No Longer at Ease
The Life of Lines
Frontier Imaginaries has the scope, breadth of ideas, and ambition of a Biennale. This does not relate to the exhibition’s size per se (although it is unusual in that it spans two institutional venues in Brisbane), but more the breadth of its historical and geographical conceptual reach. The ‘frontier’ is a concept that curator Vivian Ziherl has pursued in her work for some years, and she expects to occupy at least another three, with further ‘editions’ to be exhibited in Jerusalem and the Netherlands in late 2016, and into 2017.
Her understanding of the term frontier extends beyond its dictionary definition (which spans the fairly prosaic ‘border’) to encompass ‘extreme limit’.1 The frontier has particular meaning that Ziherl identifies in the ‘new’ 19th century horizons of the United States (and the Wild West) and Australia, where the incoming white colonisers wreaked violence on lands, peoples, ecologies and existing cultural systems, such that devastating consequences continue. What is new is her extension of the frontier’s impact into economic relationships. She said, ‘The idea of the frontier can dramatise basically six hundred years of the development of cash/money relations, and what that has meant for the lives of people and ecologies in many places in the world’.2
Ziherl is Brisbane-born, but has pursued overseas curatorial interests in recent years. The opportunity to develop Frontier Imaginaries emerged from the Institute of Modern Art’s (IMA’s) Curatorial Fellowship (funded by the Australia Council) and allowed her to ‘bridge the spaces of my professional worlds'.3 There is a breadth of collaboration in this project, and the sharing of her own interests with the participating artists is one she acknowledges early. Its holistic ambition