Selling Emily: confessions of a white advisor

TRAMA was initiated in Argentina in 2000 by a group of artists. Rather than look for certainties, TRAMA created a context to share and confront questions, experiences and ideas. This article quotes various key figures involved in the collaborative practice of TRAMA, which, in 2006 became a network of artist led initiatives, formed by: La Agencia (Buenos Aires), El Levante (Rosario), La Baulera (Tucumán), Tallerh (Córdoba) and VOX (Bahía Blanca). 

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.

Cobi Labuscagne attempts to define some of the current definitions of self in Africas effort to introduce its answers to the world. Labuscagne sets up two important benchmarks for examination in this text. The first being a framework within which Jonathan Jones of the recent international exhibition Africa Remix sets up some definitions of Africa, art and contemporary, which Labuscagne sees as largely problematic and in need of renegotiation. The second benchmark is based on a volume of essays by Johannesburg-based cultural critic and academic Sarah Nuttal, which look at conduits of beauty and ugliness and the continual interaction with art and aesthetics.

How does the south appear to itself and how might south appear on the southern stage? The sweep of the south is broad and there are many ways to cross it. Kevin Murray considers the role of nature as a host of shared references for people and cultures of the southern hemisphere as well as ideas concerning indigenous and diasporic solidarity. Murray makes the point that it is on the political stage where the south seems particularly vocal, especially in relation to economic relations between north and south. The flow of traffic between north and south is also discussed, taking into consideration the infiltrating of modernism into Australia via its northern source and the shifting patterns in positioning the exotic gaze that is normally directed south. Murray concludes that, at this stage, the south remains a rare platform that welcomes both indigenous and non-indigenous, both tribes and individuals.

Matthew Ngui is a Singaporean born, Australian artist who makes intriguing and engaging public artworks that embrace the history of a given site. Ngui is fascinated by the ways in which we interact with artworks and the individual nuances and understandings each person brings to the encounter. Ngui describes his work as often loose, and multifarious, sometimes tenuous and always fragile. Scale and ambition are other easily identifiable elements in Nguis practice, whether it be transforming a cityscape with lights or covering a Swiss Village in an avalanche of 350,000 bouncing balls, each emitting a light and a whispered message.

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.

The Video Archive project at the new Centro de Documentacion de las Artes is located on the once bombarded Chilean presidential palace grounds. The aim of the archive is to recover the history of the 'video arts' in Chile via the establishment of a dynamic and flexible platform intended to provoke new interpretations of the video medium. The task of collecting three decades of video footage from a time of social and economic critique and upheaval has been a laborious process. In addition to research, the Centre also receives material from artists who seek to add to the historical perspective of video as an accessible and common technology in current artistic practice. Key figures in the forging of Chile's video art scene included Juan Downey (1940-1992), the collective known as Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (CADA), the Escena de Avanzada (The Vanguard Scene) artists, Eugenio Dittborn, Carlos Leppe, Magali Meneses, Sybil Bintrup, Gonzalo Mezza, Carlos Altamirano, Alfredo Jaar, Victor Hugo Codocedo, Carlos Flores and Juan Enrique Forch.

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.

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'.