BRAVE NEW WORLD, February 2021 Adelaide Fringe Festival
When The Main Gallery opened in Adelaide in November 2020, its stated aim was to provide a meeting place for artists from all walks of life and to bring the work of international artists to Adelaide. There is still hope that the artists themselves can make the journey in the near future but allowing people from different cultures to communicate with each other via images, sounds and stories can influence society by changing opinions, instilling values and transcending difference. Australia knows little of Turkish artists. Gallery director Ozlem Yeni is the first artist of Turkish origin to open a gallery in Australia.
Art has long been regarded as dangerous to the stability of a the world. 2,500 years ago Plato through his Republic sought to banish the mimetic arts from his notion of an ideal society, in that he recognised the distracting and destabilizing effects of art on its citizens. Whatever works of art might be, they had the potential in his mind to suggest or imagine realities different from what was promoted as real or natural by those holding power. Plato was far from alone in such a view and modern equivalents in communist China, Stalinist Russa and Nazi Germany all recognised the power of art and did their best to control it through Social Realism. Products of human creativity are products of imagination and imagination is dangerous.
Above the entrance to an exhibition in Paris in 2011 at the Centre Pompidou called The Promises of the Past was written the claim that the function of art was to make the world better – better than it might appear at present.
In many ways the current exhibition Brave New World seeks to distract from the reported or imagined reality of 2020 which seemed at times apocalyptic. doom-ridden and severely flawed and meet that function. In homage to the Aldous Huxley novel of 1932, the basket of eggs which makes up the image of the exhibition, suggests new beginnings and an untapped future. The pre-covid society, although by no means perfect, had the semblance of order and familiarity. A year down the track and the promise of stability through mass vaccination is not so much optimism as desperation. This exhibition delivers a note of hope through Art, creativity and the power of imagination.
The selection of work from the nine artists on view presents nine different versions of a better world. Ozlem Yeni, who curated the exhibition, has a painting/collage which is optimistic and fresh. The vibrant yellow stripe which links together the three panels of the triptych takes the viewer out of time and place into a personal experience of the moment and links to the eternity of life. As with all of her work, there is a philosophical underpinning.
Georgina Mills Desire for Desires is a figurative representation of discontent as the weight of the pose captures an intangible energy associated with dissatisfaction. The figures reaches into an unknown and undefined reality. It may be hope; it may be despair.
In the left hand window Steven Cybulka’s wooden construction piece disrupts the space in connecting through the glass into the street beyond. He said that his work explores the barriers created in the mind. In this context the glass is a barrier and even though the window was thoroughly cleaned prior to the opening, the best the audience can do is to imagine passing through it. On opening night people went out into the night to examine the work from the other side as it framed the human forms on the inside.
The four Turkish based artists come highly credentialled. Hayal Incedogan is represented in collections all over the world and her work uses an interdisciplinary approach of light, sound and photography. In the Shade of Time, plant forms, in particular the Echeveria cactus, represent the continuity of time as it blossoms once a year in semi-light desert conditions. The short film shows it breaking out in pink-yellow flowers as it ‘makes concessions to life and death’ and draws an analogy with human love.
Nevin Guven looks for ‘genuineness and authenticity’ in her paintings to bring a feeling of safety to the journey of life. The narrative images have a childlike naivety about them – the innocence of childhood that will keep at bay the ‘unbearable’.
The symbolic flash of yellow optimism also pervades the work of Olcay Ataseven as it contrasts with the greys of the painted composition. These small but powerful works have travelled far and as with all of the work, negotiated the vagaries of Australia Post – surely a sign of optimism in itself.
Of the Australian artists on show Elizabeth Wojciak applies paint intuitively with brushstrokes and colour concerning themselves with mood and contentment
Linda Lee draws from evocative memory to produce stylised imagery and strong colourful compositions. The surreal fantasy worlds are redolent of an alternate universe.
The danger of art comes from what we might call the inherent instability and slipperiness of what things mean —that an object or artifact can have different meanings and connotations in different times and places. Here we have artists coming together from opposite sides of the earth and presenting a coherent and varied message of hope. The danger of art to effect positive change and social advocacy comes from the porosity of the ideas and mediums. Art advocates and invokes and much as it does revoke the real and imagined world.
Here we have several sides of the same coin and yet you could also argue that what art creates may be a worse world — worse than it appears, or not at all what you would like it to be. Visual art rt is both amelioration, betterment, and creative construction as Brave New World clearly demonstrates.