Air

“. . . what it means to breathe . . .”

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Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art’s (QAGOMA) summer blockbuster exhibition, Air, brings together an expansive collection of works by over thirty international and Australian artists, each who resist, disturb, and challenge notions of ecological harmony.

Curated by Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow, QAGOMA’s Curatorial Manager of International Art, Air, makes the invisible – atmosphere – visible. “At this moment in history, as global temperatures rise, we are sensitive to air as never before: alert to airborne threats and aware of our reliance on this precious mix of gases. The exhibition asks us to consider the air we share with all other life, to reflect on what it means to breathe freely and to examine air as a metaphor for change and the realisation of our potential,” says Barlow.

A universal connector, the curatorial inspiration is the defining crux of life with its promise of infinity. Through a selection of mostly newly commissioned artworks in a range of media, from large immersive installations to sculptures and paintings, spanning the gallery’s ground floor, Air highlights a global urgency to the threat of climate change and the heating earth. A message made even more strained thanks to the emergence of COVID-19, each breath heavy with warning.

Air is explored through five chapters – Atmosphere, Shared, Burn, Invisible, and Change – with the artworks and artists expanding on the cultural, ecological, and political dimensions of global environmental and social challenges.

Jemima Wyman’s commissioned collage, Plume 20, 2022, features the composition of billowing smoke rising from fire, made up of the images of hundreds of clouds of smoke. Here, air becomes a site of contest – tear gas, smoke bombs, flares, haze – scenes of street activism from Kyiv, New Delhi, Minneapolis, and Hong Kong.

Rachel Mounsey’s photography also captures air as fire, revealing her home, the Victorian coastal town of Mallacoota, during the summer bushfires of 2020 – the sky a deep umber, instantly recognisable and evocative of the trauma that enveloped Australia’s east coast.

Moving into a different chapter of the exhibition, Portal, 2022 – a newly commissioned installation by Jamie North – presents a cast pillar of concrete home to Brisbane indigenous plants, Ficus rubiginosa (rusty fig) and Platycerium bifurcatum (elkhorn fern). The foliage’s determination to grow reveals the resilience of nature and its unwavering commitment to regeneration.

Meanwhile, QAGOMA Director Chris Saines shares, “at the heart of the exhibition is Drift: A cosmic web of thermodynamic rhythms, 2022, by Argentinian-born, Berlin-based artist Tomás Saraceno, a major new commission that takes the form of a mesmerising constellation of fifteen partially mirrored spheres suspended in GOMA’s central atrium space. Saraceno’s Drift engages the poetic and imaginative potential of air as its partially transparent, partially reflective orbs float above the viewer at different heights, some moving gently as if breathing.”

Echoing these sentiments, Jonathan Jones’ sprawling installation, untitled (giran), 2018, in collaboration with Dr Uncle Stan Grant Snr, appears to be in motion. At first glance, birds, mid-flight, transverse the gallery’s wall. Yet when the viewer comes closer, instead, the installation is composed of traditional handmade tools comprised of wood and feathers. The language of the Wiradjuri people of New South Wales to Kurilpa, on the Maiwar (Brisbane) River, swirls out loud with the sounds of wind, bird calls, and breath.

The exhibition includes a program of artist talks, discussions, pop-up performances, drop-in workshops, and iconic film screenings, which like the artworks, bring people together in an aim to link the body’s physicality with the immediate surrounding of air full of both resilience and emergency.

Emma-Kate Wilson is an art and design writer and editor based on Gumbaynggirr Country (Bellingen, New South Wales).

Gallery of Modern Art
26 November 2022 to 23 April 2023
Queensland