporary Art, Milan, Italy 2019, and the Museum of London, Ontario, Canada 2019. Previous international shows include the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, India, 2018; Personal Structures, collateral exhibition, 55th Venice Biennale, 2013; Galway Art Centre, Ireland 2016; Harvard Art Museum, Massachusetts 2016; and Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Museum, Virginia, USA, 2012.

Recent Australian exhibitions include Missile Park, ACCA and Institute of Modern Art, 2021; Looking Glass: Judy Watson and Yhonnie Scarce, Tarrawarra Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2020; A Lightness of Spirit is the Measure of Happiness, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 2018; The National, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, 2017; The 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial, National Gallery of Australia 2017; 19th Biennale of Sydney, 2014; and a site-specific installation at the Art Gallery of South Australia as part of Tarnanthi Festival of Contemporary and Torres Strait Islander Art, 2016. Scarce was recently the recipient with Edition Office architects of the prestigious National Gallery of Victoria Architecture Commission in 2019 which was awarded the Australian Institute of Architects Small Projects Award in 2020 and the Small Building of the Year in the 2021 Dezeen Awards.

Yhonnie Scarce is represented by THIS IS NO FANTASY, Melbourne.

Latai Taumoepeau
Latai Taumoepeau makes faivā (live-art-works). Her faivā (performance practice) is from her homelands, the Island Kingdom of Tonga and her birthplace Sydney, land of the Gadigal people. She mimicked, trained and un- learned dance, in multiple institutions of learning, starting with her village, a suburban church hall, the club and a university.

Her body-centred performance practice of faivā centres Tongan philosophies of relational space and time; cross- pollinating ancient and everyday temporal practice to make visible the impact of climate crisis in the Pacific. She conducts urgent environmental movements and actions to create transformation in Oceania. Engaging in the socio-political landscape of Australia with sensibilities in race, class and the female body politic, she is committed to making minority communities visible in the frangipanni-less foreground.

In the near future Latai will return to her ancestral home and continue the ultimate faivā (performing art) of sea voyaging and celestial navigation before she becomes an ancestor.

Shireen Taweel
Shireen Taweel is a multimedia installation artist whose work broaches issues of the construction of cultural heritage, knowledge and identity through language and the constantly shifting public space of the social, political and religious axiom. Her artistic practice draws from the personal experiences of being Lebanese Australian living between cultures, and how the physical spaces within her community reflect a complex cultural landscape of transformation expressed through hybridity and plurality. The project development of Shireen’s works are often site-specific, weaving local narratives and research with a focus on experimentation in material and sound through site. Shireen's constant acquisition of traditional coppersmith artisan skills is a research vessel for community focused conceptual development. Through a progressive application of the collected artisan techniques and a manipulation of the acts of making her works lead to possibilities of cross-cultural discourse, opening dialogues of shared histories and fluid community identities.

Shireen Taweel graduated from a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2015 at the School For Creative Arts Hobart, and completed a Graduate Diploma of Fine Arts in Sculpture in 2016 at The National Art School, Sydney. Taweel’s most recent solo shows include Switching Codes at Fairfield City Gallery (2020), Holding Patterns at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney (2020) and razing legacy at Haven For Artists in Beirut (2019). Her works have been widely exhibited in notable institutions throughout Australia and Lebanon. Taweel’s artworks have been recently acquired by the National Gallery of Australia and the Art Gallery of New South Wales (2021).

Events and Programs

Saturday 12 February
Hans Ulrich Obrist on Glissant
Online Keynote

After Glissant: First Nations Perspectives of Creolisation with Warraba Weatherall, Daniel Boyd & Jax Compton
Online In Conversation

Hans Ulrich Obrist, Asad Raza & Warraba Weatherall with Olivia Fairweather
Podcast

Saturday 19 March
Community Led Architecture
with Megan Cope

Our Voices II: The DE-colonial Project
Book Launch

This language that is every stone is supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund and the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.

This language that is every stone

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