TarraWarra Biennial 2023: ua usiusi faʻavaʻasavili

“the canoe obeys the wind.”

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ua usiusi faʻavaʻasavili is a Gagana Sāmoan proverb translating to “the canoe obeys the wind,” and is the curatorial theme of the current TarraWarra Biennial as it moves across the waters to reframe the relationships between Australia and archipelagos in south/southeast Asia and south/southwest Great Ocean. Curated by Dr Léuli Eshrāghi, TarraWarra Biennial 2023: ua usiusi faʻavaʻasavili provides a platform for fifteen carefully considered artists and collectives to explore a myriad of concepts that narrate experiences of The Great Ocean connecting Indigenous people across regions, evoking a neighbourly gesture between cultures and identities.

Influential to Eshrāghi’s concept, Māori-Australian artist Dr Kirsten Lyttle’s series taniwha (water monster), 2022–23, captures the sentiment of ua usiusi faʻavaʻasavili through the te reo Māori term taniwha. Lyttle uses found newspaper articles of reported taniwha sightings dating between 1886 and 2019 with photographs of “potential taniwha,” demonstrating the value in using ancient Indigenous culture to view and consider modern society, and Eshrāghi, on a grander scale, “demands that the dignity of streams, rivers, and oceans be restored and the deleterious effects of colonisations be addressed” – adding context of which to view all the works in the exhibition as a whole.

Also inspiring the concepts of sharing Indigenous knowledge through generations, Ngugi Quandamooka mother-daughter duo Sonja Carmichael and Elisa Jane Carmichael have crafted Ngumpi (Home), 2022–23, a large-scale installation (five-metres across and four-metres high) in the shape of a shelter. Here the duo explores their family’s spiritual connections to their ancestors, Country, the sea and land, created with driftwood that washes up on their island’s home of Minjerribah.

Continuing connection to Country, PERMEATE | mapping skin and tides of saturated resistance, 2023, from The Unbound Collective focuses on the effects of the increasing and irreversible salination of mangroves remaining in Kaurna Country/Adelaide; Jenna Lee’s large installation to gather, to nourish, to sustain, 2022–23, embodies the pages of Gulumerridjin language dictionaries compiled by colonisers into three dilly bags, with forty-five diamonds bearing verbs as images; and Wupun (Sun Mats), 2023, by Ngan’gikurunggurr and Marrithyel senior artist Regina Pilawuk Wilson features the iconic design taught across generations of her lineage in large-scale triptych and two weavings. Also, Vicki West explores the decline in health of Tasmania’s kalikina brayly (kelp forests) in a large-scale immersive sensory experience, kalikina brayly, 2023, reflecting on the importance of these to the survival of Tasmanian First Nations people and culture and her own continuation of ancestral practices.

Value Form, 2023, by Fijian-Australian artist Dr Torika Bolatagici, is a two-channel work that mediates on the experiences and judgement of Black athleticism through closeup footage of the artist’s daughters’ movements on a basketball court. Equally, Sancintya Mohini Simpson’s installation, An Ocean, 2023, uses sixty black clay lotas fired in sugarcane and sawdust, with audio soundscape, to chart the complexities of migration, matrilineal memory, and trauma as a descendant of Indian indentured labourers sent to work in South Africa. Both works introduce notions that allow for a reframing of history, culture, and identity.

Crafting new stories from cultures, in Leyla Stevens’ dance performative video work, GROH GROH (Rehearsal for Rangda), 2023, the artist narrates marginalised histories within Bali’s art canon through the story of Rangda and the deviant disciples of “leyaks” (witches). Equally, in Bhenji Ra’s Trade Routes, 2023, poetic choreography delves into an “accidental archival practice” that takes shape across multiple coastal regions worldwide. Captured from the stars, David Sequeria’s heartfelt wallpaper installation, You and I, we’re like diamonds in the sky (after Rihanna), 2023, features a series of framed miniature portraits of the artist and his partner Ben in turbans, first face-to-face, and then kissing, under their combined star signs, while Hoda Afshar’s Speak the Wind, 2023, explores the presence of wind deeply embedded in culture in the islands off the Southern coast of Iranian.

Finally, the works of Phuong Ngo, Remastered, 2023, Abdullah-Rahman Abdullah, Tanpa Sempadan, 2023, and Elyas Alavi, The Spirit Spring, 2023, all installations, to vastly different effects – explore, respectively, the white Australia policy and lingering attitudes to the “made in China” label; ancestral stories and how they feed through to today, while also embedding a life-long fear of crocodiles; and repurposed railway sleepers from The Ghan railway in Alice Springs with neon lights that explore the relationship between Afghan cameleers in Australia and their relationship with First Nations people. The neon script reads a line from a Rumi poem, “My soul heard something from yours; Since my heart drank from your spring.”

Eshrāghi concludes that these “artists demonstrate keen minds and talented hands, but most of all, critical care for communities, knowledges, and futures that are being made possible today, by sensitively delving into important concerns . . . This takes place within a wider context of transnational contestation in desperate need of sustained intersectional critique.”

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

TarraWarra Museum of Art
1 April to 16 July 2023
Melbourne