Human Rights - Search

Sublime Plight: Richard Mosse, Ai Weiwei and the social turn

Wes Hill

Editorial: Human flow

Eve Sullivan

Inhuman flow: Censorship and art in the two Chinas

Darren Jorgensen and Tami Xiang

Living and dying under surveillance: Xu Bing's Dragonfly Eyes

Sasha Grbich

Human flow in Melanesia: Taloi Havini's artefacts and habitats

Nicholas Thomas

Foreign returned: Between expatriate and repatriate in Mumbai

Balamohan Shingade

Alana Hunt with Sanjay Kak: A conversation about Kashmir

Alana Hunt and Sanjay Kak

Global flows in Ruth Watson's Geophagy

Bruce E. Phillips

Juilee Pryor: The Army of Unrequited Dreams

Ann Finegan

Ryoji Ikeda: The aesthetics of data flow

Daniel Palmer

Fragmentation and complexity in Crossings by Wei Leng Tay

Roger Nelson

The Hard Work

Michael Keighery, current Chair of Viscopy and past chair of NAVA and the Crafts Council of Australia reviews the apathy and ignorance of artist about their industrial, copyright and taxation rights. He draws attention to the hard worn, by NAVA and Artslaw, ruling by the Tax Office in 2005 that all kinds of artists can now claim their art business expenses against all forms of income.

Michael Keighery

The Work of Art

Art theorist and Emeritus Professor of Visual Arts, Flinders University, Donald Brook examines the art world and its strange ways. Art, he says, is not craft nor the consequence of any exercise of skill at all but the artworld is infallible in identifying art.

Donald Brook

Throwing the Baby Out with the Bathwater

The CDEP (Community Development Employment Program) was axed by the Howard Federal Government throughout the Northern Territory though is still current in South Australia and Western Australia. The Program was launched in 1977 by the Fraser Government and has been a very valuable way of getting Aboriginal people to be engaged productive community memes in art centres and other activities. A number of key Aboriginal art centres rely on CDEP staff for printing, administration, preparators, artists and craftspeople. It is a vital component in building community self-reliance and pride.

Felicity Wright

The Obsessive Compulsive Worker

What does obsessive artwork mean? Is this a new compulsion among artists and what does it mean? The work of Hossein Valamanesh, Fiona Hall, Zhuang Hui, Zhang Huan, Shen Shaomin, Katsuhige Nakahashi are referenced.

Stephanie Britton

A Relationship can't be Outsourced: Tracey Clement

The idea of slow art takes on a gripping intensity in Tracey Clements textile works which use ideas of duration and repetition to refer to womens traditional work and skills - a huge ball of wool, a giant button-covered blanket, full-size bodies made from thread and most recently a miniature city of salt and wire. The excessive though delicate relationship between the artist and the work becomes evident in the resulting artefacts. She admits to watching very bad DVDs while on the job.

Dominique Angeloro

Soft Power - Confession: Leung Mee Ping

Hong-Kong based Leung Mee Ping sees the artist as a craftperson able to fabricate intricate work that makes the viewer revision the everyday. Memorising the Future is an ongoing project of shoes made from felted human hair. It has been shown all over the world in major museums and now consists of more than 11,500 shoes.

Binghui Huangfu

Busy Work: Dreaming Time

Justine Khamara uses a scalpel to cut out tens of thousands of images from magazines. She then joins the often identical images to make very large assemblages. The artist sees the obsessive busywork that she does with her hands as providing her with space to dream and do the real work of sifting through the stuff in her head.

Justine Khamara

Process, Production and the Invisible Line: Carly Fischer

Carly Fischer's work is on the cover of the Work issue of Artlink. Her latest exhibition at Helen Gory Galerie of everyday cleaning items and broken fluorescent tubes made from blue paper is art that is almost invisible but critiques consumerism and the culture of waste.

Marcus Keating

Work Wanted: Keith Wong

An artist advertising art in the yellow pages as an artwork turns out not to be a light matter.

Keith Wong

Everybody's Working for the Weekend

This article was written by a mysterious Australian creative labour collective possibly based in Western Australia. It humorously analyses the special characteristics of creative work as against the goals of capitalism while simultaneously possessing an intense work ethic through looking at recent artworks by Matthew Hunt, Tarryn Gill and Pilar Mata Dupont, Rodney Glick and Lynnette Voevodin, and pvi collective. It concludes that the creative task of showing how the nature of work is historically and geographically located is vital.

partyof

Labour of Love: Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro

The latest work by Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro, artists who have been fruitfully collaborating for over seven years was shown at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2007. Called The Paper Trail it explores Paul Virilios ideas about dromology (the science and logic of speed especially in relation to war) through thinking about the Mongolian Empire. A fantastic Mongolian Ger (a nomadic structure ordered on the internet), government archives, Johnson Solids and the Trailer of Death are some of the features of the installation which suggests complex and recurring layers to all globalisation.

Zanny Begg

Beyond the Parlour Games: We Refuse to Become Victims

Thresholds of Tolerance curated by Caroline Turner and David Williams, was shown at the ANU School of Art Gallery from 10 May to 5 June, 2007. We Refuse to Become Victims, an art work made by three artists collectives, Culture Kitchen in Canberra, Taring Padi in Jogyakarta and Gembel in Dili, Timor, a four part series of large works on fabric of small woodcuts, screenprints and painting struck Pat Hoffie as political art that really works as it is cross-disciplinary, cross cultural and seems to stretch out back to the fields of production rather than towards the empty field of the gallery.

Pat Hoffie

Valuing Relationships: Concertina

Concertina is a group of seven artists, Katrina Weber, Ros Miller, Wendy Rushby, Kathryn Hill, Wendy Todd, Dana Kinter and Anny Gooden, who for six years have been working as a collective creating within self-prescribed boundaries. Once a year they set aside their own practices and embark upon a major collaborative project leading to an exhibition. Their latest venture meant one artist Anny Gooden stepping outside the group, she was overseas, and providing instructions to the others. The resulting exhibition, Text as Muse, was shown at Light Square Gallery from 27 June - 26 July 2007.

Sera Waters

Reskin: Intensive Collaboration

A fascinating participant report on an exciting collaborative project of great vision and experimentation. Reskin 2007 was developed by the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT), the Australian National University School of Art, the Centre for New Media Arts (CNMA) and Craft Australia. It brought twenty international and national artists, designers and technologists together under the guidance of seven professional wearable technology specialists at the forefront of their respective fields. The idea of Reskin, co-ordinated by Alexander Gillespie was to design wearable technologies for the body using the latest materials and methods.

Daniel Kojta

Mirroring our Dialogue: Danielle Freakley as 'The Quote Generator'

The Quote Generator is a three year public art project where the artist only speaks in quotes which she instantly attributes. For the first year Danielle Freakley will quote from commercial products, the second year from friends and acquaintances and the last year from herself in the past.

Penny Trotter

Taking Care of Business: Ash Keating

Melbourne-based artist Ash Keatings art practice is based on an ethic and aesthetic of recycling. He reinvents waste often for site-specific interventions - before disposing of the relics by recycling them responsibly. For 'Press Release' (2005-ongoing) he cut 6,500 copies of the same bird from magazines and has thrown them skywards, letting them soar to the ground, in atriums and galleries from Sydney to Santiago. In his videos he is seen at work deconstructing free newspapers or wrestling with large discarded vinyl banners.

Anthony Gardner

A Bush Camp in a Mysterious Land: Guan Wei

Chinese-Australian artist Guan Wei first visited Australia eighteen years ago but it was only in 2006 that he went bush for two weeks with nine other artists, on an artists camp organised by Darwin's contemporary art space 24 Hour Art in collaboration with Injalak Arts and Crafts in Western Arnhem Land. His vivid experiences of the great outdoors, its sounds, animals and birds, led to his A Mysterious Land series. He worked with local Aboriginal artists, was shown rock paintings and found similarities between Aboriginal culture and Taoist philosophy.

Guan Wei

We Can Work it Out: New Style Residencies in Asia

Since the early nineties Asialink has helped to plunge 450 Australian artists into the proverbial deep end of arts practice, the overseas residency. Out of their comfort zones, far from friends and familiar comforts, the artists test their artwork and themselves in new cultural contexts. The recent experiences of Megan Keating in Taiwan, Danius Kesminas in Indonesia, Alwin Reamillo in the Philippines and Ben Morieson in Japan are described in all their variety and embrace of an increasingly Asia-literate world.

Georgia Sedgwick

Witnessing: Transcending the Public-Private Divide in Photography

Reveries: Mortality and photography was curated for the National Portrait Gallery by Helen Ennis and shown from 27 April to 5 August 2007. This touring show will be at Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery from 19 March to 18 May 2008. It includes a wide range of approaches from the harrowing to the humorous. It includes work by Axel Poignant a self-portrait with his last roll of film, Anne Ferran, Carol Jerrems, Craig Potton, William Yang, Anne Noble, Ruth Maddison, Bernie ORegan and Jonathon Delacour who stopped taking photographs after this series of babies and their carers in intensive care.

Stacie Bobele

The Creative Potential of the Awkward: Sarah crowEST

A look at roughly the last five years of 2007 Samstag scholar Sarah crowESTs art practice of objects, performances and videos. CrowESTs manifesto is to maintain flexibility in her thinking; to do or consider the opposite of that which is usual or customary and to make something very messy. Her work often explores the functions of the alter ego in contemporary visual arts practice.

Wendy Walker

Unknown Worker in Art: Alan Lukey

A retrospective survey of the work of Alan Lukey who died in 2003 aged 51 organised by fellow artist John Foubister with the help of Jill Lukey was shown at New Land Gallery in Port Adelaide, 21 April to 10 June 2007. Lukey was a South Australian artist who painted abstract and meditative works and lived on the Fleurieu Peninsula between 1977 and 2003. He also made public art works often in the shape of waves.

James Moss

Artworks Out on the Beach Townsville

In September 2007 in Townsville Stephanie Radok attended the Perc Tucker Regional Gallerys Strand Ephemera, a biennial outdoor sculpture and installation exhibition first held in 2001. The Strand is a 2km landscaped beachfront park where local and interstate artists placed their site specific works which ranged from an Aeolian harp by Nameer Davis to a throne made of seasponges by Wendy Robertson. An enthusiastic audience of children and Strand-strollers made their way from work to work thinking about art and its myriad manifestations. Commissioned artists making work in shipping containers were Craig Walsh, Bonemap, Donna Marcus, Chris Fox and Richard Goodwin.

Stephanie Radok

John Maitland's Energy Architecture

John Maitland is the sole director of Energy Architecture, an Adelaide architecture firm committed to environmentally sound and socially responsible architecture established in 1990.

Mark Thomas

Australian Pastoral by Jeanette Hoorn

Joanna Mendelssohn

Indigenous Triennial

Culture Warriors: National Indigenous Art Triennial 07 Curator: Brenda L. Croft. National Gallery of Australia, 13 October 2007 - 10 February 2008; touring to Art Gallery of South Australia, 20 June - 31 August 2008; Art Gallery of Western Australia, 20 September - 23 November 2008; Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, MarchMay 2009. (Note: The touring exhibition will be about 90 works rather than the 130 seen in Canberra.)

Daniel Thomas

X Strata Indigenous Art Awards

Xstrata Coal Emerging Indigenous Art Award GoMA, Brisbane 4 August - 11 November 2007

George Petelin

The Hours

The Hours: Visual Arts of Contemporary Latin America Curator: Sebastian Lopez Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 21 June - 2 September 2007

Jeff Browitt

Territorial

Territorial Canberra Contemporary Art Centre June 2007 24 hr Art, Darwin September October 2007 ACT Artists: Silvia Vélez, Bernie Slater, Raquel Ormella NT artists: Franck Gohier, Catriona Stanton, Gary Lee

Sarah Scott

ACCA

Almost Everywhere Apparent Sonia Leber and David Chesworth Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 11 August - 30 September 2007

Saige Walton

Fremantle Print Awards

Fremantle Print Award 07 Fremantle Arts Centre 8 September - 21 October 2007

Judith McGrath

Papunya Tjupi: A New Beginning

Papunya Tjupi: A New Beginning Ivan Dougherty Gallery 6 September - 6 October 2007

Amanda Muscat

Anne Mestitz

Electric Love Anne Mestitz Bett Gallery, Hobart 4 August - 18 August 2007

Philip Watkins

Strange Fruit

Strange Fruit: Testimony and Memory in Julie Dowlings Portraits Curator: Jeanette Hoorn Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne 21 July - 14 October 2007

Maura Edmond

Painting at SALA

Shades of the Real: a selective survey of tonal painting Adelaide Central Gallery 20 July - 11 August 2007 artists: Morgan Allender, Nona Burden, Stephanie Crase, Kveta Deans, Louise Feneley, Mary-Jean Richardson, Chelsea Lehmann, Rachel Smyth, Deborah Trusson, Yve Thompson Christian Lock Greenaway Art Gallery 4 -29 July 2007 Kaylie Weir (in Noodle) Premier Art Gallery SALA exhibition 3 August 1 September 2007 Learning to Speak Simone Kennedy Artlab SALA Exhibition 3-19 August 2007

Lisa Harms

Tautology

Tautology Emma White 9 - 26 August 2007 MOP Projects, Sydney

Anneke Jasper

No. 1

No. 1 six a, North Hobart 24 August - 24 September 2007

Judith Abell

Sara Elson

Sarah Elson Anigozanthos (eudaimonia hybrid) 5 August - 2 September 2007 Galerie Desseldorf, Perth

Holly Story

The Ranger

The Ranger Julie Gough SASA Gallery, Adelaide 12-28 September 2007

Stephanie Radok

Topsy

Topsy Eleanor Avery, Ray Cook, Kim Demuth, Alice Lang, David Spooner, Grubbanax Swinnasen. Curator Chris Comer Metro Arts Galleries, Brisbane 5 - 22 September 2007

Holly Arden

Artrave

Artlink

Editorial

Stephanie Britton

Signs of the Times: Stephen Page, Sacred Symposium, Adelaide Biennale

Stephen Page is the first Artistic Director of the Adelaide Festival of Arts to be indigenous and his program for 2004 includes indigenous works but perhaps not many more than most Adelaide Festivals, which have always had a significant indigenous component. Yet there is a sense that the commissions that Page has initiated represent a maturity in approach and development that signifies a watershed for Indigenous culture in Australia. Page expects it to be optimistic, philosophical, constructive, to reflect on the fusion of the old and new without bastardization.

Stephanie Radok

The Dave Inside

About the work and fame of Las Vegas based art writer Dave Hickey. Like all icons Dave comes with a portable, pocketable, mythology. A pungent blend of his own statements, press hype, rumour and dubious speculation.

Robert Cook

Virtual Adelaide

One of the leading interactive groups to come out of Britain is the Blast Theory who are making interactive gaming projects, installations and mixed reality projects in various major cities of the world. They were based in Adelaide from January to March 2004 under the South Australian Premiers Thinkers in Residence Program in partnership with various other major Australian art corporations. Through the use of real and virtual city cityscapes there is an overlapping of concepts of time and space, with a focus on ideas of absence and presence amongst players online and those on the streets.

Heather Croall

Beyond Adelaide

Brook looks at the role of geographic location throughout the ages of art theory and practice. The metaphor of adverse location prompted some baroque theorising about the metropolis as contrast-partner to the provinces...with the onset of neo-conservatism and the supervenience of economically rational accounts of virtue and of value the idea that art is peculiarly sensitive to location because it is more cultural than clothing and footwear came under challenge... Addressed in a context that concerns the locality of Adelaide, and beyond.

Donald Brook

Young South Australian Art

This article is about hip young artists working outside the field of contemporary art. Even if the changes of the last forty years have meant that liking things for being cool and fashionable has generally lost its polemical significance, my sense is that this still may hold some currency with regard to the specific condition of contemporary art in South Australia. Strickland examines the work of South Australian artist Magosia Miow.

James Strickland

Wet Culture - Playing With Codes

Melentie Pandilovski, the Director of the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide, sees the current manifestation of the word experimental in Experimental Art Foundation as relating to biotechnology, consciousness and the places taken up by artist in scientific places where experiments are the usual tasks at hand. In a move away from dry hard-wired technologies the last five years has seen a rise of wetwork and a new subculture within science as artists find new roles in scientific laboratories and ask fresh moral, ethical and aesthetic questions.

Stephanie Radok

Stories: Past, Present and Future

Franchesca Cubillo, the Artistic and Cultural Director of the National Aboriginal Cultural Institute, has a broad cultural background with Spanish Catholic and Filipino cultural infuences fusing seamlessly with her Aboriginal heritage. Aside from her administrative and managing roles at the institute she is also a painter and photographer. Maughan looks at Cubillos life and work as it is shaped through an appreciation of the importance of family and community.

Janet Maughan

Isolated Interventions

This article explores the artistic and economic viability of living and working in South Australia, a state with less than 400,000 people, most of whom reside in the south-eastern corner. Theres enough professional isolation here to remind us that were living in a world where art is not a self-evident virtue. As a result of living in the geographic margins, artists require considerable ingenuity, flexibility and lateral thinking in order to sustain a viable practice.

Malcolm Mackinnon

In the Far North-West

Colin Koch is the coordinator of Ku Arts, the artists representative and development body, a role which requires him to make the journey up into the northern regions of South Australia, land belonging to the Anangu people, once every six weeks. Koch discusses the significance of Ku Arts: some of the hurdles they have had to overcome and the subsequent milestones this regional indigenous arts centre has acheived.

Colin Koch

Can Culture Save the River and Wetlands?

This question 'can culture save the river and wetlands'was put to a debating panel at the annual conference of Country Arts SA in October 2003. The river in question was the Murray. This article takes up some of the important issues surrounding environmental degredation and focuses on the SunRise 21 Artists in Industry Project which saw the collaboration of artists and organizations working together to establish a mutual relationship between arts and the environment.

Ian Hamilton

The Second Experiment: Floating Land 2003

Floating Land 2003 was an event held as part of Noosa Regional Gallerys second major biennial site-specific art project that ended in high drama at 3am on the top of a mountain and one that unexpectedly created a new lobby group. The emphasis for this project was on experimentation both in terms of the art and the notion of what consitutes an event/festival that takes place over a period of time.

Kevin Wilson

Ara Irititja: Protecting the Past, Accessing the Future - Indigenous Memories in a Digital Age

White fellatechnology was once considered a threat to Anangu culture and identity, but when iMacs, data-projectors and printers turned up in Anangu communities, they attracted a great deal of interest and excitement. The above mentioned title was an exhibition that opened at the South Australian Museum in October 2003 and comprised of three remarkable multimedia interactive databases which stand to offer unique opportunities to investigate pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara peoples history and culture.

Chris Nobbs

Community Arts and Artists in the Community

The Parks Arts & Functions Complex is situated in the Parks Community Centre in the Western suburbs of Adelaide, a region made up of many disadvantaged and minority groups. Weekly and fortnightly groups meet to explore different mediums and creative processes, and working without the assistance of a tutor means they rely on each other to develope their skills. The social benefits of these groups are often as important as the creative concerns. The centre invites guest artists to run various workshops to help sustain this interaction amongst members of the community.

Margaret Edgecombe

Transfiguring ACMI

The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) is now just a little over a year old. Housed in a purpose-built venue at Federation Square in Melbourne , ACMI is home to two multi-format cinemas, a variety of exhibition, education and production zones and the Screen Gallery, the largest of its kind in the world and, arguably, the jewel in ACMIs crown. Gye looks at the recent success of the new Screen Gallery and the future direction of ACMI.

Lisa Gye

Sacred Food: Elizabeth Nyumi

Like many of the people at Balgo, Elizabeth Nyumis early life was a nomadic existence with her family group on the Canning Stock Route. Whe her mother died she walked with her father into the old Catholic mission at Balgo. She began painting for Warlayirti Artists in 1988. Recently a very successful painter, she was invited to show at the 2004 Biennale of Sydney. OBrien examines Nyumis life and work.

Philippa O'Brien

The Real Thing: Recent Art of Derek Kreckler

The twenty-first century, it seems, will not be the age of manifestos. Like advertising campaigns and the design of cars and other consumer items, contemporary art has started to look the same....there is no agenda, no politics, no historical claims. As McLean states, for Derek Kreckler, the point of being an artist today is not how well you resist this condition, but how well you can bend it to your own ends. Krecklers work is here positioned in a postminimalist rather than a postmodernist framework.

Ian McLean

Small and Green is Beautiful

Stephanie Radok

Artrave

Artlink

trans-luscious musings

Bridget Currie

The Museum is the Message

The fifteen artists involved in Inside SAM's Place all acknowledge the shared language of art objects and museum artefacts.

Roy Ananda

Distance in our Lives

Exploring collaborations and their relationship to crossdiscipline and cross-cultural art practice is a key interest of Parallelo, South Australia's leading edge performance company. For over 18 years Parallelo have experimented with fusions of culture, media and artform as mediums for artistic expression and for new audience access.

Linda Cooper

Smart Strategy for Art Education

The marketing of senior secondary art achievement in South Australia, which has seen a rise in popularity in Year 12 art exhibitions, cannot be taken as proof of the depth and sustainability of visual art education in schools across all levels.

John Neylon

The Chapman Brothers

UK artists Jake and Dino Chapman have been the subject of public and media controversy since their emergence on the British art scene in the early 1990s. The Chapmans assert that their shock tactics are in aid of an examination of cultural taboos.

Sophie Forbat

Witnessing to Silence

Caroline Turner, Jen Webb, Jon Cattapan and Christine Clark

Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri

Art Gallery of South Australia 31 October 2003 - 26 January 2004 Curated by Vivien Johnson

John Kean

This was the Future, the McClelland Sculpture award and Sculpture at RMIT during the Jomantas Years 1961-1987

RMIT Gallery, Storey Hall, Melbourne 21 July - 13 September 2003 McClelland Art Gallery, Langwarrin 4 November 2003 - 8 March 2004 Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen 4 October - 7 December 2003

Juliette Peers