In Confidence: Reorientations in Recent Art is an expansive group exhibition of artists from Australia and Asia whose work responds to particular geographies. Their projects affirm both the international and local realities that have been of interest to artists in this region for the past decade.
In Confidence is about transnationalism and grass-roots actions in art and the kind of genuine globalism that is particularly relevant on the West coast of Australia.
The exhibition brings together over 70 pieces by artists whose chosen modes and places of making reflect an eclectic and often ambiguous response to geography. In Confidence shows artists who are at ease collaborating with Javanese craftsmen or punk musicians or assisting in the Free East Timor Movement. The work of a Malaysian conceptual artist working with a film director is presented alongside that of a Western Australian Indigenous landscape painter living with a disability; whilst the video work of a Singaporean performance artist trained in Japan sits nearby the photographic work of an East Coast Indigenous artist who role-plays iconic modern art figures.
Although manifested differently by each artist, the quality shared by the work is confidence. The artists in this show all declare an optimistic mood as well as an energising impulse. It is the kind of positivity that can allow unique aesthetics to emerge and new cultural realities to be located. These reorientations are a consequence of the artists’ deep understanding of how such new realities are generated through truly cross cultural exchange.