Lynette Walworth

Discovering the Other National Palace Museum, Taipei, July 7 to August 19, 2007

Merilyn Fairskye briefly discusses her journey to Taipei where she took part in an exhibition of video installations Discovering the Other, the first ever contemporary art exhibition to be held at the National Palace Museum. Curator Gertjan Zuilhofs discription of this exhibition can be seen as a metaphor for his world view shadows, spirits and ghosts seemed to be everywhere, while at the same time the works engaged with the world of people and place, and the precarious struggle to maintain individual and cultural identities. Featured artists included: Deborah Stratman, Ella Raidel and Lin Hongjohn, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Merilyn Fairskye.

Experimenta Playground, an international biennial exhibition of media art, marks Experimentas 21-year commitment to innovation in both production and in promoting and exhibiting new media art throughout Australia and abroad. With artworks that engage with the creative possibilities emerging from a dynamic interaction between the moving image, art and new technologies, each artist in the exhibition creatively expands the definition of play, performance and ritual. Here the revelation of technology and spatial features create new ways of appreciating the construction of fantasy. Participating artists include : June Bum Park, Guillaume Reymond, Shu Lea Cheang, Hiraki Sawa and Tomoyuki Washio, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Madeleine Flynn, Tim Humphrey and Jesse Stevens, Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman, Philip Worthington, Gavin Sade, Priscilla Bracks and Matthew Dwyer, Stelarc, Marina Abramovic, Kuang-Yu Tsui, Eugenio Ampudia and Robert Hughes.

The Adelaide Film Festival (AFF) is an event that has always had an eye on technological innovation and evolution and it is a tenet of AFF to celebrate screen culture in all its genres and formats. This years AFF was the host of a suite of symposiums, exhibitions, thinktanks, and screenings that spotlight the popularity and possibilities of content outside the linear feature film. This article details three of these events in particular  Crossover, the Broadcast Summit and one focused on machinima. The evidence of AFFs Digital Media strategy, focusing on seminars that invite audience interaction and discussion, means that Adelaide audiences will be part of this exciting artistic and technological discussion.

Jasmin Stephens presents a personal recollection of this years Venice Biennale and documenta 12. As Stephens states, Venice reflected the worldwide trend of artists reappraising iconic moments from Conceptual Art from the early seventies and in so doing taking up the low-tech equipment associated with them. Artists here discussed are Aernout Milk, Willie Doherty, Paolo Canevari, Sophie Whettnall, Shaun Gladwell, Yang Zhenzhong, Emily PrinceSusan Norrie, Joshua Mosley and Tabaimo, Nedko Solakov, Mario Garcia, Felix Gmelin, Steve McQueen, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Ines Doujak, Lili Dujourie, Zofia Kulik, John McCracken, Harun Farocki and Artur Zmijewski.

The privately funded centre of the PHOENIX Halle, which grew out of a small media arts organization called HMKV (Hartware MedienKunstVerein), stands alone in a derelict steel mill in Dortmund, Germany. Established in 1996 by German curators Iris Dressler and Hans D. Christ, HMKV is dedicated to curatorial research and practice in the media arts field. HMKV and PHOENIX Halle are fundamentally exploring how artists create meaning and interpret the rapid states of change in our contemporary post-industrial society. Julianne Pierce briefly examines the work of HMKV and the PHOENIX Halle during her travels in Germany.

Historically, the relation between art institutions and film has been fraught with every imaginable problem and inequality. How to truly bring cinema and art into dialogue, to create real interpenetrations and hybrid forms that move well beyond the ephemeral fireworks of yesteryears between-images? Martin proposes that the gallery needs to take its filmic pedagogy outside its lecture rooms and onto the gallery and film works need to be fully valued in themselves  by curators, audiences and the entire, increasingly dominant promotional machine attached to our major galleries  for their history, their value, their power and (yes) their art.