Edge of Elsewhere

Cultural diversity, transnational politics and the global diaspora are explored in the culmination of the three-year Edge of Elsewhere project. By Gina Fairley.

From Campbelltown to Haymarket and far beyond, Edge of Elsewhere is a three-year project that has engaged the diverse cultural mix of suburban Sydney. Conceived in partnership with the Sydney Festival, the project wraps up this year with 13 artists exhibiting across two venues, Campbelltown Arts Centre and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.

What makes Edge of Elsewhere unique is that the artists embed themselves within Sydney’s communities, building relationships to make new artworks exploring social dynamics. Traditional boundaries are changing faster than ever; for example, Pacific, Arabic, Chinese and urban Aboriginal communities have helped Campbelltown become the fastest growing region in Australia. The premise of the project is to explore how those ‘edges’ of impact can be drawn together through collaboration.

Specially commissioned for Edge of Elsewhere, internationally acclaimed art duo Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ contribution, THE SLICKEST LITTLE KOREAN SCUMBAG DOWN UNDER, perfectly articulates the larger project’s attention to the ways that our understanding of the local is affected by the vicissitudes of globalisation. Alerted to a Korean gentleman who immigrated to Australia with hopes of living as a golf professional – a story heard from a taxi driver in Korea – YHCHI embarked on a search for this man by engaging the help of residents in his local community of Campsie. Told in the artists’ trademark barrage of fully capitalised, blocky, Flash- animated text, the work is a fabulous flirtation between reality and fiction, played out amongst hilarious, almost dangerous cultural misunderstandings.

When we think of the word ‘edge’ it is not only that sense of sitting at the periphery but also the very notion of distance and translation. This project resituates this geographic ‘edge’ as the ‘centre’ (relative to the perspectives of those in its participant communities) and recognises it as an energised zone for the meeting and marrying ideas and cultures. According to Lisa Havilah, co-curator of the trilogy, “it is about contemporary intercultural diversity... it’s about rethinking the region”.

Edge of Elsewhere is genuine and ambitious in its vision and this year’s edition extends the foundations laid in the past two shows. 2011 Blake Prize recipient Khaled Sabsabi stunned audiences in the first edition of Edge of Elsewhere with his installation of televisions screening a Sufi dervish . He returns this year with an equally memorising project connecting members from the South West Sydney order of Naqshbandi Sufi, whom he worked with in 2010, with communities abroad, met while Sabsabi was on an extended residency in Lebanon and Syria. This new piece explores in film the overlay of learnt Sufi philosophies with social realities and geography, exploring ‘edge’ as a meeting place between traditions ancient and contemporary.

Sabsabi uses geography as an axis for drawing out dialogue. Filmmaker Jun Nguyen -Hatsushiba does the same. The artist will premiere the next instalment of his ongoing video project Breathing is Free: 12,756, titled for the distance of the earth’s diameter in kilometres, which he jogs as a running tally accumulated across various global cities.

In October 2011, the artist traced 80 kilometres in seven days, mapped as a circuit of Christmas Island overlaid on the physical footprint of Canberra, taking political, cultural, transitory and refugee issues to the seat of power. To complete this project, at 4A Ngyuen-Hatsushiba’s previous global running actions will also be screened.

Aaron Seeto, director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art says, “Edge of Elsewhere has generated interest internationally because it raises some of the important questions of our time – the confluence of traditional thinking, global politics, history, migration and diaspora. It has been an exciting and experimental period of reflection and production.”

Perhaps one of the more experimental works within this year’s project is Michel Tuffery’s performative social sculpture and its subsequent documentation. A contemporary New Zealand artist of Samoan, Cook Island and Tahitian heritage, he has used agricultural history in the region as a political metaphor that draws together young people from Campbelltown’s Pacific and Indigenous communities. Working with livestock in a kind of farming experiment – which took place in a transformed government housing estate property in Minto – this ephemeral piece is woven into a workshop and video documentary that aims to extend these youths’ horizons beyond their inherited socio-economic conditions.

Brook Andrew plays with similar ideas of casting history against the contemporary. Over the past two years he has developed a creative relationship with Hong Kong-based animation and film company Imagi Studios, a leading producer of CG-animated feature films. Showing at Campbelltown Arts Centre, the resulting animation - along with a suite of large-scale still images - explores the journey of an Aboriginal Boy named Banjo.

The threads – while disparate culturally – are easy to trace across Edge of Elsewhere. For example the tradition of storytelling is still deeply valued in many of the cultures the artists have worked with. Both Sydney-based Thai artist Phaptawan Suwannakudt and Indonesian artist FX Harsono use narrative as a foundation to encourage new dialogues. Of particular interest, FX Harsono has worked with a group of arts professionals and artists on a kind of content-generating curatorial platform, with the workshop itself feeding a program of public events.

Scattered across the venues – the majority of the artists are clustered at Campbelltown where those communities are sited – this project encourages us to physically engage with its themes and narrative by asking inner-suburbs art aficionados to leave the ‘centre’ and take the journey to the ‘edge’. And hopefully, in the process, take a fresh look at just how relative those concepts really are. 

Edge of Elsewhere is at the Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney, 15 January – 13 March and at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, 15 January – 12 March.