Artrave

Art Intrusions Shanghai
366 cultural events, one for every day of 2008, are happening somewhere in the city of Shanghai thanks to 'Intrude: Art & Life 366', an ambitious interdisciplinary cultural project organised by the Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art. It aims to intervene in the daily lives of the people of Shanghai with perspectives on art and culture to which they would otherwise not be exposed and in making the mundane spectacular give them some very unusual and rich cultural experiences. The first project was 'Lantern from Heaven', a media work by artist Gu Wenda. With the goals of one cultural headline a day, this is an enormously ambitious project master-minded by the Director of the Shanghai Zendai MoMA Shen Qibin. After attending a large number of biennales and museums around the world his thoughts turned to the grand look, feel and placement of the exhibits and how many people are excluded from enjoying them. In a very unusual move for an art museum, he decided to instigate this massive project, with all its implications, including a series of rolling calls for proposals from China and abroad, (100 Chinese and 266 international artists will participate), publishing a monthly bulletin on completed projects, planning for web archives and touring projects in other countries, and of course, putting on more staff.

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Hyperlexic, desalinated but not scary

Separate performance works by The Collective (Alana Hunt, Sylvia Schwenk, Ingrid Dernee, Megan Brewster, Susie Fraser, Anna Williams), Tony Schwensen and Zina Kaye confront the complexity of the interlinked flashpoints of oil, energy, human rights, global warming, rampant flows of predatory capital and the war on terror with notions of resistance and how individuals can act. Schwensen was at Artspace, The Collective in Trajectories of Dissent at Little Fish Gallery and Mori Gallery while Zina Kaye in a Terminus Project at Westfield Bondi Junction broadcast her own comments on the massive LED signs hanging in the atrium of the mall.

Ann Finegan

Rabih Mroué and Lina Saneh interview

Rabih Mrou and Lina Saneh are Lebanese performance artists. In their work called Whos Afraid of Representation?, currently touring Europe, they describe the work of over fifteen well-known performance artists from Chris Burden and Marina Abramovic to Stelarc and Rudolf Scwharzkogler whose violence occurs within the safe and sanctioned space of the art world. They contrast this symbolic violence with descriptions of violent murders in Beirut. The work draws attention to the way violent deaths in Beirut are as ephemeral as the newspapers they are reported in while the violence practiced by the performance artists becomes history and the artists gain authority.

Mireille Astore

Chance encounters: Pamela Kouwenhoven and Peter McKay

Two South Australian writers work with discarded materials to make strong commentaries on contemporary life. Pamela Kouwenhoven uses old empty plastic car battery cases to make Rosalie Gascoigne-like collages of faded colour and worn histories. Like her signature works using malthoid taken from beneath rainwater tanks, they have a strong environmental agenda, drawing attention to beauty as well as responsibility. Peter McKay makes playful works with serious messages. At night he makes patterns in oil stains on the road with glitter and photographs them. These works collapse the infinite into the accidental as galaxies appear on the ground.

Melinda Rankin

Replay: Christian Marclay

Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) Melbourrne 19 November 2007 - 2 February 2008

Dylan Rainforth

Obscure dimensions of conflict

Lyndell Brown and Charles Green travelled in early 2007 for five weeks to the Middle East, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf as the Australian War Memorials official war artists. The artists will make a series of oil paintings for the War Memorial from some of the many photos they took as well as developing a series of photos outside the official commission. The photos show an abstracted ruined world, shadows, machinery, stockpiles of weapons behind barbed wire, aircraft, campsites and deserts. The Ziggurat of Ur is evident in two photographs of Iraq and eloquently symbolises the rise and fall of cultures and armies across the land.

Warwick Heywood

Writing images with words: an inheritance of ambiguous faces

Beirut-based artist and writer Walid Salek's book of essays, called Jane-Loyse Tissier, deals with stereotyping in art. He is concerned with the way the Third World is often treated as a cliche of constant emergency and crisis and not as a subjective and historical space. His essays reinterpret some canonical works of Western art by artists like Titian, Courbet, Ensor, Giotto and David. His claim is that all pictures and all interpretations are contingent and thus in defending the Third World's right to its own interpretations based on its own values the entire world is being defended.

Bilal Khbeiz

Conducting Mobility

Artists thinking and making work about fuel span the globe and delve into a wide range of ramifications. UK-based PLATFORM have done a multi-pronged report called Unraveling the Carbon Web on four oil-producing hot spots, Iraq, Nigeria, Russia and the Caucasus. Chicago-based Laurie Palmers Notions of Expenditure solicits renderings of exercise equipment and gyms redesigned for the production of electricity. Brian Collier wanders the edges of Illinois highways to locate thriving non-human life forms. kanarinka documented her running of the official evacuation route out of Boston while collaborators Kim Stringfellow, Amy Balkin, Tim Halbur, Pond and Greenaction made an audio guide for a Californian highway drawing its military, residential and agricultural stories together.

Claude Willey

[the space in between] Book project

Curated by Tara Gilbee VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne 13 July -4 August 2007 Sidney Myer Work on Paper Gallery, Bendigo Art Gallery 15 March - 13 April 2008 Umbrella Studio Contemporary Arts 8 August - 14 September 2008

Simon Gregg

Robert MacPherson, Vernon Ah Kee and Jeremy Hynes

Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane 8 December 2007 - 2 February 2008

Timothy Morrell

Biennale of Sydney 2008: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Tracey Clement interviews Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, curator of the 2008 Biennale of Sydney, and finds out what she thinks about the Stendhal Syndrome, Biennale Syndrome and the politics of language.

Tracey Clement

Grant Dale Inflight Gallery, Hobart December 1-22 2007

Diana Klaosen

Wonderful World

Curator: Erica Green 12 October 7 December 2007 Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art

John Neylon

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