American artist Barbara Kruger (b.1945) has exhibited in Australia (including a solo exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, in 2005–2006), but encountering her work remains a rare treat on our shores. For decades, beginning well before the advent of social media, her prescient use of words and text has invited people to consider their context in contemporary society.

In Brisbane, between 4–7 September, audiences may experience her concise, dynamic aesthetic within the internationally acclaimed Gems delivered by choreographer Benjamin Millepied and the L.A. Dance Project. Gems is a rewritten compilation of three dance works. Its first chapter is Reflections, developed in 2013 when Barbara Kruger was invited to collaborate with Millepied on the sets and the costumes. Millepied’s contemporary interpretation of George Balanchine’s Jewels (1967) has been, since then, an ambitious and changing program. For the first time, the three contemporary ballet works by Millepied—Reflections, Hearts & Arrows, and On the Other Side (each of which respond to Balanchine’s Rubies, Emeralds and Diamonds)—are presented together at the Brisbane Festival. This world premiere is exclusive to Brisbane.

Kruger told me that she was thrilled to know that Reflections will be seen in Brisbane. She said, “I can’t believe that it’s so many years ago, in 2013, when I was invited to collaborate. Benjamin and I were both living in Los Angeles, and the [L.A.] Dance Project is an incredibly vital project. As the years go by, I’ve seen the change in the dancers and the troupe; it evolves. I was there at the first rehearsals, and all the run throughs. It was a great opportunity for me to work with the sets and the dancers.”

In 2017 another iteration was developed for Paris as Reflections Redux, using film and holograms to immerse the viewer within the Kruger ‘scenography’. “That was really thrilling to me; I started doing video in 2009 and it has been very much in my work since then.” Video is also central to Kruger’s major exhibition THINKING OF YOU. I MEAN ME. I MEAN YOU shown at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021–2022 (which has subsequently toured to the US and Europe), and Another day. Another night, her major show currently on view at the Guggenheim Bilbao. For Kruger, given the engagement of her work with architecture and its relationship with the human body, Millepied’s dance project offered “an opportunity for me to enlarge those areas with actual professional dancers and moving bodies, rather than the spectators you have in an institution”.

Her process toward the development of the set—in ruby red and white, featuring the words ‘STAY’ on the back wall at a scale that dwarfs the dancers, and ‘THINK OF ME THINKING OF YOU’ on the floor—reflects the emotional and empathetic journey Millepied intends for the audience. Its meaning and a sense of longing is expressed “through gesture and the bodies, mingling and separating. I thought of notions of seduction and notions of welcoming, and notions of rejection and how the body moves through those different rhythms and different emotive states. I tried to work with text that I thought embodied the contradictions that are happening when people try to deal with one another, whether through contempt or adoration or anything in between.”

The costumes—in black and white, and with a simple pattern of squares—were intended to be unobtrusive. “They allow a focus on the dancers themselves and their movement, and how that movement could be multiplied or diminished through how the bodies were adorned – with a different level of visuality than the backdrops and the floor.”

Kruger’s practice harnesses a critique that has for decades empowered feminism, an anti-consumption ethic and, most recently, sought to support populations under duress. This year she wrapped a passenger train in Ukraine with a poem, including the text “Another day another night another darkness another light”—which evokes the resilience of the Ukraine people. For Kruger, “To be invited to do a project like that just meant the world to me. It’s an intercity railroad and people use it widely; it’s so much a part of everyday lives.”

When I ask Kruger what she believes art may achieve at this time of global instability, she makes no grand claims. “But I believe cultural works are important, and the commentary they create—whether it’s visual practice or a novel or a piece of music—has a way of communicating to people what it means to be alive, to live another life, to live another day. These have different means to those that the concentrations of force and capital take for granted. There is a meaning there, and hopefully my work and that of my colleagues has been part of that, a commentary about what it means to be alive, albeit not literally or diaristically. It has that power.”

With social media and technologies shrinking the average attention span, Kruger’s art practice has only grown in relevance, with her message resisting institutional power. Her early training working in magazines created her understanding of an “economy of address. I’ve tried to be very rigorous around my reality testing, like what kind of meaning is being made? How are people making that meaning in response to the images and words… I try to be conscious of the possibilities of that.”

Her pitch is unerring. I looked her up on Instagram—18,300 followers, and a single post—an image of fingers gripping a phone, and on the screen: “iPhone therefore I am”.

For Brisbane audiences Kruger’s work is a dramatic foil amid what the artist describes as “extraordinary dancers”. Together they convey an understanding of the emotive energy associated with gemstones, likely to move and release audiences, for a while anyway, from current uncertainties.

GEMS
L.A. Dance Project and Benjamin Millepied
Brisbane Festival
QPAC Playhouse, South Bank
4—7 September

Barbara Kruger: Another day. Another night
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain
Until 09 November