Footnotes

PROVENANCE
The Gene & Brian Sherman Collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED
Go East: The Gene & Brian Sherman Contemporary Asian Art Collection, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 14 May - 26 July 2015

LITERATURE
Go East: The Gene & Brian Sherman Contemporary Asian Art Collection, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2015, pp. 48-49, 229 (illus.), p. 227

SCAF allowed me greater freedom and more scope than the commercial Sherman Galleries – in that I was able to extend my reach into monumentally scaled and conceptually complex areas of visual practice. Deeply ingrained social injustices, textile innovation, urbanisation, issues relating to water resources and transformative architectural practices had always interested Brian and me, and exploring these ideas via the most talented artists and creatives in the Asia Pacific, guided my curatorial and grant allocation choices.

The Aquilizans' In-Habit: Project Another Country (22 June - 25 August, 2012), which toured to six regional venues with a related iteration in a major Japanese museum, remains amongst the three top projects of my 35 year art-focussed professional life.

A monumental cardboard house city, largely created by communities under the artists' guidance, flowed down from the heavy wooden rafters in the 350 square metre gallery space - suspended from structural beams and reflected in the mirroring reflective floors. Itinerant Badjao floating communities traversing the seas around Filipino islands, trading & living off fruits of the ocean, have in recent times been forced, due to increasingly strict border controls, to settle in shanty towns on the edges of land masses. Impoverished and stripped of their traditional floating homes, they, and especially their ethnically distinct children, are often reduced to busking and begging in order to survive.

In-Habit: Project Another Country had a profound impact on gallery visitors. Children and adults created astonishing new abodes from recycled cardboard, string, tape and popsicle sticks arranged on long workshop tables at the rear of the space - added daily to the already overcrowded cardboard township. Video monitors hidden in and amongst the informal dwellings screened semi naked smiling Badjao children - rapping their stories on drums and in voice.

The highly interactive work spoke to a world where diversity equals oppression, where borders decimate cultural practices and where children remain confined in cycles of poverty without educational opportunities or means of escape.

The two works offered in this auction capture the spirit of this nationally significant show and the artists' increasing stature on the international stage. Their participation in the 2003 Venice Biennale and the inclusion of their work in our national and state collections bear testimony to the importance of their practice.

Dr Gene Sherman