Palimpsest...Vision of a multicultural Australia. An exhibition co-ordinated by the Multicultural Arts Trust of South Australia, December 1990 Chesser Gallery Adelaide. Great colour photos.
The three storey facility looks incongruous in the ramshackle Aboriginal settlement of Ramingining which crouches along a dirt road in an Arnhem Land eucalypt forest 550 km east of Darwin in the Northern Territory. Photos of people in Ramingining.
Looks at the art practice of four artists in Western Australia - Patrizia Tonello, Alex Spremberg, Cathy Cinanni and Karl Wiebke. Illustrations of their independent works included.
At times, life feels like a collection of unrelated events, a necklace without the string. Christl Berg writes of her experiences of leaving Germany when she was 25 and having lived in three different continents with three different cultures at varied stages in her life.
It is the responsibility of Australian Collections to preserve this material - correspondence and manuscripts as well as printed texts - in many languages, not as exotic flowers of 'accented' literature, but as integral parts of the history and literature of multicultural Australia.
The Australian National Gallery's library has just completed a project which documented ethnic and immigrant objects in about 750 photographs. The bulk of these photographs show textile and ceramic craft brought with immigrants to Australia or made in Australia following traditional methods and designs. Nearly 20 ethnic groups from Europe, the Middle East and Asia are represented. Photos of textiles included.
How much marketability is immanent in the artist's cultural background is a matter of delicate negotiation between dealer and client. Just now, it may appear to some artists an unfortunate fact that for them, Aboriginality is not an option.
It is fair to say that the development of multicultural arts and the recognition of cultural diversity in Queensland is still in its early stages. Photos (6) of an event at the Cafe Folkloric.
Does anyone have their right to represent stories and cultural background not their own? Does anyone have the responsibility to do so? No, I don't think so.....