The entry hall at the Art Gallery of New South Wales is lined with portraits of First Nations women. No explanation is given on the plaque for Brenda L Croft’s Naabami (thou shall/will see): Barangaroo (army of me) (2019-22). It needs none. Hanging beside the entrances to the AGNSW’s Grand Courts – a series of galleries that have long been a home for “high” European and Australian art – Croft’s photographs are striking statements of First Nations presence.
If one needs a more pointed directive, they only have to turn their head to the opposite wall and see Abdul Abdullah’s painting Decisions (2022), which broadcasts the words “Have a think about it”.
It’s the perfect way to frame the fourth iteration of the biennial survey of Australian art, The National, which is clearly looking to expand our understanding of art’s protagonists through 48 new projects, involving more than 80 artists. The show opened on Thursday across four of Sydney’s cultural institutions: AGNSW, Carriageworks, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) and Campbelltown Art Centre.
Further into the AGNSW’s showing is Gerry Wedd’s Where Are We Now? (2020-23), which takes the traditional – almost innocuous – aesthetic of blue and white ceramic wares and turns it on its head: on second glance, the 661 pieces of ceramic include vessels emblazoned with the names of drugs – “Lithium”, “MDMA”, “Xanax” – while his tiles against the wall depict existentially charged imagery: a lone syringe, a blindfolded man, a razor blade. “The blue and white is a trojan horse,” Wedds says of a work he believes a lot of people will overlook. “They’ll think that the art gallery got it out of an antique shop.
“I like work that is macro and micro: from a distance it’s one thing, but if you spend time with it, other things start appearing.”
Entering level three of the MCA we are greeted by catastrophe. In Hoda Afshar’s Aura (2020-23), a kaleidoscopic array of black-and-white found photographs depict moments from the 2019-20 bushfires, Black Lives Matter (BLM), US air strikes on Iraq in 2019, and the ongoing pandemic. There is conflict, tragedy and schism here – but for Afshar, these events are connected by the most fundamental of things: breath. From the smoke of the bushfires to Eric Garner and BLM’s cry of “I can’t breathe” to the suffocation of the pandemic.
Afshar did not take the individual photographs, which stretch across the globe. Instead, she began the work from her home in Melbourne during lockdown, photographing a portion of other people’s photographs. “Every scene you see is a tiny part of a much larger picture,” she explains. “There are millions of photographs being recorded online every minute around the world. Do we need more photographs, or do we just need to meditate on what’s already created?”
That question – of what to look at, or what to show – is a difficult one for an exhibition with such an all-encompassing title as The National. Rather than shoehorning artists into an exhibition built around a singular theme, the MCA’s senior curator Jane Devery wanted artists to maintain their own diverse points of reference. Be it in Isabelle Sully’s sound work, which reconsiders the histories of women’s voices in the media through a series of news bulletins read by Sandra Sully; Allison Chhorn’s immersive video installation, which places a facsimile of her parents’ vegetable shade house in the gallery, meditating on memory, migration and simple acts from the everyday; or Rudi Williams’ chance-driven photographs that feel at once kinetically charged and completely still.
“I just wanted to broaden the idea of what Australian art is,” Devery says. “I deliberately chose artists who would brush up against that idea of The National.”
This is foregrounded at Campbelltown Arts Centre, through the presence of a giant inverted boat in the gallery’s centre: Isabel Aquilizan and Alfredo Aquilizan’s Another Country (2010-2023). Working with their five adult children – Miguel, Diego, Amihan, Leon and Aniway – and practising under the collective name Fruitjuice Factori Studio, the artists take a quintessential vessel of travel and use it to suggest the process of home-making.
“We’re from the Phillipines, we have 7,107 islands, so we use the boat as a signification for travel, journey, dislocation and movement,” Alfredo Aquilizan explains. “By inverting it we are thinking about the dawn of architecture, when someone arrives on an island and the first thing they do is invert their boat, which becomes their roof.”
This idea of home has a material expression in the work too: many of the pieces that the Aquilizans used to construct the boat, including the dingy itself, come from beneath their house, collected over the past 17 years. Other objects in the work have been sourced from local op-shops around Campbelltown, so that one feels that every piece of the boat, down to its very grain, seems to carry stories.
At Carriageworks – the fourth site of the National – co-curators Freja Carmichael and Aarna Fitzgerald Hanley repeatedly returned to the question of “What is closest to us?”. The pair found an answer in 11 new works that spoke to the local and the familiar, and functioned as sites for sharing culture.
In Erika Scott’s The Circadian Cul-de-sac (2023), the familiar is arrested in a state of almost absurd unfamiliarity: a towering, four-metre-high hourglass is sitting in a bubbling pool – yet you wouldn’t immediately know it. A deluge of eclectic items enshrine the structure, including inflatable zorb balls, LED lights, jewellery, computer keyboard keys, car tyres, jumper leads and tampon information leaflets. The assemblage stages a confrontation between recognisable consumables and a state of utter disorder, silently speaking of an alien world not so different from our own.
Surrounded by visually arresting artworks by Naminapu Maymuru-White and Elizabeth Day, Yindjibarndi artist Katie West’s installation, The women plucked the star pickets from the ground and turned them into wana (digging sticks) (2023), presents a subtle yet equally powerful installation, which pulls the sounds and materials of Country into the halls of Carriageworks.
Three vintage radios are suspended on steel star pickets, which you can hear reverberating as they transmit field recordings from West’s family farm. Lean in closer to the work and you almost sense the sound begin to change. And that’s because it does. “Our own physical presence in the gallery, because of the precarity of these old radios, changes [the sound],” Hanley says. “Our literal connection with the work affects [its] aurality.”
It is almost too neat a synecdoche for the fourth iteration of the National: that artworks change us, and are changed by us, as we lean in to hear some part of their story.
The National 4 is on show until June and July at Carriageworks, the Art Gallery of NSW, Campbelltown Art Centre and the Museum of Contemporary Art. Entry is free
