Neighbourly Knowing
Gallery Director of Noosa Regional Gallery Michael Brennan explores the benefits of discovering what the neighbours are up to.
Life is both easier and more enjoyable if you get along with your neighbours. I often stop to have a chat with mine over the back fence. They offer to lend me their garden tools or let me know when the kids have left the car’s interior light on. And it makes things less complicated when all doesn’t go to plan, like that time my noisy pool pump ran non-stop for the better part of a week (sorry Mike!).
We’re not all the same, of course, and we’ve all got different backgrounds and different things going on in our lives. But with a little effort, life is all the richer for getting to know and trying to understand those around us. And you never know when you might need to call on them for a favour, or they on you (although, now that I look at the list of interactions above, it’s not entirely clear what it is that I bring to this relationship).
The Asia Pacific Triennale (or APT, as it’s more commonly called), invites the neighbours over to our place to share what they’ve been up to. It’s been going on since 1993 and it’s now considered one of the standout contemporary art events in Australia. The APT takes over the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) every three years with a program of new and recent work by emerging and established artists and collectives from across our corner of the globe. And while the 10th staging of APT opens at QAGOMA in the first days of December this year, less than a week later, Noosa Regional Gallery has been granted the privilege of being the first venue on a multi-year tour that shares key works from the first nine iterations of APT at regional galleries across Queensland.
Asia Pacific Contemporary: Three Decades of APT, showcases art from Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Taiwan, Vanuatu and Vietnam. Surveying a vast and dynamic region, this exhibition takes us on a journey that reflects how our engagement with and understanding of contemporary art and culture in the region has grown and evolved. It dips into ideas and identities across a diversity of artforms, giving us projects and experiences that range from the ceremonial to the conceptual, and from the deeply personal to the cultural, political and social.
While this exhibition is on show at Noosa Regional Gallery, our neighbours closer to home – just up the road at the Butter Factory Art Centre in Cooroy – have the complimentary exhibition, Asia Pacific Video, bringing together some of the leading artists of the Asia Pacific region, showcasing video works spanning two decades from the QAGOMA Collection. You should get along and check that out too.
There you go Mike – a bit of useful advice that I can share with you. Just doing my bit to be a good neighbour.
