Juan Davila: Queering the South

This article looks at the work of Brisbane-based artist Pat Hoffie and the way she flirts with acceptability in her quasi-ironic method of cultural exploitation. In her art the inevitability of cultural servitude to capital flowers into something more complex and generative, and demonstrates how the local can make its mark on global frameworks. Hoffie's technique shows a layering of activity within the field of contemporary art, broadening into a complex visual concept of cross-cultural dynamics. Her artworks include material that signifies its history of cultural exploitation and commercialisation. Artworks directly referenced here include: 'No such thing as a level playing field', 'Blackbirding Series', 'Avatars (The Committee)' and 'Madame Illuminate Crack's Pictorial Guide to the Universe'.

James Guert's recent show at the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide is described through this article to have induced an almost trance-like state  from the arrangement of the four square light boxes, depicting scenes from four sites of interception to the four large digital projections humming with visual and auditory stimuli. The focus of this text is on Guerts remarkable journey to the four corners of the globe. The corners are literally represented by smallish triangle objects of inner lit plastic photographed and composed to construct a full form of the globe. The way they are presented, as foreign objects in the landscape, raise questions about the way the west relates to the wider world. In the particular settings Guerts has used, all being sites on or near the sea, the corners are impositions, objects at odds with the surrounding environments. This is enforced as a reminder about the extent that the West continues to impose its will on even the most remote communities.

Sean Kelly reflects on the experience and the complexity of taking an exhibition initiated by Asialink called From an Island South of landscape work by Tasmanian artists, Bea Maddock, Richard Wastell, Julie Gough, David Stephenson, David Keeling, Philip Wolfhagen and Jonathan Kimberley with Jim Everett curated by Jane Stewart of the Devonport Gallery to Lahore in Pakistan. He found that the political side of the Tasmanian art and its use of traditional approaches to art combined with critical content had similarities with some art produced in Pakistan. He refers to the 2003-4 landmark show of contemporary Pakistan art seen in Playing with a loaded gun curated by Atteqa Ali.

Mamduh Waheed discusses the current state of the arts in the Maldives, a country for which the word art has no formal existence. Despite this fact, there is plenty of art to speak of. The opening of the countries National Art Gallery in 2005 saw the exhibition Maldives Contemporary 2005 which included a display of local and international art. Subsequent to this was the establishment of a National Centre for the Arts, which focused primarily on the facilitating of academic and technical education in the arts and crafts. This article also looks at the role of tourism and trade as avenues for art and discusses the role of a group of younger local artists Waheed has here termed the New Contemporaries.

Galeria Metropolitana is an independent and self-sustaining art space, allocated at a working class and semi-peripheral commune in the Southwest side of Santiago of Chile. Working primarily from a domestic space, the curatorial, production and management tasks carried out entail a radical challenge between art space managers, artists and neighbours or organisations. Galeria Metropolitana has become a kind of local 'institution of the alternative' and as a gallery project is considered unfinished, a permanent work in progress. The gallery is described as a self-reflexive space, not to be separated from its context, and works with art history (local-international), neighbourhood history and city history as its key concepts.

This article acts as a rough guide to recent art from South Africa. With galleries having multiplied during the early 2000s, the current state of contemporary art in South Africa is so that there are various major galleries, artist-run spaces, community arts centres, municipal galleries and museums and corporate collections helping to sow the seeds of what might in the near future become a more dynamic art circuit.

These two short pieces look at two Indigenous artistic collectives in Papua New Guinea and South Australia. The Omie people of the Oro Province in PNG and artists from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in remote South Australia and the events which have taken place to showcase their unique creations to the wider communities are briefly didcussed. Please visit www.holmesacourtgallery.com.au and www.betterworldarts.com.au for more information.