Directors Aileen Burns and Johan Lundt add an antipodean twist to their global focus at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art, selecting Willem de Rooij and Fiona Tan to kick off the 2017 exhibition program. They promise “a year of both playful aesthetic adventures that push the limits of art, and careful critiques of the challenges facing us in these uncertain times”.
It is the first solo exhibition for de Rooij in the Asia-Pacific region. Tan’s Nellie, 2013, points up the interests she shares with de Rooij in colonialism, trade and the historic connections between Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. Tan was born in Indonesia (in 1966), grew up in Australia and currently lives in the Netherlands, from where she has built a strong international career.
Nellie (Cornelia van Rijn) emigrated to Jakarta (Batavia) from the Netherlands at the age of 15. Photographed in a luxurious historic house, and in elaborate period dress, Nellie becomes a strongly evocative image of a young woman. “It looks at the life of the one surviving child of Rembrandt and her journey to Indonesia [Fiona’s own place of origin]. There is a kind of mapping or similarity in her interests and the materials she uses of the colonial period,” says Burns.
Tan’s ongoing interests in history, identity, and memory are visible, yet her evocation of Indonesia also speaks to the current Australian psyche. Burns explains: “Indonesia is our close neighbour and is often portrayed with ambivalence in the media. Tan’s work draws on Indonesia’s long subjection to the European presence in the Asia-Pacific.”
Fiona Tan
Institute of Modern Art
1 April – 29 April
Trevor Vickers reflects on his six-decade career in hard-edged abstraction, the value that Perth’s light offers painters, and how his latest exhibition at Art Collective WA focuses on a series of quieter works.
In GHOSTLAND, her new exhibition at the ANU Art & Design Gallery, Julie Gough continues her lifelong inquiry into gaps and silences—while conjuring the apparitions that haunt Tasmania’s colonial past.
In The Rites of When, Angelica Mesiti considers the rituals that may mark the seasons in our burning planet. The Tank has been waiting for art like this.
Four Aboriginal women artists are arming themselves with culture and art, showing us the power of matriarchal bonds and sisterhood, in These Arms Hold at Incinerator Gallery.
The NGV’s Reimagining Birrarung: Design Concepts for 2070 invites eight leading Australian landscape architecture and design firms to reimagine the lands and waters of the Birrarung (Yarra River). View, in pictures, a vision for the future of our waterways.
Anador Walsh reviews Ivan Cheng’s performance exhibition NP at Monash University Museum of Art—a three-day project, made in collaboration with a group of Year 11 students, that explores the loss of childhood innocence and role of documentation in performance.
