The V&A Museum in London has mounted an exhibition titled "Rising Voices" that attempts to summarize three decades of the Asia Pacific Triennial, a vast survey of contemporary art from Asia, Australia, and the Pacific organized by Queensland Art Gallery. The show crams works from multiple continents, island nations, and Indigenous cultures into just three rooms, featuring bark cloth paintings from Papua New Guinea, Indigenous Australian abstracts, shark sculptures from the Torres Strait, and Tahitian textiles. Many works address colonialism, political oppression, and tyranny, with artists like Elisabet Kauage, Pala Pothupitiye, and Svay Ken using art as resistance. The exhibition includes pieces by Maryam Ayeen, Abbas Shahsavar, Lila Warrimou, Pennyrose Sosa, Aline Amaru, Brenda V Fajardo, and Heri Dono.
This exhibition matters because it highlights the challenge of representing the immense diversity of art from a vast region within a limited institutional space. The review criticizes the exhibition design for its dull, funeral-like lighting and a looping mournful piano ballad that discourages extended viewing. More fundamentally, the show raises questions about whether such a sprawling topic can be effectively condensed into a single small exhibition, with each segment—Pakistani miniature painting, Indigenous Australian photography, Papua New Guinean textiles—deserving its own dedicated show. The review underscores the tension between institutional ambition and the risk of superficial treatment when presenting art from multiple cultures under one roof.