“Air” is the second exhibition by Brisbane’s QAGOMA in a series – the first, “Water” opened at the beginning of 2020, when Australia was in terrible drought with devastating bushfires that were a daily reminder of the climate crisis. As it turned out, the smoke of those bushfires – and the way they turned the sky red and black – is also the subject of the next exhibition in the series, “Air”.
Air is ubiquitous, often invisible, able to burn and be polluted, and also vital to life and health. The theme is malleable, and also timely due to the Covid-19 pandemic that has dominated our lives since 2020. In the exhibition catalogue, curator Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow writes: “At this moment in history, we are sensitive to air as never before: alert to airborne threats and aware of our shared reliance on it as vital.”
Barlow divides the exhibition into five sections, expanding the meaning of air accordingly: Atmosphere, Shared, Burn, Invisible and Change. Part of the Atmosphere section, Tomás Saraceno’s Drift: A cosmic web of thermodynamic rhythms is an installation of giant silver and transparent balls dotted through the gallery’s main atrium that represents the air itself. Kirrihi Barlow says Saraceno asks us to: “imagine air as it encircles the globe, as a vast invisible highway connecting continents, and as molecules moving within our bodies and bloodstream.”
Saraceno’s companion piece, much smaller, that hangs on the walls beside the installation is We do not all breathe the same air, a framed series of dots on strips of paper. Each dot is the pollution in the air made visible via lighter or darker grey, separated into hours, one strip per day, one hanging per week. A potent reminder that the air we breathe is sometimes poisonous.
Also exploring the atmosphere, but this time through scent, is Katie Peterson’s work To Burn, Forest, Fire, which is made up of two small incense sticks, lit each morning. One is an imagining of what the earth’s first forest smelled like around 419 million years ago, including clay, fungi, fern and moss. The other is a speculation on what the earth’s last forest will smell like, including decaying vegetation, humidity and garlic vine. Peterson worked with scientists during lockdown to determine what each sent should be –to read more, go here.
And onto Burn. A series of photographs brings us back to the horrible reality of fires out of control – Rachel Mounsey’s ‘Mallacoota fires in the sky’ series from 2020 shows the sky in orange and black, capturing what happens when the landscape – and its air – burns. These shots are from Mallacoota in Victoria, when fires enveloped the town in the early hours of New Year’s Eve 2019. This bushfire was part of the super-fire which raged during Australia’s ‘Black Summer’ of 2019-2020, burning through 24 million hectares.
Also on the subject of burn is an incredibly powerful work Plume 20 by Pairrebeener artist Jemima Wyman. This work is pieced together from hundreds of separate clouds of smoke – images taken at protests around the world. Red flares, white smoke bombs and the yellow smog of tear gas combine to show the violence of protest, both from the political left and right, with photographs taken in Kyiv, New Delhi, Minneapolis, Hong Kong and elsewhere around the world.
A series of swirling objects evoke the the wind or a murmuration of starlings. This is untitled (giran) by Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi artist Jonathan Jones who worked in collaboration with Dr Uncle Stan Grant, who provided a soundscape in Wiradjuri language for the piece. Each item is a traditional tool made from a feather, collected with the help of the community, combined with other materials. There are six traditional tool types included: bagaay – an emu eggshell spoon; bindu-gaany – a freshwater mussel scraper; waybarra – a weaving start; bingal – a bone awl; dhala-ny – a wooden spear point; and galigal – a stone knife. The piece is a fascinating insight into Wiradjuri culture through objects used as part of daily life.
Harth © QAGOMA
For me, the works that made the most impact are those that teach me something, whether that’s something positive like untitled (giran) and the tools, or highlighting something wrong with our world like Plume 20 and the protests.
Other works in the latter category include Mona Hatoum’s Hotspot III, which shows a red world in ecological crisis, Yhonnie Scarce’s Cloud Chamber, where glass yams represent the ongoing health impacts of people in Woomera due to nuclear testing, and Thu Van Tran’s Rainbow Herbicides, in which rainbow colours represent Agent Orange and other chemical weapons deployed by the US during the Vietnam War.
In light of Covid-19 and the airborne nature of the virus, some previously existing works have taken on a new meaning, such as Ron Mueck’s In Bed, which features an oversized woman looking worried as she lies in bed. The scale of the work is astonishing, the attitude of the woman familiar and unsettling, and all the more meaningful now.
What “Air” shows is that QAGOMA is not afraid to go big – many of these works are oversized – and that it is not afraid to explore complex themes. As QAGOMA director Chris Saines said in his opening night speech: “These kinds of thematically driven exhibitions can seem quite abstract and esoteric. Until, of course, they’re not.”
More on Air at QAGOMA
Thank you to QAGOMA for flying me to Brisbane for the media launch and opening night of Air.