Until We Meet Again – จนกว่าเราจะพบกันอีก is a dialogue between Helen Grace and Phaptawan Suwannakudt, charting shifts in gender roles across cultures – Australia, Thailand and Hong Kong – over a period of fifty years. Narrated through personal chronicles of historical moments, the exhibition traces their displacements through sounds, images, interwoven objects and experiences. The artists construct an extensive installation – sculpture, video installation and memory traces. Serendipity and synchronicity guide their real and imagined intersections as they explore the times and spaces that have shaped them. 

The artists have each lived through wars and motherhood – destruction and creation – and in their connection, they sense a kind of predestination to collaborate on the exhibition that embodies these intertwined journeys. The work draws partly on their spatial experiences and partly on the stories of these moments in their lives: world histories and regional histories, across Thailand, Australia, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Cambodia – places that opened to one another during this period, reorienting the world. A dream of borderless worlds comes into view, just before fear and darkness begin to obscure the openness they seek. This historical and panoramic narrative is realised through an expansive spatial composition – an arrangement of video screens and folding screens which are central elements in their shared artistic languages. 

This new work emerges through individual development and as a shared process of dialogue and exchange – including the circulation of images and translation – between the artists. The narratives touch on the influence of popular culture and the flows of time and water – the Chao Phraya, beside which Phaptawan was born in Bangkok Noi, and the aquaculture systems of Gunditjmara Country, where Helen was born. 

On Gunditjmara Country, the artists visited cultural landscapes, meeting with elders and encountering aspects of Country together for the first time. In this volcanic plain, where ancient aquaculture systems were engineered for eel trapping and crop cultivation over millennia, they were immediately struck by a geological feature – Mount Elephant, a scoria cone formed by a volcanic eruption more than 30,000 years ago. The elephant in the landscape speaks to those who live with it, although early European settlers failed to recognise the intricacy of Indigenous engineering – present all along, in plain sight.

Both artists have returned to the landscapes of their childhood, accompanied by one another – walking familiar paths and undertaking imagined water journeys to reimagine their origins. In Bangkok Noi and in Western Victoria, they reconnect with ancestors, landscapes, stories and dreams. This exhibition brings together the practices of two established senior women artists, allowing them to extend their work in new directions. A return to source is always the beginning of renewal.