A moving composition

It’s hard to know where to start with this extraordinary complex offering at Contemporary Art Tasmania, but let’s make one point very clear – this is an essential visit for anyone interested in the vibrant edges of new – new what? What is this show? It’s certainly art, but more than that it’s something we rarely see in gallery spaces in Tasmania – it’s a new composition. Tomoko Momiyama is certainly a clever artist, but she’s also a composer, and what we find when we engage with this show is music. It’s really beautiful music too: It’s an interpretation of the voice of Momiyama’s adopted father speaking in the Ainu language of Japan.

Ainu is what we call now an endangered language, with few people alive now who might speak it with fluency.

Momiyama has a recording of her beloved adopted father, Tamotsu Nabesawa, speaking to the rocks and the trees in Ainu, and this precious and private recording was played to three musicians, Maggie Abraham (percussionist), Georgia Shine (cellist) and Joe Weller (trombonist).

Each musician worked with Momiyama to create an interpretation of the recording, and it’s this music and performance we eventually encounter.

Before that though, the artist gives us a story to read, displayed on the gallery wall, and there’s a video to take in of the work being done to make the music. We see each musician being instructed and beginning to work out what to play.

This documentary material is entrancing: it demonstrates the sharing and communicative effort that are so crucial to the artist’s work, and it feels as if we are seeing something very intimate, as if we are being invited into the process so that a different kind of understanding might be reached when the ultimate work is viewed.

I found myself understanding all this preliminary material as a kind of musical score that I was taking part in as preparation for hearing something that came from a space of huge personal significance to Momiyama.

I felt a small thrill when I entered the second room in the CAT gallery space, and there I encountered a sublime constructed video installation of the musicians playing and performing.

To put it mildly, this was quite an experience. The realisation is excellent, constructed with notable meticulousness and it’s evocative and successful. But more than that, it invited me to consider some rich and complex notions about how we understand language and voices and recordings of them, and how to listen to such things – in particular, precious recordings of people who have gone speaking in languages that are on the cusp of being gone as well.

We do not hear Momiyama’s father’s voice – instead we hear a musical interpretation that was created and recorded in the CAT gallery, as part of a respectful process that was overseen with a lot of love and care.

That it was created as part of a residency at CAT was important, as we experience this in the place it was made, and that has many implications for how we understand music and recording as things that people do, and how we treat these precious artefacts.

This is a very moving work that can be enjoyed for its beauty, but it’s also profoundly thoughtful. It’s also one of the best things I’ve seen so far in 2022, and is essentially unmissable.

Nadia Refai’s art is largely concerned with how she understands herself and her place in the world. It explores identity, culture and heritage in gentle and subtle ways that elevate small details into sharp view. In this simple and sweet exhibition, Refai shares intimate images from the gardens and backyards of her family – and they’re beautiful spaces, filled with evidence of activity and effort.

There are beautiful flowers, places to grow herbs, sunny and shady places where one may sit, and most importantly, people. Refai communicates the welcoming and nurturing nature of her grandparents and how she sees them, in their spaces, growing herbs or just being there. There are hints of memory suggested by the presence of empty chairs and doorways, but what really comes through is a feeling of connection. The things Refai loves most are clearly her family members, the times she has with them and what she has learnt about life and living from them. The images are constructed to be like the slipperiness of memory itself, where incidental things, like a white plastic chair, pictured below, become endowed with richness.

A Garden for the Things You Love.