Not so long ago there was a small but wonderfully thoughtful exhibition at one of Brisbane’s youngest artist run initiatives, Level. Curated by local artist and Level co-director, Alice Lang, I’m Okay, You’re Okay featured work by three artists: Sanja Pahoki and Kate James from Melbourne and Sydney-based Agatha Gothe-Snape. The show took as its premise the notion of anxiety and its relationship to performance, productivity and creativity, with the artists ‘analysing its role in the creative process; drawing from and re-enacting its presence in everyday scenarios; and incorporating it as a tool to fuel labour-intensive processes’.1 Discreetly tucked up in the back exhibition space and distinctly lacking in spectacle, I’m Okay, You’re Okay characterised all that is best about Brisbane’s currently-flourishing ARI scene, providing both critical engagement with the work of early career artists and a platform for emerging curators and writers.
The first work encountered by the viewer was Croatian-born Sanja Pahoki’s The Test (2001), which explores the common fear (and one that is often exacerbated for non-native speakers) associated with the mispronunciation of words. A single-channel video comprised of short clips, The Test documents the struggle of Pahoki’s small cast as they attempt to pronounce words that we encounter in text but are rarely used in conversation. This exercise produced visual and audio evidence of performance anxiety as ‘almost everyone in the video either mispronounces or is not totally confident with the words that they are presented with’ and it also provided the soundtrack for the space.2 The curator’s decision to place this work on the gallery floor added to its already intimate framing; whilst Pahoki’s participants may have been brave enough to agree to this filming, the low positioning