The first stage of “Edge of Elsewhere” was recently installed at Gallery 4a in downtown Sydney and in the Campbelltown Arts Centre, 60 kilometers to the west of the city center. Sited in the two gallery spaces, connection and continuity between the outlying Campbelltown and Sydney’s geographical and historical center are sought through a curatorial agenda that couriers international art to Sydney’s geographic periphery. As a fast growing municipality, Campbelltown is an oddity—geographically isolated, yet one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse in the region—and, thus, a natural choice as partner exhibition space for “Edge of Elsewhere”. The curatorium—Lisa Havilah of Campbelltown Arts Centre, Thomas Berghuis of the University of Sydney and Aaron Seeto of Gallery 4a—were careful to include a nationally and ethnically diverse group of artists. They were equally careful about media, steering away from traditional media such as painting and sculpture and selecting works whose contemporaneity was iterated by subject matter inasmuch as by the heavy emphasis on installation, video and performance work.

Where the show rambles in Gallery 4a, it is tightly and gorgeously installed in the Campbelltown Arts Centre, which houses most of the commissioned and new work. Entry is gained through a corridor created by two banks of television sets playing Khaled Sabsabi’s cacophonous, visually arresting video installation 99 (2010). The selection of antiquated monitors display unique scenes of violence and destruction each foregrounded by the same diaphanous, twirling white dress. An audio recording of the condensed sounds of ambulance sirens, Sufi madayih, or hymns, and women’s screams echoes throughout. The ninety-nine monitors recall the Islamic motif of the 99 most beautiful names of God, which have often been used as a metaphorical reference to the multifaceted nature of humanity. It is an installation of overwhelming disquiet that transports the viewer into a state of profound dislocation.

Richard Bell’s video, Broken English (2009), grapples with extreme, often permanent dislocation of indigenous history and land rights in contemporary Australia. The second video in a series of three works, Broken English delves into the “patrimonies that [white Australians] indulge in” to legitimate national histories. Engaging in a chess match rife with metaphorical undertones, Bell engages his chess partner in a discussion about Australian history punctuated by recorded interviews with indigenous and white publics that uses, “Do you think Australia was peacefully settled?” as its launch point. Bell receives a litany of answers from white Australians that indicate the affirmative and, from there, he plunges into frank discussion of racial politics in Australia. Problematic in its staging and editing, the work, nevertheless, vividly presents the gaping distance between political gestures toward equality and a harsher reality.

Beginning with the phrase, “the natives are restless” and its anagram, “As venereal theists rest,” Newell Harry, like Bell, engages colonial legacies. Rather than employ video, the Sydney-based artist appropriates the materials and motifs that reflect the cultural repositories of the racial, political and linguistic hybridities resulting from colonial migration. For “Edge of Elsewhere,” Harry installed the neon light wall text, the natives are restless/as venereal theists rest (2009), and several Tongan tapa gift mats patterned, alternatively, with Tongan coat of arms and the Tokolau Feletoa pattern depicting two tuna fish. The interaction between the luminous white neo and rich browns of the tapas created a richly textured environment that spoke to the hybridity of postcolonial communities.

Hostage (2008), Wang Jianwei’s video and four-part polystyrene installation, ponderously occupies the central gallery. Pipes reminiscent of the Centre Pompidou’s primary colored exterior extend from floor to ceiling in General Report, the largest of the four installation components, which consists of an amalgam of heavy industrial machinery. White goo overflows from General Report toward a red curtain behind which the artist has erected a vessel containing two astronauts, a note on China’s quest to become a leader in space exploration. The installation provides cartoonish tangibility to Wang’s portrayal of the farcical nature of ideological and political mass movements. This sentiment finds somber outlet in the accompanying video, which condenses eighty years of Chinese revolutionary history into a chorus of symbolic gestures,garments and objects. The theatricality of the production mimics the performativity of political revolution, casting a doubtful eye on the authenticity of mainstream ideology and political movements.

Indonesian artist Arahmaiani, like South Koreans YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES (YHCHI) and New Zealander Lisa Reihana, explores the contentious communal zones where identity is sustained through often intangible linkages. Arahmaiani’s epheremal Installation no. 1 (2010) explores the vicissitudes of identity through sculptural environment that blends sheer curtains, wall drawings, a slideshow of female faces and embroidered Javi script. The otherworldly calm in Arahmaiani’s installation contrasts markedly to the frenzied pace of YHCHI’s commissioned video, SYDNY 5000 (2010), a time-traveler’s experience in the dreamlike realms of cyberspace. In her photography series Digital Marae (2007-2009), Lisa Reihana explores the “ongoing physical interaction with the ancestral world” through the digital manipulation of Maori studio portraits to create fantastical scenes somewhere between the earthy and supernatural.

However, the problematics of border community representation emerge in the works of Brook Andrew and Kimsooja. In a new series of screen prints, Brook Andrew deconstructs the cultural manifestations of political and racial histories. Best known for his large-scale inflatables, one of which will be included in the Biennale of Sydney and at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation later this spring, Andrew’s new prints run afoul of the blatancy of the self-consciously political. How Did Obama Win Over White, Blue-Collar Levittown? (2009), a screen print bearing the same message across the pristine orderliness of a formal table place setting, reveals an insensitivity that projects racial binarism on a decidedly pluralist America and an obliviousness to the complexity of American electoral politics and to the very fact of Obama’s mixed race. These oversights are especially glaring for an artist who, as recently as 2008, spent significant time in the United States.

Kimsooja’s mesmerizing 4-channel video installation, Mumbai: A Laundry Field (2007-08), documents the rhythms of daily life in a Mumbai slum’s public laundry. Enraptured with the color and vibrancy of Mumbai’s peripheral communities, Kimsooja began documenting the city’s quotidian scenes in 2006. The resulting work fused her previous interest in the symbolic materiality of cloth and the meditative flow of urban space. Set to the staccato of trains moving over tracks, video projections reveal trolleys and three-wheeled carts rushing through decaying alleyways and laundresses beating saris in large concrete water tubs. Narrative rhythm arrives through the train’s steady clank and the laundresses’ activity. Mumbai: A Laundry Field presents a lush, aestheticized account of poverty, but also introduces the problematic of fetishisized representation of the developing world. Ultimately, though, problematic representations are subsumed by the meditative hum of ritualized daily activity.

Dacchi Dang similarly creates a contemplative space from the uncertainty of transience. A Vietnamese refugee now living in Australia, Dang’s work seizes upon the material vernacular of Vietnam and incorporates the memories and stories of migration. In PB565 (2009) installed at Gallery 4a, Dang has created a tarp from bulk rice bags and suspended it over an array of curled paper bark. The delicate installation speaks to fragile moments in transit and fleeting permanence of shelter during a refugee’s journey. Installed on the gallery’s second floor, its introspective poignancy was easily lost within the audio-visual din of surrounding video works.

Apart from Dang’s work, Gallery 4a largely exhibited earlier works from participating artists, which provided historical backdrop for the larger exhibition in Campbelltown. The gallery’s first floor contained photographs from Lisa Reihana’s 2009 photographic series Nga Hau e Wau and Young- Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ ARTIST’S STATEMENT NO. 45,730,944: THE PERFECT ARTISTIC WEB SITE (1999-2009), the artists’ first collaboration in text-based web art. On the gallery’s second floor, Wang Jianwei’s 2006 video Dodge, a pulsating journey through a surreal karaoke parlor, was installed opposite video documentation of Shigeyuki Kihara’s previous realizations of Talanoa: Walk the Talk. The collaborative work engages individuals and groups in the Samoan act of talanoa, or chatting, a communal dialogic process that seeks to redress conflicts between opposing groups. Kihara’s fifth Talanoa performance of a possible series of eight was realized as part of “Edge of Elsewhere” and Kihara invited members of Sydney’s Chinese and Pacific communities to Chinatown to discuss their common, shared histories. Video documentation of the performance was shown at Gallery 4a during the exhibition.

In an art world that, since the 1990s, has been increasingly mobile, rootless and diasporic, the emphasis on artistic processes that explore cultural margins runs the risk of seeming trite. But, in Australia, a nation slowly acknowledging a newfound domestic pluralism, examination of the national, ethnic and religious in-between assumes greater importance. By asking artists who occupy these border communities to (re)engage in localities in flux proposes an exciting curatorial framework with potential to challenge established curatorial forms in Australia.

The difficulty of this show, but perhaps also its intention, is that its strongest works are exhibited at the edge of elsewhere. Few Sydneysiders will overcome this geographical and psychological distance for an arts exhibition, particularly when distance is exacerbated by the city’s fickle public transportation system. But the argument can be made that the show is not for art world insiders and rather for the people and communities that, because of socioeconomic and geographic realities, are frequently excluded from art-going publics. As this seems the case, then the ongoing challenge for exhibition organizers remains an educational program that extends beyond exposure to new artistic languages and into cultivation of sustained interest and identification with those artists’ claiming representational agency over marginalized communities. As Lisa Havilah notes in her catalogue essay, “one of the most significant ideas of interest to artists in today’s changing environment is that of cultural distance … our sense of the world is shaped by myriad influences—the cacophony of ideas and information that contribute to the ongoing reshaping of our perception of contemporary life.” A cacophony of ideas is ushering forth from Campbelltown Arts Centre, but the din of geographic and discursive distance may render deaf the cultural ears located elsewhere.