Celebrate storytelling across generations with UQ’s latest exhibition
UQ Art Museum is one of Brisbane’s most celebrated sites for cultural mediation – boasting an extensive collection of classic and contemporary work. Its latest exhibition, How we remember tomorrow traverses different eras and perspectives to explore the stories and cultural practices that move across and beyond the ocean currents.
Atong Atem – Banksia, 2021. Courtesy of MARS and the artist.
On display from February 13 to June 15, the must-see showcase represents the fourth exhibition in Blue Assembly – the museum’s long-term research initiative on the life-sustaining power of our oceans.
How we remember tomorrow heroes embodied cultural understandings of the ocean found within the work of exhibited artists from the Majority World (countries where most of the world’s population lives, beyond Europe and its colonies,). By understanding selected artists’ relationship to oceans as ancestral archives, this exhibition is a fascinating journey into the continuation of stories, knowledge and cultural practices.
From sculpture to installation, the multi-medium collection platforms artists with lineages that span intertidal and lagoon zones across the Great Ocean – connected by water both literally and culturally. Water is celebrated as history – inhibiting and holding memory.
Shivanjani Lal – Aise Aise Hai (How we remember), 2023. Courtesy of the artist, Gadigal, NSW.
The artists featured in How we remember tomorrow offer vast understandings and depictions of water. In the work of the late Tongan and Fijian scholar, theorist and author Epeli Hauʻofa, titled ‘Our Sea of Islands,’ the author writes about Indigenous Great Ocean notions of time as circular rather than linear. Whilst in Shivanjani Lal’s artwork ‘Aise Aise Hai (how we remember)’ – the inspiration of the exhibition’s title – the Fijian-Australian artist creates a monument to the history of indentured labourers of and throughout the Great Ocean.
Teho Ropeyarn – Wintinganhu (sister-in-law) 2023. Photo: Zan Wimberley.
As part of Blue Assembly, the exhibition calls attention to the ways that artists submerge the colonial archive, giving rise to Indigenous technologies, knowledge, kinship constellations and planet-centred governance structures. How we remember tomorrow offers its audience a rewarding experience to reimagine water and reconnect with the power of our natural world.
Discover the exhibition from February 13 to June 15 and learn more via UQ Art Museum’s website.
This article was written in collaboration with our friends at UQ Art Museum.
