경로를 재탐색합니다 UN/LEARNING AUSTRALIA

Co-curated by the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA), South Korea, and Artspace, Sydney 경로를 재탐색합니다 UN/LEARNING AUSTRALIA is an extensive display of Australian artistic practices, which gathers together works, not through discrete categories or trends, but as a web of positions that complicate how we might picture Australia – traversing topics of power, colonialism, racism, marginalisation, and cultural revitalisation.

Given national survey shows are often at the forefront of the art as cultural diplomacy model – showcasing, surveying, and value-signalling – this show embraces a transcultural exchange, while attempting to unsettle the idea of promoting cogent national narratives. 

Curated for the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of diplomatic relations between Australia and South Korea, the show’s curatorial process had to adapt to the global pandemic. Instead of trips to and within Australia, the curatorium for the show (including Gahee Park, Eugene Hannah Park, and Kani Kim from SeMA, and Alexie Glass-Kantor, Michelle Newton and Johanna Bear from Artspace) undertook “unlearning” exercises during their regular online meetings – a more durational and involved process than may have been elicited by travel. 

The title for the show was also a dialogic process – with no direct translation of unlearning in Korean, they eventually settled on 경로를 재탐색합니다 – which roughly translates back into English as re-routing or re-directing the course (a phrase used by GPS systems when you’ve taken a wrong turn). The analogy made me think of Soda Jerk’s epic anti-road-movie TERROR NULLIUS, 2018,  (included in the show) as a form of re-travelling the well-worn ground of the Australian cinematic cannon to explosively re-imagine it. Unlearning (or as Gahee Park has described the exhibitions concept, as the simultaneous processes of “learning, unlearning, and relearning”), might mean doubling back to move forward. 

Working on the wall texts for this show, I was struck by how much these ideas of re-visitation, re-imagining, and re-working came up – often trying to find words that would adequately describe the complex temporalities, criss-crossing of histories, and transhistorical and transcultural impulses that function in many artworks. This ranges from Brook Andrew’s collapsing of contemporary crises and catastrophe into the historical churn of the archive in works from the series This Year, 2020, Taloi Havini’s plotted cane sculptural forms reflecting on the ephemeral yet embedded nature of Häko architectural practices in Reclamation, 2019, Club Ate’s digitally rendered aquascapes that parse Filipino mythologies through intertwining queer histories in the film Ex Nilalang: from creature ~ from creation, 2017, and Leyla Stevens’s poetic resurfacing of the stories of Balinese female artists submerged within a museum collection in the film Patiwangi, the death of fragrance, 2021. 

Vanquisher of national mythologies par excellence, Richard Bell, will show the painting Prelude to a Trial (Bell’s Theorem), 2011, which bares the statement “Western art does not exist,” as well as his itinerant extension of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy – Embassy, 2013-ongoing. If with one hand Bell pokes at the phantasms of a Eurocentric art landscape enmeshed within legacies of settler-colonialism, with the other he exploits the tributaries of the art world for potent sites of on-going contestation and dialogue. It is this kind of double-motion the show attempts overall – an Australian survey show as a process of unlearning it must reinhabit the very myths it attempts to dispel.    

This essay was originally published in Artist Profile, Issue 57, 2021.

EXHIBITION
경로를 재탐색합니다
UN/LEARNING AUSTRALIA
14 December 2021 – 6 March 2022
Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul