Cape 07

In this article Philip Batty, a former art teacher at the Aboriginal community of Papunya  offers some personal reflections on his involvements with the rise to fame of indigenous artist Emily Kngwarreye and other indigenous pieces and attempts to make sense of them. Batty discusses some of the problems associated with viewing these traditional works within the Western framework of modern art. He proceeds to offer some speculative answers as to how various political, economic, historical and aesthetic conventions transformed Aboriginal religious business into art. Batty uses the work of Emily Kngwarreye to exemplify how indigenous works can become merely a mirror image of European desires.

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.

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.

I have always felt a deep fascination during the contemplation of what we call nature, its circular logic, its monumentality, its disorderly perfection - Ortega Through this text Leonardo Ortega documents his travels through the Australian desert  where he lived out his curiosities about the Aboriginies who inhabit the lands, with their political and social situation becoming the central subject for his video-installation INDOMITE exhibited in Melbourne in 2006. This project continues on from Ortega's previous artwork The Ralco Model exhibited at Galeria Metropolitana, Santiago. As Oretega explains of the intention of these works and his practice at large I try to document diverse human subjectivities in a world that tends to homogenise those experiences. I try to rescue difference in a time when equality has stopped being a real humanistic value.

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.

Tom Nicholson is led by Galeria Metropolitana's co-director Luis Alarcon through an area of Santiago, which exists for the most part as a wasteland brought down during Pinoche's dictatorship. In one of the neighbouring suburbs, La Victoria, Nicholson learns of some of the area's history - being inhabited by landless people in 1957 - and of the commemorative action that takes place annually to mark this occupation. In accordance with these activities, Galeria Metropolitana held an event which featured the work of Aotearoan/New Zealand artist Daniel Malone and which brought attention to the different - and often conflicting - claims to truth with which words and images articulate experiences and aspirations.

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'.