Some Other Place

ALEX CYRESZKO RYAN HICKEY MEHR JAVED ABDULLAH M.I. SYED LUPING ZENG

BLACKTOWN ARTS CENTRE

FOREWORD

SOME OTHER PL ACE 18 APRIL – 22 JUNE 2013

Blacktown Arts Centre is proud to present an exhibition by five contemporary artists living and working in Blacktown. Like many of Blacktown’s residents and workers, the artists have come from elsewhere and this experience of moving, relocating and seeking settlement has influenced them as people and as artists. Migrating from another continent, or across a city as diverse as Sydney, carries fragmented memories of places that are often re-imagined in a new place of settlement. The process of moving entails constant shifts in the perception of the self, events and places.

Reassembling memories of the real and the imagined from both past and present experiences are paradoxes which are expressed through the individual enquiries of the artists featured in this exhibition.

Some Other Place investigates the dynamics of migration and displacement, often in relation to the social, geographical and political circumstances that impact on experiences of different places. Alex Cyreszko, Mehr Javed, Abdullah M.I. Syed, Luping Zeng and Ryan Hickey originate from Poland, Pakistan, China and western Sydney. Their projects refer to and comment on the reconstruction and memory of these other places, which are simultaneously a physical place in the world, a media space and a mental place with a personal and social connection. The artworks are expressions or spaces of otherness that are neither here nor there, but instead emerge from these conflicting experiences into a ‘third space’. The works in Some Other Place achieve this partly by revisiting late modernist preoccupations with surface and materiality in art. (At the same time they contain an image within and are images in themselves.) But by drawing on personal experience of migration the artworks reveal some of the current conditions of dislocation.

Blacktown Arts Centre would like to thank all the artists for their commitment to the exhibition and the positive spirit with which they engaged with Some Other Place, and to David McNeill for his essay in this publication that contextualises the exhibition and provides a rationale for understanding the links between local and global experiences in western Sydney.

Paul Howard Curator Visual Arts

Blacktown Arts Centre 78 Flushcombe Rd, Blacktown NSW 2148 PO Box 63, Blacktown NSW 2148 T: (+612) 9839 6558 F: (+612) 9831 8730 E: artscentre@blacktown.nsw.gov.au www.artscentre.blacktown.nsw.gov.au Tuesday to Saturday 10am–5pm (closed public holidays) General admission free

SOME OTHER PL ACE DAVID MCNEILL CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART AND POLITICS UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES

THE LAST DECADE AND A HALF HAS WITNESSED A GRADUAL TRANSFORMATION WITHIN the Greater Sydney ‘cultural catchment’. The significant sites of contemporary artistic production and display have migrated steadily and implacably westward. As a result one is as likely to find relevant contemporary visual culture, both local and international, presented in Blacktown, Campbelltown, or Casula as in the Art Gallery of New South Wales or the Museum of Contemporary Art. The obvious explanation for this shifting centre of gravity is, in itself, inadequate. The westwardmoving population is, of course, relevant but we cannot necessarily assume a correlation between population density and contemporary art practice. Many populations and communities simply do not place a priority on the bundle of activities that we collect under the rubric of contemporary art. Issues such as family welfare, employment, sport or communal exchange and solidarity frequently relegate specialist or minority concerns to the sidelines. Whether we like to admit it or not, contemporary art is most commonly embraced by those with very particular predispositions and expectations. There are plenty of ways to register and communicate our responses to quotidian experience and contemporary art has to queue with its rivals.

Luping Zeng, The Third Element – “Earth” of Five Chinese Elements (PM Gillard Honours US War Dead), 2013

So, shifting demographic density is not, in isolation, sufficient to explain the ‘rise’ of the west.

Nor can this rise be thought of as the direct product of a conscious and energetic campaign to wrest control of ‘high end’ cultural capital from its traditional gatekeepers, most of whom are entrenched in the eastern suburbs. This would presuppose a systematic and conspiratorial project at odds with the often piecemeal and pragmatic desire to foster and expose locally relevant art on a case-by-case, project-by-project basis. As always, such transformations happen only as a result of the hard work of dedicated individuals who are able to imagine what a transformed cultural landscape might look like and what benefits might flow from it. In respect of the cultural battles waged on behalf of Western Sydney for the last decade or more there are many energetic and astute campaigners who deserve acknowledgement and recognition for putting in the hard yards for so many years. To name just a few, pretty much at random: the artist Guan Wei, who left China in the wake of the Tiananmen repression used his privileged position in the Australian art world to leverage exposure and support for local practitioners and institutions. His fellow countryman Ah Xian did the same, after his career took off somewhat later. Similarly, Khaled Sabsabi, an artist and musician with a Lebanese-Islamic background, has fought diplomatically and relentlessly for the recognition of local artists with so-called ‘Middle Eastern’ backgrounds.

It is significant that these artists and many others like them, served as advocates of a suburban cultural hub in Western Sydney while at the same time exhibiting and travelling abroad. That is to say, their perceptions formed at the intersection of local and the global concerns and they frequently (although not always) bypassed the need for brokerage or mediation from the established elites and institutions of the eastern suburbs.

Ryan Hickey, Panorama 1, 2013

Thus the groundwork for a secure and extensive contemporary art infrastructure in the west was laid well before the Global Financial Crisis decimated the ‘high end’ of art patronage in our downtown institutions. It also, therefore, predates the Occupy Movement and its exposure of the parasitic practices of the so-called ‘one percent’ – the speculative capitalists who, prior to the GFC, had endeavored to transform contemporary art into just another luxury good.

The economic downturn of 2008 did not in itself facilitate the transformation in cultural demographics that I have briefly described here, but in loosening the grip of eastern gatekeepers it encouraged a conceptual and literal westward artistic migration in search of, for example, cheaper studio space, less vigorously surveilled graffiti walls and low rent artist-run-spaces and lofts. As Marrickville becomes the new Glebe there is a corresponding and deeper nomadic westward drift of the kind of hip street culture that serves as the sea in which contemporary art swims. Or, more accurately, the pre-existing sub cultural enclaves in the west have intersected with their westbound counterparts and it is this new fluid connection that offers such fertile ground for relevant contemporary cultural practice.

Mehr Javed, Shell (detail), 2012

The exhibition Some Other Place offers us a kind of snapshot of contemporary art’s steady westward migration. All of the artists in the show have connections with Blacktown and while these are quite different connections in each case they all produce art that deals with mobility, global interconnectedness and what the anthropologist Victor Turner has described as ‘liminality’; defined as a productive state of transition or ‘in-between-ness’.

Turner contrasts this liminal condition, or communitas, with ‘community’ understood as an orderly and structured hierarchy of prestige and access to resources. Communitas is more fluid, more egalitarian and less predictable. Thus diasporic or migrant communities from quite different backgrounds and with quite different life experiences are, he would claim, more likely to find common cause precisely by virtue of their participation in multiple cultural arenas.

This understanding of fluidity does I think help us to understand the diversity of art practices represented in Some other Place. The works in this show, whether by the ‘native’ practitioners or by migrant artists all evidence a fascination with the possibilities of cultural ‘mash up’ or mixing, in the sense that a DJ might use the term. Thus works are produced not by a process of distillation or reduction but rather by an enforced co-habitation of the apparently dissimilar. When Luping Zeng drops Julia Gillard into a traditional Chinese brush painting (Guo Hua) it does something quite different than we have come to expect from postmodern pastiche.

Let me explain this clearly as I believe it is important. Following the rise of Postmodern practices in the late 1970s it has become commonplace to juxtapose two (or more) different art styles within the one work. In its original form this mixing of styles was intended to undermine the sovereignty and autonomy of the individual creative artist. However, historically it had quite the opposite effect. This process of pastiche or ‘palimpsest’ had itself become a stylistic marker in its own right by the middle of the 1980s and those most adept at finessing stylistic collisions had become global art stars. We can now see in retrospect that Postmodernism represented the last attempt by cultures of the North Atlantic to assert their hegemonic custodianship of contemporary art. Even a great postmodern painter such as Gerhard Richter, when painting a gestural abstract canvas by using the meticulous techniques of Soviet Social Realism, is still working from within a view of East and West refracted through the narrow close-focus lens of a Cold War perspective. Postmodernism remained to the end resolutely European-American in its choice of stylistic sources and thematics.

The artists in this show belong to a completely different era, they perform under a completely different dispensation. Luping Zeng’s work moves beyond the inward looking reflections of EuroAmerican ‘Pomo’ and instead forces a confrontation between the opportunistic ad hoc protocols of Australian politics and the ancient Taoist beliefs in a landscape imbued with ‘Chi’ or life force.

Guo Hua demands a facility honed and passed down over many centuries. It is a technique that is predicated on a slow history, or longue durée, that is predicated on vastly different worldview than the one that animates the constant requirement for spin, photo-ops and damage control so characteristic of Australian politics.

Mehr Javed, The Replenishing Zero, 2012

Ryan Hickey is a native westerner. He has spent a great deal of time travelling by train back and forth to the Blue Mountains and he has noted, with an artist’s forensic eye, the perverse richness of the trackside ‘wastelands’. Graffiti, waste dumps and guerilla vegetable patches all serve to enliven spaces that are paradigmatically liminal. These overlooked borderlands can tell us a great deal about the world in which we live, if only we know how to interrogate and interpret them.

They may reveal dreams, fantasies and desires that are progressively ‘squeezed out’ of an urban context increasingly policed and privatised by the voracious priorities of neoliberal governance.

Abdullah M I Syed and Mehr Javed both come originally from Pakistan. Their home state is currently one of the most demonised on earth. Located at the very epicentre of global tension, Pakistan is both courted and abused by powerful (and less powerful) nations that have little interest in the complex and deep philosophical and artistic history of a land that without moving, so often finds itself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Such origins must make it difficult to imagine a nation or a community that is not at the mercy of vast and unpredictable flows of planetary exchange. Syed and Javed both allude to the imposition of fear and uncertainty as a form of political control, and they both, in their own quite different ways, offer metaphors for resisting the stultifying effects of anxiety. Javed’s delicate lacework drawings exist as a fragile trace of her performing body. In her embossed urban landscapes she ‘dances the city’ much as a skater might traverse it.

Syed’s work is the most overtly political in the exhibition. He is a polymath who works as an artist, designer, teacher and curator. He has lived in many places and like Javed, he is ‘tuned in’ globally in a manner that most sedentary Australians could only envy. When he offers himself as a ‘soft target’ or aesthetically transforms (and therefore makes useless) that most brutal international language of all (money) he is directing our attention to both the causes and the symptoms of the eerie but pervasive sense of quotidian anxiety that has shadowed us through the opening moments of our new century.

Alex Cyresko originally hails from Poland, a state that has, like Pakistan, occupied a liminal status in Europe for as long as anyone can remember! Trampled by traversing or occupied armies for centuries Poland has been coopted, time and time again, as a site for the imperial dreams of outsiders. Cyresko meticulously examines the texture of these dreams in large elegiac photographs that revisit the birch forest, a traditional setting for both menacing fairy tales and mythologies of national identity.

Exhibitions such as Some Other Place suggest that it is Sydney’s western suburbs that most productively register the consequences of living in a world that becomes more enmeshed and interdependent day by day. Indeed the eastern seaboard can sometimes look, by comparison, sadly insular and provincial. It is unsurprising then, that some of the most engaging contemporary art is progressively abandoning the world of aging glitterati and is instead seeking the opportunity to test itself in more interesting cosmopolitan waters.

Abdullah M.I. Syed, Soft Target: One Minute Performance, Burj Al Arab, Jumeriah Beach, Dubai, 2012

Above: Abdullah M.I. Syed, Cha-r-ba-gh (Series: They See Neither Their Heads, Nor The Stones, Nor Even The Walls!) (detail), 2013 Right: Luping Zeng, The Fourth Element – “Metal” of Five Chinese Elements (Relationship of Barack and Julia), 2013

ALEX CYREZSKO Inlander is a conversation with the past. It represents an oral history and a landscape symbolic of Eastern Europe, of ancient Slavic tree-worshipping traditions, of Poland during and after the Second World War, and its effects on family and diaspora. During the 1930s, the borderlands between Poland and Russia was a place to play with siblings and tend bee hives. During the Second World War, my maternal grandfather, a Polish army officer and a ‘Black Uhlan’ of orthodox religion, would hide from the Partisans and from the Nazis, nursing a broken leg, an injury sustained when he kicked out the toilet window of a moving train bound for Siberia. He was later buried in the forest in an unmarked grave, and it is also a place where the family fled to when their home was burnt down towards the end of the war. In 1963 my father returned to the forest with his brother, not far from their family home, to look for their father’s burial ground but they did not find it.

The forest is an enigma that has lingered in my family history for decades if not centuries, a place of safety and a place of terror. It represents a memory and a connection to the landscape where my family come from: ‘some other place’. My artwork is an exploration into this landscape and the memories it evokes, both sinister and symbolic at the same time. The work represents a place where many tragedies were covered up and hidden but also a new place to investigate, evaluate and initiate a conversation.

Alex Cyrezsko, Inlander 1, 2013

Alex Cyrezsko, Inlander 2, 2013

RYAN HICKEY While growing up in western Sydney I have been inuenced by the sight of its development; the sporadic lengths of bushland being gradually replaced by houses, factories and other urban structures. Having spent years travelling between the city and the Blue Mountains, my recent work is inuenced by the urban landscape and the way that natural and man made features meet and interact in unusual places.

This is best seen in vacant areas of municipal land owned by local councils, which are often underappreciated as they are not entirely natural and so are not admired for their natural beauty. They exist outside the purpose and function of nearby buildings, leaving them as seen but largely forgotten. Within every square metre there is a composition of chance to be found and admired, which is formed by the result of the built and natural worlds being forced together.

Stretched, dried and mangled trees and grasses press up against tall, at surfaces of buildings, of concrete, steel and brick. Somehow they exist comfortably side by side. The possible tension between smooth, organic forms and hard-edged geometry is resolved here. My works for this exhibition seek to emulate and understand these areas, as well as to create another use for them as some of the materials have been collected from such places within Blacktown. Our attention is drawn to the value of both precision and imprecision and the necessary balance of control between a logical plan and unnoticed growth.

Ryan Hickey, Direct, 2013

MEHR JAVED My practice looks into exploratory drawing as a means to evoke the haptic, or the tactile, within the visual, allowing for a slow and contemplative viewing experience. I reference a geometric idiom in my works to create densely patterned surfaces that capture the tipping point between coherence and chaos. In my drawings and reliefs, I investigate the generative capacity of geometric motifs as metaphors for the inďŹ nitesimal and the inďŹ nite as explored through techniques of repetition, tessellation and seriality. The resulting over-all surfaces, or Patternscapes, are repositories of time that evoke a sense of implicit continuum. Referencing urban landscapes, structural motifs, and decorative facades, the drawings appear familiar, yet situate the viewer in a distended time-space.

My recent drawings are made by meticulously punching and perforating the paper surface with a needle. Collectively these masses of pinholes create a porous skin-like surface that is both visually tactile and weightless at the same time. In other works the use of gold leaf creates a dense, opulent skin over the paper surface. The reective quality of gold creates optical effects that allow for a momentary splicing of spaces as the image enfolds. In both cases, the resulting image is immersive, making the viewing experience slow, meditative and sensual.

Mehr Javed, Untitled, 2012

ABDULL AH M.I. SYED The three projects draw on an obsession with time and place, leading to the question of identity, its performativity, and its construction of many Others. In Orientalism Edward Said asserted that leaving one’s cultural home makes one ‘… able to judge it, and the whole world as well, with the spiritual detachment and the generosity necessary for true vision.’ In my works this ‘judgment’ and ‘true vision’ gradually reveals itself through ‘elsewhereness’, and in Foucault’s terms, a heterotopia (other-place) or liminal space. These are paradoxical spaces of otherness, which are neither here nor there, simultaneously physical and mental from which one is always – already – in exile.

As heterotopic sites, the works celebrate hybridity, pluralism and unrootedness. They question how space and place mediate subjectivity, as well as their political connection to the society that produced them. The identities in these works assume paradoxical roles: they are the masculinities of the glorious Persian, Mughal, Renaissance and contemporary man, all performed by the artist. The identities shift between times, spaces and hybrid settings; they move from public spaces such as gardens, streets or the ‘white cube’ gallery, to private places such as the privileged inner sanctum. The journeys of these travellers take them toward the centre, the inner circle of the mandala or target; in other words, toward themselves. They are waiting for themselves, ‘as a stranger’, to return home.

Abdullah M.I. Syed, A Balancing Act-I: Inner Sanctum, 2013

Abdullah M.I. Syed, A Balancing Act-I: Inner Sanctum, 2013

LUPING ZENG A Migrant’s Progress – Zeng in Australia explores differences in the cultural and social perspectives in China and Australia. My paintings use Chinese techniques that have become transformed and altered through my exposure to western techniques and culture. I use the Chinese Confucius Yin-Yang and Wu-Xing philosophy as a tool to explore both Chinese and western artistic influences, through the five elements: wood, earth, fire, metal and water. The result is my own personal philosophy of ‘non-philosophy’.

In Advanced Education, the two figures wear Chinese traditional dress – portraying the characters of Chinese Jin dynasty people with the essential characteristics of my new art philosophy combining originality, humour, different cultural viewpoints and sophisticated educational interpretation.

PM Gillard Honours US War Dead shows a Chinese traditional landscape with a layer of Australian Sky News in which Prime Minister Gillard pays tribute to America’s war dead in a Veterans’ Day ceremony that raises awareness of national territorial issues. In Bushfire Zone and NSW Hit by Heavy Storms the figuration of the Chinese traditional landscape uncovers media images of the Australian bushfire zone and severe regional flooding, making us aware of core ecological issues and our risky relationships with nature and sustainable lifestyles. Relationship of Barack and Julia expresses my concern with both human rights and regional security following President Obama’s speech to the Australian Parliament emphasising America’s determination to augment its attendance in the Asia-Pacific region.

Luping Zeng, The First Element – “Wood” of Five Chinese Elements (Advanced Education), 2013

Luping Zeng, The Second Element – “Fire” of Five Chinese Elements (Bushfire Zone), 2013

EXHIBITION ART WORKS ALEX CYRESZKO Inlander 1. Photographic emulsion and paint on pine wood, 2013.

12 parts, each 60 x 60 cm Inlander 2. Paint on pine wood, 2013. 80 x 240 cm RYAN HICKEY Panorama 1. Watercolour on paper, 2013. 85cm x 145cm x 4cm Panorama 2. Watercolour on paper, 2013. 85cm x 145cm x 4cm

Exhibition acknowledgments Thank you to all Blacktown Arts Centre and Arts & Cultural Development staff.

Additional thanks to staff from Community Development; Building Construction and Maintenance; Communication, Events and Industry Liaison; Corporate Finance; Environmental Sustainability; Governance and Property; the Depot and the Information Centre.

Alex Cyreszko would like to thank Natasha Scanlon, Ella, Max, August and Maisy Cyreszko, Boleslaw, Irena and Mark Cyreszko, Jason Burgman, Anne McDonald, Gayle Jackson, Daniel Palmer, Simon Gregg, Paul Howard, Vaughan Wozniak-O’Connor, Monir Rowshan, Glenwood High School, Blacktown City Council and Blacktown Arts Centre.

Direct. Brass, painted glass, timber, bark, 2013. 79cm x 90cm x 6cm Dissect. Steel, brass, mirror, branches collected around the Municipality of Blacktown, 2013. 1.2 m x 1.2 m MEHR JAVED The Replenishing Zero. Hand-perforated paper on lightbox, 2012.

135 x 135 cm The Replenishing Zero. Hand-perforated paper on lightbox, 2012.

135 x 135 cm Shell. Hand-perforated paper, 2012. 137 x 116 cm Untitled. Gold leaf and gouache on paper, 2012. 25 x 25 cm Untitled. Gold leaf and gouache on paper, 2011. 25 x 25 cm Untitled. Gold leaf and gouache on paper, 2011. 25 x 25 cm Untitled. Shell gold, gouache and graphite on paper, 2010. 25 x 25 cm Untitled (Concertina Artist Book I, II, III). Gold leaf and gouache on paper, with bound front and back covers, 2013. Variable dimensions ABDULLAH M.I. SYED A Balancing Act-I: Inner Sanctum. Acrylic ink, graphite, gold and silver gouache, ink stamps, needle tool and sandpaper on found target paper (Quadratic), 2013. Each panel 144 x 144 cm (framed) Cha-r-ba-gh (Series: They See Neither Their Heads, Nor The Stones, Nor Even The Walls!). Woodblock stamps, graphite, acrylic, 24-carat gold leaf and stone-pelting on altered wall and sound, 2013. 4 panels, 3.9 x 2.7m Soft Target: One Minute Performance, Burj Al Arab, Jumeriah Beach, Dubai.

UV Inkjet Print + DIASEC, Edition 1 of 6 + AP, 2012. 51 x 76 cm.

Image by Adeel-uz-Zafar Soft Target: One Minute Performance, Sky Tower, Victoria Street West, Auckland.

UV Inkjet Print + DIASEC, Edition 1 of 6 + AP, 2012. 51 x 76cm.

Image by Roohi S. Ahmed Soft Target: One Minute Performance, Opera House and Sydney Harbour Bridge, Mrs Macquarie’s Point at Sydney Harbour, Sydney. UV Inkjet Print + DIASEC, Edition 1 of 6+ AP, 2013. 76 x 51cm. Image by Ben Rak Soft Target: One Minute Performance, Doris’s crack ‘Shibboleth’ in Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London. UV Inkjet Print + DIASEC, Edition 1 of 6 + AP, 2011. 51 x 76cm. Image by Li Wenmin LUPING ZENG A Migrant’s Progress – Zeng in Australia Series: “Chinese Five Elements – Yin Yang and Wu Xing” The First Element – “Wood” of Five Chinese Elements (Advanced Education). Oil on canvas, 2013. 91 x 123 cm The Second Element – “Fire” of Five Chinese Elements (Bushfire Zone). Oil on canvas, 2013. 91 x 123 cm The Third Element – “Earth” of Five Chinese Elements (PM Gillard Honours US War Dead). Oil on canvas, 2013. 123 x 91 cm

Mehr Javed wishes to thank Blacktown Arts Centre and Blacktown City Council for providing the opportunity to exhibit her work, and the curatorial team for their consistent effort and attention to detail.

Abdullah M. I. Syed would like to acknowledge Paul Howard, Sophia Kouyoumdjian, Mike Esson, Fakeha and Sajid Ali, Bonita Ely, Vaughan Wozniak-O’Connor, Miranda Smith (Gallery 360), Jesse O’Neill, Roohi Ahmed, Adeel-uz-Zafar and Ben Rak. (Luping Zeng) This exhibition would not have been possible without the support of many people. I wish to express my gratitude to Curator, Paul Howard, who was abundantly helpful and offered invaluable assistance, support and guidance. Deepest gratitude is also due to my supervisor, Dr. Vaughan Rees and to Helen Farrell, whose knowledge and assistance on this research project was invaluable. Special thanks also to all the staff of Blacktown Arts Centre.

All works are courtesy and © the artists 2013

Blacktown Arts Centre / Blacktown City Council Manager Arts & Cultural Development/ Director Blacktown Arts Centre Cultural Planning Coordinator Visual Arts Curator Performing Arts Development Officer Project Officer Project Officer Project Officer Operations Coordinator Senior Administration Officer Administration Officer Administration Trainee Exhibition Installers

Publicity Graphic Designer Copy-Editor Photographer Operations & Building Works Printed by Innovative Print Solutions ISBN: 978-1-921482-38-0M

The Fourth Element – “Metal” of Five Chinese Elements (Relationship of Barack and Julia). Oil on canvas, 2013. 123 x 91 cm The Fifth Element – “Water” of Five Chinese Elements (NSW Hit by Heavy Storms). Oil on canvas, 2013. 91 x 123 cm

Abdullah M.I. Syed gratefully acknowledges the support of

Jenny Bisset Monir Rowshan Paul Howard Maria Mitar Sanki Tennakoon Paschal Daantos Berry Annette Tesoriero Miguel Olmo Erin Rackley Dayna Coyle Monique Muscat Lisa Sharkey Marius Jastkowiak Krisjoe Fuertes Bianca Devine Amanda Calleja Jesse O’Neill Jodie Polutele Jennifer Leahy Justin Attwater

Sky Tower, Victoria Street West, Auckland (detail), 2012

Back: Abdullah M.I. Syed, Soft Target: One Minute Performance,

Front: Alex Cyrezsko, Inlander 1 (detail), 2013