The Fairfield Community Arts Network is a community - based organisation which aims to develop cultural awareness in Fairfield with particular emphasis on the multicultural nature of the area.
Ritual and ceremony enrich all aspects of Jewish life, its life cycle events and daily life. Jews give constant thanks for God's munificence - for the first fruits of the season, for the food on the daily table, for new clothing donned. Everything is inbued with significance and for all events there are rituals.
Written with Joseph Eisenberg. The National Association for the Visual Arts [NAVA] is currently sponsoring a project on 'Multiculturalism and the immigrant artist in Australian visual culture'. Part of the study focuses on the role of public galleries in appreciating, exhibiting, and acquiring the work of Australian artists from non- English speaking backgrounds [NESB].
...Underlying this linguistic fertility is a migrant intuition of the relativity of language, of the lightness and mutability of its phonology, inflections and syntax. Less portentously there is no migrant to this country who has not experienced those punning co-incidences, echoic repetitions, mutual misunderstandings and mishearings which are the basis of my scripts. It may be no accident that in 1992 Australian voices evoke first contact with the New World.
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.
This is a new notion for me. I'm sure it is a term familiar to most readers. However, just in case, this is my version of what it means. To understand it you need to appreciate that there is an hierarchical order of metals determined by their 'nobility'. A sacrifical anode is less a noble metal which is used to attract impurities away from more noble metals that you do not wish to be eroded. Thus if you wish to avoid erosion in your copper boiler, you can put a sacrificial anode in the water which will attract the impurities in the water and keep them away from your noble boiler. The link between multicultural artworkers and sacrificial anodes is entirely my own!
The way that I want to convey that meaning [racism] here is to use a small number of relatively random examples of current art/race = art/power debates from around the world. They give a flavour of the issues. They have obvious relevance to Australia's relationship to the rest of the world, as well as to relationships within Australia.
Hossein Valamanesh writes from Berlin hoping that this issue of Artlink will help in the understanding of the multicultural nature of Australian Culture and not assist in any way in making pigeon holes to safely classify the issue.
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.
Above all we need new myths to suit the new Australian culture which is part of the Asia Pacific region. We can't live by Aboriginal myths alone, as some have suggested, in a land so changed by our coming. The unpacking of cultural baggage by writers of all cultural groups, old and new, has to continue until it gives rise to a myth which we all recognise as fitting the Australia to which we have contributed. Wrote David Malouf.