Your middle c is not my middle c

The most vital contemporary art reflects the ever-shifting state of who we are, where we have come from, and what we want to talk about. The National 4: Australian Art Now is an exhibition of kaleidoscopic perspectives across four major Sydney institutions that addresses this moment in time. The National was initiated in 2017 as a series of biennial exhibitions presenting work made from and for an Australian context. (1) Since the third iteration in 2021, Australia crawled through two years of pandemic life. As much as we may want uncomfortable memories of COVID-19 restrictions and lockdowns to dissolve into recent history, the reality is that for many artists the last two years have been an isolating and difficult experience – not an ideal opportunity to disappear into the studio and make new work. In many cases, the other work artists relied upon (to pay for being an artist) all but disappeared. Exhibitions were cancelled, postponed, or closed upon opening. Borders were shut. While borders and doors are thankfully open again, the intense dislocation of the pandemic continues to reverberate in ways that we are only starting to talk about.

The National 4 in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ (AGNSW) historic building, and for the first time at the Brett Whiteley Studio in Surry Hills, presents several site-specific commissions and responses by artists that encourage new conversations about the architecture, history, and collections of our cultural institutions. The Art Gallery also presents works by artists that have been made over the last two years, or others belonging to series that may have been developed over several years. There is a strong element of self-identity explored through storytelling in the works selected: a multitude of voices and landscapes that unpick history as well as art history to encourage alternative viewpoints. There is a concentration of artists whose work refers to the role of women as practitioners, teachers, warriors, subjects, mothers, matriarchs, collaborators, and holders of knowledge. There are also moments of activism, transgression, and rupture, deliberate contraventions of message and materials in artistic practice.

In 1890, New South Wales Government Architect Walter Liberty Vernon was briefed to make his design for the new Art Gallery building ‘as strictly classical as possible,’ (2) and the vestibule space at the entrance to the Art Gallery reflects this brief. Consisting of two central bays with Ionic columns made from polished Kempsey marble, semi-glazed domes, niches for sculpture, and ornate tiled floors, the natural materials, symmetry, and craftsmanship of the vestibule command a quietening of the mind. In response to this space, Nabilah Nordin’s site-specific sculptural installation Corinthian Clump (2023) presents as the punk-rock cousin of classicism. The work draws from Nordin’s existing sculptural inventory and approach to making, which embraces a no-holds-barred takedown of the authority of formalism. The result is brightly coloured forms that appear precariously structured, a layered mix of elaborate rubble and parody, and a fitting transition from the gloom of lockdown and social isolation.

The expansive Kaldor Hall on the ground level of the original south building is a natural meeting place, and the entrance point for the Art Gallery’s collection in the historic Grand Courts and 20th century galleries. Occupying the southern wall of this Hall, interrupted only by the arched entrances to the Grand Courts, are 45 large-scale photographic prints from the Gurindji/Malngin/Mudpurra artist Brenda L. Croft’s series Naabami (thou shall/will see): Barangaroo (army of me) (2019–22). These are the faces of First Nations girls and women from New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, photographed by Croft using an historic wet plate collodion process previously employed by colonial ethnographic photographers documenting the First Nations people of this country. Croft’s army of contemporary female warriors cannot be avoided, their gaze extending over the Hall and commanding an enduring presence.

Works by Abdul Abdullah, Pierre Mukeba and Glen Mackie are also located in the Kaldor Hall and collectively propose a diversity of histories and peoples inherent to the makeup of this country. Five new paintings from Abdullah’s ongoing landscape and seascape series are shown outside the 20th century galleries. These painstakingly painted landscapes present rocks anthropomorphised with emoji-style faces or punchy lines of text, an act of branding with simple emotional cues that transmits tensions between traditional and contemporary, analog and digital, representation and reality. Abdullah’s works are informed by his firsthand experience of the racial prejudice and Islamophobia that infected our public discourse post-9/11, deeming him an outsider within his own country. He pushes us to address our own moral compass. As one painting clearly states, ‘HAVE A THINK ABOUT IT.’

Mukeba has created a large-scale, intensely drawn and hand-sewn work on calico that has been suspended like a bedsheet from a clothesline. Mukeba’s art is diaristic, confessional, and urgent. Born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, he moved through refugee camps in Zambia and Zimbabwe with his mother and sisters before they were granted asylum to Australia and settled in Adelaide in 2006. Spirituality is an important element of his practice – his mother is a pastor in a Christian church – and Mukeba’s faith integrates Congolese mystical beliefs and Christianity. For The National 4, he has taken inspiration from Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (c.1495–98), a High Renaissance masterpiece where Christ reveals to his apostles his knowledge of imminent betrayal. Having existed in perilous circumstances for a substantial period of his own life, Mukeba’s contemporary African take on this New Testament story sits firmly within his court, a raucous reflection on life in the face of an inevitable end.

The seafaring peoples of the Zenadth Kes/Torres Strait Islands have for millennia passed on their knowledge through song and story. In more recent decades, a new generation of artists including Mackie have taken to printmaking to depict the history and contemporary stories of the region. Birds, plants, and animals, the introduction of Christianity and the hazardous industry of pearl shelling, are mixed with personal accounts of ancestral totems and storylines. Mackie’s installation for The National 4 is a fascinating unfurling of his familial story. The protagonist is Edward ‘Yankee Ned’ Mosby, a Jewish–American sailor who deserted the American Civil War and settled in Zenadth Kes after marrying a local woman, Kudin. Together they raised four sons and a daughter, and Mosby became a prosperous owner of lugging ships used to gather pearl shell, trochus shell, and bêche-de-mer from the local waters. Mackie shares the rich layers of this story through intricate prints and sculptures that represent Yankee Ned’s seven pearl-shelling luggers and his family. Mackie is represented in the work by his totem, the hammerhead shark, and his own daughter is named after her Ancestral grandmother, a continuation of Kudin’s honour through art and life.

As we progress into the interior of the exhibition, works by Esther Stewart and Gerry Wedd encourage a closer reading of our local environments. The vernacular of Australian architecture and domestic interiors has been central to the work of Stewart for over a decade. For The National 4, Stewart has created one monumental painting, built from 12 separate panels, referencing a 1970s canary yellow and dark brown kitchen that the artist found and purchased through Facebook Marketplace. The paintings are hard-edged and modular, composed from a restricted palette and lexicon of forms, and they slide into a space once dominated by male painters including Frank Stella and Richard Diebenkorn. Stella’s painting in the collection of the Art Gallery, Khurasan Gate variation II (1970), an abstracted homage to Islamic art and architecture, was previously hung on the bulkhead where Stewart’s work is currently shown. Lyrical and tender, Stewart’s hand-rendered tiles, splashbacks, and cupboards affirm the validity of the interior as high art.