Frontier Imaginaries is a platform for commissioning artwork and writing, and for producing exhibitions and discursive events, that ask where the frontier might be today and how its historical iterations still shape contemporary experiences of place and belonging. The project was established by curator Vivian Ziherl through a year-long fellowship at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art (IMA). This publication is the first in a series and focuses on the outputs generated and questions raised by the first two exhibitions held under the banner of Frontier Imaginaries, which were held in Brisbane in 2016: The Life of Lines at the QUT Art Museum and No Longer at Ease at the IMA. Both exhibitions were also framed by exhibition design by Kevin O'Brien and Claire Humphrey's.
The Life of Lines homed in on geopolitical frontiers, boundaries that carve up the land itself to delineate ownership, to zone territory for limited use or belonging, and to create an outside. Participants in the exhibition were Megan Cope, DAAR, Demian DinéYazhi', Ho Rui An, Karrabing Film Collective, Helmut Newton, Tom Nicholson, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Sawangwongse Yawnghwe, and archival materials were sourced from the John Oxley Library and Shell Film Australia.
No Longer at Ease situated the Australian ideal of being 'relaxed and comfortable' amid the turbulence of our current era, and takes its title from the 1960 book by Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe. It takes a more abstract approach to the idea of the frontier, probing is psychological dimensions. The exhibition included new commissions by Alice Creischer, Gordon Hookey, Rachel O’Reilly (in collaboration with PA/LA/CE Architects Valle Medina and Benjamin Reynolds, and artist Rodrigo Hernandez), alongside works by Juan Davila, Demian DinéYazhi’, Bonita Ely, Ryan Presley, and Wendelien van Oldenborgh. These newly commissioned and loaned works were complemented by a curated selection of materials from the North Stradbroke Island Historical Museum that examine the Moreton Bay Oyster Company as a case at the intersection of environmental and labour histories.
In this publication, Ziherl lays the groundwork for Frontier Imaginaries, setting up her research trajectory for the coming years. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, whose writing and creative practice have been a significant touchstone in Ziherl’s thinking on the frontier as a concept rather than a place, has produced a text and three drawings that figure an elusive boundary in terms of sovereignty, the rhizome, and a less tangible ‘crumbling’ trace. In a very personal account of the experience of existence on the other side of what many Australians would identify as the frontier, Khadim Dai writes from his position as an Afghani Hazara asylum seeker displaced in Indonesia. For his family, Australia was the new frontier on the other side of a daily struggle for survival in a context of unbearable violence and loss, but it’s a future that they have yet to reach.
Two conversations, one between artist/writer/critic Rachel O’Reilly and artist/activist Tallara Gray, and the other between artist Gordon Hookey, historian Michael Aird, and Ziherl, give form and specific Queensland examples to the concepts of frontiers probed by the project as a whole. Hookey, Aird, and Ziherl focus on the Aboriginal experience and historicisation of colonisation, with its mutating frontiers, while O’Reilly and Gray discuss the contemporary conditions of fracking and activism as they relate and contract with historical modes of mining and strikes.
The frontier is at once an old concept that most readily calls to mind the settler-colonial stories of the Wild West and the triumphs of Empire that changed the world throughout the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries and one that resonates today through both the legacies of colonialism and current forms of exploitation and extraction. Through Frontier Imaginaries, Ziherl will test the definition and usefulness of the term, infusing it with the criticality and imaginations of the artists and thinkers who are drawn together by this expansive project.
Aileen Burns and Johan Lundh (Executive Directors, Institute of Modern Art), and Vanessa Van Ooyen (Senior Curator, QUT Art Museum)