Ali Kazim creates highly crafted works that experiment with painterly techniques to create atmospheric, dream-like qualities. In precise detail, Kazim captures the stillness of a deserted landscape or a sudden transformation as a storm tears through parched terrain. His paintings are based on the Punjab region of Pakistan – once home to a large part of the Indus Valley Civilisation and now scattered with ancient ruins.
Kazim is interested in the history of Pakistan’s landscapes and the ancient civilizations that once inhabited the region, particularly imagining the stories hidden in unexcavated remains, regularly visiting these ruins, studying the mounds that form the contours of the landscape, and searching the sites of long-abandoned cities, which are partly exposed or still buried.
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Mound in Punjab, Pakistan, 2018 / Photograph courtesy: Ali Kazim / View full image
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Mound in Punjab, Pakistan, 2018 / Photograph courtesy: Ali Kazim / View full image
Ali Kazim discusses his work
Ali Kazim, Pakistan b.1979 / Untitled (ruins series) 2018 / Watercolour pigments on paper / Four sheets: 206 x 456cm (overall) / Purchased 2018 with funds from the Contemporary Patrons through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Purchased 2018 with funds from the Contemporary Patrons through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Ali Kazim
Working in a range of techniques, styles and scales, he draws on a repertoire of techniques and materials to access these emotive surroundings and conjure the mysteries of forgotten cities. The large landscape is informed by Siyah Qalam, a fleetingly popular form of Persian painting influenced by the ink painting traditions of East Asia, whereby multiple layers of ink were applied with a fine brush.
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Ali Kazim, Pakistan b.1979 / Untitled (storm series) 2018 / Pigments on mylar / 32 x 42cm / Purchased 2018 with funds from the Contemporary Patrons through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Ali Kazim / View full image
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Ali Kazim, Pakistan b.1979 / Untitled (cloud series) 2018 / Pigments on mylar / 32 x 42cm / Purchased 2018 with funds from the Contemporary Patrons through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Ali Kazim / View full image
Kazim also creates atmospheric compositions on polyester film rendered in pigment with cotton or soft brushes, delicate paintings that capture a sudden moment of transformation as severe weather tears through parched terrain. Stencils and erasers are used to detail bolts of lightning, and storm and dust clouds, elements that momentarily bring the landscapes to life.
Kazim is also interested in how pottery shards have transformed over centuries from practical objects to remnants of deserted and forgotten places, and the blackened ceramics bear organic lines or veins to resemble both rocks and organs.
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Installation view Cloud Series 2018; Storm Series 2018; Lightning Series 2018; Ruin Series 2017. APT9, GOMA / View full image
APT9 has been assisted by our Founding Supporter Queensland Government and Principal Partner the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body, and the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments.
Featured image detail: Ali Kazim’s Untitled (ruins series) 2018
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Women’s Wealth is a collaboration between QAGOMA and three Buka women: co-curator Sana Balai and artists Taloi and Marilyn Havini. Inspiration for the project originated in these women’s shared dream.
Sana Balai, Independent Curator, Community Elder, and co-curator of the Women’s Wealth exhibition at ‘The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT9) gives a background to the art project that engages with the ongoing importance and richness of women’s creativity.
Sana Balai discusses the importance of Women’s Wealth
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Where are the women makers?
Observing art exhibitions over the past two decades, artists from Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands have been highly represented; however, the Autonomous Region of Bougainville and its neighbours in the Solomon Islands — Choiseul and Shortland — have had little or no representation at all. There is also a tendency for Melanesian art to be thought of as ‘art made by men’. Where are the women makers from the islands of the Solomon Sea? Women’s Wealth is one answer, and was born out of conversations involving Ruth McDougall, QAGOMA’s Curator of Pacific Art, artist Taloi Havini and me over the last five years. After 20 years working in the museum sector in Australia, I felt this project offered us an opportunity to draw attention to this largely overlooked region of the Asia Pacific. In effect, the Women’s Wealth project was a blank canvas.
Once the pride of the Pacific with its serene ocean views and picturesque landscapes, Bougainville has been almost completely destroyed by the Bougainville crisis. This recent history has significantly impacted the people in many ways, and they hold unspoken and painful secrets as a result. In this context, galleries and art centres are non-existent. Singing, dancing, carving, weaving and painting are practised, but ‘art’ is a Western word or concept that people are not familiar with; instead, ‘craft’ is the word widely used when referring to aesthetic expression.
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Research for Women’s Wealth started on Buka Island in April 2017. We were welcomed by the Hakö Women’s Collective and the Yumi Yet Bamboo Band from Lontis village. With guidance from teacher Marilyn Havini, we visited markets, met with artists and visited communities. We talked about the project, its focus on women, and its presentation in APT9. Our research then took us to the main island of Bougainville. We were visiting communities severely affected by the crisis, and we didn’t know what we would find. McDougall worked with the women, showed them images of artworks, and sat with them weaving, drawing and encouraging them to teach her Tok Pisin. I sat with the men, discussed cultural protocols and the importance of keeping our culture alive through art. McDougall and I emphasised the importance of protecting their cultural knowledge.
A similar trip to Taro Island on Choiseul in the Solomon Islands involved meeting artists both at the markets and through McDougall’s contacts from previous visits to Honiara. As part of this trip, nine artists from Bougainville, four from the Solomon Islands and four artists from Australia were selected to participate in a special workshop in Chabai. The Nazareth Rehabilitation Centre in Chabai plays an important role in Bougainville society, as it protects women and children affected by violence. The first day of the workshop was challenging: women didn’t know one another and language and self-confidence were proving barriers to participation. On the second day, everyone was excited, and by the fifth day, everyone asked: ‘Are we going back next week?’. Women shared materials, taught each other techniques and talked about their art and culture. As one artist shared with me:
We are not looking forward to next week because what we have worked out together is that here we are not wives, we are not mothers or grandmothers, we are just women doing what we love to do.
The Bougainville Women’s Wealth project began as a blank canvas, a canvas that is now filled with stories, both traditional and contemporary. It is proof of a living culture with a wealth of knowledge. The women of Bougainville are the holders of cultural knowledge; it is their wealth — this is their story.
Sana Balai, Co-curator Women’s Wealth
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The importance of women’s voices
Ruth McDougall, Curator of Pacific Art at QAGOMA highlights the inspiration for a project to develop understanding of the Bougainville and Solomon Islands region, and to provide Bougainville women with opportunities to engage in new creative conversations.
Women’s Wealth is a project highlighting the importance of women’s voices in the predominantly matrilineal societies of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville and the nearby provinces of the Solomon Islands. At the heart of the project is a belief in the capacity of art to both engage diverse audiences in new understandings, and contribute to sustainable and socially cohesive communities. Focusing on vibrant cultural practices, such as weaving, pottery and body adornment, Women’s Wealth celebrates the ways in which indigenous women create forms of great aesthetic and cultural significance, assert continuing connections to people and place, and transfer knowledge and maintain livelihoods, as well as affirm a sense of collective agency and authority.
Related: Women’s Wealth Interactive Tour
As part of this project, Bougainville women were reconnected with artists from the nearby Solomon Islands, with whom they share strong linguistic and cultural ties, but who are divided by political boundaries. A small, predominantly Indigenous, group of artists from Australia working in similar media were also invited to participate in the project. To launch Women’s Wealth, a group of 19 women from across these three regions came together for a ten-day workshop in September 2017.
As a result of this workshop, the artists produced a range of different artworks for APT9. Many artists asked members of their community to authorise the creation of specific cultural forms and to assist in finishing works...
Pannaphan Yodmanee visited her local Buddhist temple often as a child, and it was here, at the age of ten, that she learnt to paint. Buddhist shrines and temples in Thailand are places where art, religion, history and life intertwine. Ancient stories, histories and cosmologies are depicted on their inner walls and on murals in their grounds. As old paintings and murals decay, they are repainted and restored so narratives are preserved as towns and cities evolve.
Taught by a monk and extensively trained in traditional Buddhist painting techniques, Yodmanee has formed a deep understanding of the philosophies and cosmologies inherent in vernacular Buddhist art. Unencumbered by traditional conventions, she applies this knowledge in her work to reveal interactions between symbolic imagery and the world outside the sacred, and, in doing so, develops new social and artistic contexts to consider the significance of these narratives.
Related video: Artist Stories
Yodmanee’s dense installations are eruptions of materials and structures. Varying in size and texture, her works are composed of exposed structures and fields of detritus shrouded in small, vivid paintings and carefully layered wall treatments. Her installations resemble demolished urban sites, with stories composed along uneven surfaces and interspersed with miniature handmade objects. She creates storyboards of journeys and fables in landscapes of broken concrete and exposed girders. They are embedded with vivid temperas, gold pigments and mineral paints, and feature crumbling stupas and Buddhist icons that merge spirituality, the cosmos and local histories. The sprawling congregation of materials and images resembles a mural lying in ruin, with fragmented figures and motifs forming small chapters of a story that continues amidst the rubble.
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Watch the installation time-lapse
Yodmanee’s works are as much about material and structure as they are about spirituality and narrative, and are based around three elements: rocks and stones from the artist’s hometown representing the natural world, found objects and broken fragments of buildings slated for demolition, and miniatures of Buddhist icons created by the artist using experimental techniques. Along with illustrating Buddhist narratives, Yodmanee chronicles the formation of individual and regional identities, and explores South-East Asian histories of migration and conflict, and the destructive tensions within society.
The rough, industrial aesthetic of her work lies in stark contrast to the precise painting style Yodmanee was once taught in the quiet confines of her local temple, yet, somehow, harmony is achieved between the hard-edged, large-scale debris and the delicate paintings and sculptures scattered throughout. Her installations offer a new platform and contextualisation for Buddhist art and practice, a direction that has been influential in the development of contemporary art in Thailand since the early 1990s, as Thai artists have sought new possibilities to express faith in experimental forms of contemporary art.
Related: Pannaphan Yodmanee and ‘In the Aftermath’
In her use of urban materials, Pannaphan Yodmanee highlights the cycle of destruction and renewal in our contemporary world, which, in Thailand, parallels the pervading presence of Buddhist belief and custom with the continual development of cities. Her work conjures the power of faith to transcend the destructive forces inherent in modern development, and offers a place to engage with the constants of history and spirituality in an ever-changing environment.
Tarun Nagesh is Curator, Asian Art, QAGOMA
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QAGOMA Foundation
In 2019, as we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Foundation, Thai artist Pannaphan Yodmanee’s extraordinary work In the aftermath 2018, commissioned for ‘The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT9) is the subject of our 2019 Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) Foundation Appeal.
The Foundation, the Gallery’s vital fundraising body was established in 1979 and has raised more than $140 million, with generous support enabling the acquisition of more than 8,300 artworks, over 45 per cent of the State’s Collection.
The Foundation’s 40th anniversary is an opportunity to reflect on the generosity of the Gallery’s many supporters who have contributed over the past four decades. Find out more about the QAGOMA Foundation and the 2019 Foundation Appeal.
With your support, the 2019 QAGOMA Foundation Appeal will bring this significant work into the Collection. It will be a remarkable APT9 acquisition and addition to QAGOMA’s renowned collection of contemporary Asian and Pacific works, by one of the region’s rising stars.
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Read more about Pannaphan Yodmanee in The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art available online or in store. The publication represents an important and lasting document of the current artistic landscape of Australia, Asia and the Pacific.
Feature image detail: Pannaphan Yodmanee’s In the aftermath 2018
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