While AIDS does indeed affect everyone in our society, at the moment in Australia we are seeing predominantly a gay and lesbian artistic response to the epidemic.
Exhibition review Perpetual Motion: Aboriginal Strategies for rejigging art and technology
Curated by David Kerr and Doreen Mellor
Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute, Adelaide South Australia 8 July - 14 August 1994
Nuclear conflagration - whether real or imagined - captivated the post war psyche. Endist images of one form or another were developed in response to what many foresaw as the likely outcome of a third world war.
The artist looks at the paintings which were developed for the Health Commission on education, prevention and caring in the AIDS environment. Using an Aboriginal perspective these paintings were produced as a powerful series of posters.
Across much of Aboriginal Australia the announcement of a death is followed by profound communal mourning, the removal or destruction of the deceased's belongings and most significantly a prohibition on the use of the deceased's name.
Exhibition review Familiarity? Re-examining Australian Suburbia
Mikala Dwyer, Michele Beevors, Glen Clarke, Elizabeth Woods, Tony Schwenson and Aleks Danko
Curated by Brian Parkes
Plimsoll Gallery, University of Tasmania
23 September - 16 October 1994
Looks at the exhibition 'Death' co-curated by Felicity Fenner and Anne Loxley held at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery in April 1993. 'Death' was a mixed media survey covering more than 200 years of Australian art which directly addressed the theme of death.
On 17 March 1993, the body of photographer Angelo Campana was discovered in the burnt out remains of the newly opened IEG Waste Recycling Plant in Corrimal. According to the coroner's report, his death had not been caused by this fire, but from fatal head injuries incurred by the deceased's head being repeatedly bashed with a theodolite. This is the immediate crime which is appears to be investigated in Dennis Del Favero's sleuthian compilation of words and images, objects and installations called 'Prima Facie'.
The cinema's ability to represent death - the act of dying, bodily transformations, decay, the corpse - in astonishing realistic terms helps to explain why film, the moving rather than the static image, has become the central depository of death narratives (ancient and modern) in contemporary culture.