An engaging time-lapse captures the melting process of a vibrantly colored block of ice from a close-up perspective. It gradually disintegrates, forming swirling pools of water, resembling otherworldly terrain and inspiring awe.
Read Also...:
Brain rot' MAFS tops TV ratings despite more contestant controversy
03-12, 2025
First Indian film festival in Australia goes beyond Bollywood
03-12, 2025
Rising 2025 brings Beth Gibbons, Suki Waterhouse and more to Melbourne
03-12, 2025
In Sydney Dance Company's Somos, audience members and dancers 'could not be closer'
03-12, 2025Singaporean artist Dawn Ng's multi-channel video installation is one of the exhibits at the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial (APT), currently on display at the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA). The work compresses a 20-hour process into an efficient and captivating 40 minutes.
The accompanying label explains that Ng is exploring the way we experience time: "Some things seem like they will never end, while others are over in a flash."
This aptly describes the two days I spent immersed in the 500 works of APT11, being engaged, puzzled, and moved by them, and the subsequent time I spent reflecting on the experience of viewing art and what it can reveal—about ourselves and the world around us.
The Asia Pacific Triennial (APT) is QAGOMA's flagship project and has been intrinsic in shaping the gallery's influence both domestically and internationally. Since 1993, the APT has showcased the work of over 650 artists from 50 different countries in the Asia Pacific region, attracting over 4 million visitors.
The 11th Asia Pacific Triennial brings together 70 artists, groups, and co-curatorial projects from over 30 countries and regions, including Nepal, Hawaii, New Zealand, Cambodia, Mongolia, Mindanao in the Philippines, the Sulu Archipelago, and Australia. Artists from Saudi Arabia, Timor-Leste, and Uzbekistan are also making their debut.
But what sets the APT apart is not the list of countries or artists, but the fact that the APT never truly ends.
As Tarun Nagesh, Curator of Asian and Pacific Art, explains: "The APT is an ongoing process; it's not a singular, one-off curatorial or conceptual gesture."
The exhibition is held every three years, but the dialogue and research are ongoing. The APT is rich with relationships.
Especially in the wake of the Australia Council for the Arts' withdrawal of its invitation to artists Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael D'agostino for the 2026 Venice Biennale, and the ensuing pain and dismay, the experience of the Triennial reaffirmed one thing for me: that the job of artists is to hold space for complexity, nuance, and critical and personal reflection in their work.
At the APT, the audience is invited to do so as well.
Moving through the various floors and interconnected gallery spaces of APT11, various themes begin to emerge. You'll notice recurring expressions of care, concerns about environmental and political crises, and reflections on the importance of community and cultural knowledge.
Bilingual wall labels help to orient you, but there is no prescribed way to read the works, so, from room to room, your curiosity becomes your compass.
Curiosity also drives the APT's curators to conduct research and build relationships throughout the region. This ongoing work between editions is where the APT's strength and magic lie. It doesn't start with the art, nor does it end with the exhibition.
Nagesh explains: "These ideas of care and crisis [that emerge in APT11] are, in some ways, less about the final product of the exhibition, and more about the conversations that happen in developing the exhibition with artists and our many collaborators."
Ruha Fifita, Curatorial Assistant, Pacific Art, agrees. "It's not always about a specific art project working with a specific group of people. It can start from our understanding of the region and the landscape."
Fifita is also deeply interested in the role art plays outside of the gallery environment.
"I think that's evident in a lot of the choices that were made in the APT—trying to work with artists whose work fulfills another almost primary function within the context in which it's made. It's a really nice way to learn not only about the artist's practice, but also about a place."
For APT11, Fifita collaborated with weavers and renowned ocean navigator 'Aunofo Havea Funaki in the village of Tu'anuku, Vava'u, Tonga, to help realize one of the largest and most ambitious of the APT11 commissioned projects.
Funaki is a community leader in the village of Tu'anuku, and the driving force behind the stunning kutu weaving Fala Kuta e Toa ko Tavekefai'ana (2024), which occupies a towering double-story wall space before continuing to unfurl onto the floor.
Fifita, who also grew up in Vava'u, understood what the opportunity to make and share the work might mean for Funaki and the Lepamahanga women's group who weave the mats.
Fifita says: "There's a really strong relationship and a lot of trust there, which allowed me to communicate how different the context of the APT and the museum is, and invite people into something that's quite foreign."
The mat hanging in the APT is a weaving with artistic ambition, but it is also an intergenerational project and a work of environmental advocacy.
Vava'u is home to Tonga's largest freshwater lake, and Funaki and the community are custodians of the surrounding ecosystem, which includes the increasingly scarce reeds used for kutu weaving.
Fifita explains: "Funaki's experience as a navigator and the knowledge she's gained has always run parallel to what she needs to do as a climate activist, and the projects she wants to run with the women's group, and these weavings can respond to some of what she knows about the area."
At the foot of Funaki's mat is Standing by the ruins (2022) by Saudi Arabian-born Palestinian artist Dana Awartani. The geometric installation, made of 439 handmade adobe bricks, echoes the textural weft of the mat, but it also has its own story to tell about collective memory and the meaning of cultural heritage in the face of conflict.
Instead of leaving the straw that usually binds them together, Awartani's bricks are beginning to crack. As Nagesh explains, "She's interested through her practice in thinking about the Middle East and the history of conflict there, and cultural loss, whether it's monuments and architecture, or ongoing ways of making and knowledge."
The cracks poetically illustrate this fragility, but there is also a sense of reverence in Awartani's work. A resilience and a deep respect for making traditions underpins it.
More than 16,000 kilometers separate Tonga and Palestine, but the aforementioned threads of care and crisis gently weave these two seemingly disparate works together, forming a truly moving encounter.
Nearby, Wiradjuri artist Karla Dickens' mixed-media installation As above, so below (2024) includes works from her 2022 series Disastrous, which directly confronts the devastating environmental legacies of exploitative forces and colonial heritage.
On the opposite wall, Bombay-born Rithika Merchant's large, whimsical, sci-fi watercolors speculate on life after Earth becomes uninhabitable, with strange creatures moving in and making do.
Elsewhere, on a large folding screen, CAMP Studio's Bombay Tilts Down (2022) deploys magnified single takes from CCTV footage that tilt down from the horizon to the hawkers on the streets below, who seem aware they are being watched and wave in response.
Around the corner from here is a series of witty video works from Thai artist Kawita Vatanajyankur, in which she takes on the tasks of otherwise mechanized processes—the loom becomes an elaborate acrobatic performance; the spinning wheel becomes a spider-like dance—to comment on the invisibility of female labor in textile production and mass manufacture.
If a punch in the guts can make you happy, this is it.
Then there are works of breathtaking beauty. Wardha Shabbir's dazzling experiments with Pakistani miniature painting; Uzbek artist Madina Kasimbaeva's vast tapestry and its unique suzani (embroidery), which took four years to complete; Albert Yonathan Setyawan's mandala-like wall, the Indonesian-born, Tokyo-based artist, composed of more than 3,000 individual mud-cast terracotta hands and flames.
Early next year, QAGOMA will present an APT "highlights" exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Some of the works have not been exhibited for decades, and this will be their first showing in Europe.
For Nagesh, who is curating the exhibition, this is not only an opportunity to celebrate some of the APT's most significant works, but also to reconsider them in the context of the V&A's own collection and its colonial underpinnings.
"We're approaching it with some of the same principles that we approach each Triennial. Thinking about different articulations of history and colonialism [and geography and politics], and the great diversity of contemporary art from the Asia Pacific; it's not a traditional idea of contemporary art."
If there is one work in APT11 that encapsulates the Triennial's commitment, ambition, vibrancy, reciprocity, and joy, for me, it is Taiwanese artist Hsu Che-Yu's cinematic, dazzling stop-motion animation film Compound eyes of tropical (2020–2024). It's a 16-minute single-channel film with a diorama made entirely of exquisitely crafted joss paper and wire.
It blends Chinese folk dance, mythological archetypes, European puppetry, and exhilarating Taiwanese and Indonesian percussion to tell a Malay fable about a mousedeer who tricks crocodiles into helping it cross a river.
It really is breathtaking, and like so many other works at the APT, it is absolutely worth seeing.
The 11th Asia Pacific Triennial is on display at QAGOMA in Meanjin/Brisbane until April 27.
