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IN SIGHT: New Works by Australian Artist Lisa Roet 

Wed 4 to Sun 22 Mar, 11am to 7pm 
The Annexe Central Market
Presented by the Australian High Commission 
Admission Free   

The Australian High Commission is proud to present In Sight, a solo art exhibition featuring new works by Australian artist Lisa Roet. Inspired by her lifelong interest in primates, Lisa’s neon and LED light sculptures, audio-video works and drawings address the demise of wild orangutan populations in Borneo. Also featured are a series of 10 portraits of orangutans that Lisa has worked with in zoos and laboratories over the past 15 years. This exhibition represents an exciting cross pollination between environmental awareness and contemporary art practices. In Sight is a sequel to two previous exhibitions held at the National Art Gallery in 2000 and 2001. 

Opening Speech by Angela Hijjas

Congratulations to Lisa for creating such a challenging exhibition on such a large scale that we are forced to look at urgent issues. We think these things are peripheral to our survival, but in reality they are too big to ignore, and too big for us to escape unscathed…  

In fact it is our own future that is predicted by the fate of primates.  If they go, so ultimately do we; that may sound melodramatic but not so…  if endangered mega-fauna are lost it demonstrates our ambivalence to the issues of the state of our world. The short rationale is that if we cannot act soon on the degrading environmental situation, our habitat will be destroyed, by our own action, or inaction. Climate change is the single most threatening environmental issue in the world today, and protecting existing forests, the homes of these animals, is an essential part of a solution to that huge problem.

Recent political and economic changes that have been forced upon us may indeed lead to a new beginning of an environmental resurgence, I hope so. Because now is the time to begin to rectify the damage we have caused with our market based economics… forests must be protected and rehabilitated, poaching and hunting must be stopped, priorities on economic growth must be superseded by repairing our own environment and assessing other values apart from GDP. Health care, poverty, environmental degradation, water and food security, cultural development and many more issues are more important, they add to quality of life rather than the amount of money we have in our pockets.

I hope that Malaysians will see this exhibition and question what our government is doing for the protection of these primates and our national heritage to ensure the long term survival of our mega biodiversity… Unfortunately procrastination and corruption in the political and administrative processes have meant that the Malaysian environment has paid an awful price over recent years: illegal logging, trafficking in wildlife, fragmentation of our remaining forests, over fishing, clearing of land for indiscriminate development and plantations, unrelenting land fill… the list goes on. We must put a stop somewhere, and now that prices of our commodities have dropped may be, must be, the time to start.

To me, these strong works raise all of these questions. I remember one of Lisa’s previous shows at the Malaysian National Gallery after her residency there in 2000… she had created huge drawings of the anatomical details of orang hutan, larger than life sized hands, each hair, wrinkle of skin and torn nail exquisitely rendered in charcoal, and surrounded by Lisa’s own finger prints… small smudges that put our similarities and differences into a unique perspective. These works too link our lives to theirs, each is an individual, and we are so closely related.

When family tends to define who we help and who we don’t, I think these works make it quite clear: we are their family, they are ours, and it is our responsibility to do something about their place in the world. 

Just this week at WWF, I saw photos of a female orang hutan and her baby stranded up a dead tree in a flood. Orang hutans don’t swim, and she had been there for a week, according to estate workers who had seen her and reported her predicament to the WWF project officers, who came to see what could be done.  A rope was tied from the shore to her tree, another one was about to be pulled to reinforce it, but she decided one was enough and quickly descended, gripped the rope as she entered the water and pulled herself and baby across. Her intelligence cannot be denied, and her predicament mirrors our own. We must find the will to save her and all endanged species, and in doing so we will save ourselves, because unfortunately for us, when our environment becomes uninhabitable there won’t be anyone around to throw us a line. 

Thanks and congratulations to Lisa Roet for this timely and challenging show. 

Angela Hijjas
Rimbun Dahan