Experimental - Search

This country is broader than our accents and older than almost any other place on the planet, yet there is a great untruth at its heart that we are still not confronting as a people.

Din Heagney

On seeing the pattern

Emeritus Professor of Visual Arts at Flinders University and Founder of the Experimental Art Foundation, Donald Brook takes on the March 2012 issue of Artlink titled 'Pattern and Complexity' and guest edited by well-known curator Margot Osborne.

Donald Brook

Every Space Project needs an artist

Sarah Jane Pell

Street legal: unmediated exchange

Eco-architect Paul Downton gets down with street artist Peter Drew who endorses Adelaide's mayor Stephen Yarwood's statement: “Art isn’t just for art galleries… Cities are the best art galleries you could possibly have.” Yet Drew also thinks that street art will maintain its authenticity “because there’s always going to be an illegal aspect to it…"

Paul Downton

James Dodd the colonial bus stop

Din Heagney

Trying to burn a rainbow

Artist, writer, history/theory lecturer at RMIT’s School of Architecture and Design, and ex-Director of West Space, Phip Murray riffs on and includes comments from curators and artists about experimentality and ARIs, including the contradictions of their potential radicality and their co-option as incubators.

Phip Murray

Why the Guerilla Girls don't have to be naked to get into the Met

Curator Laura Castagnini interviews Guerilla Girls founding members Frida Kahlo and Käthe Kollwitz on the past, the present, the legacy of feminist activism and the institutionalisation of experimental practices.

Laura Castagnini

The grey space between art and politics

Curator and Artistic Director of LUMA, La Trobe University Museum of Art, Vincent Alessi discusses art that is political and experimental focusing on the recent work of Melbourne-based Carl Scrase who describes the Occupy Movement as: “one of the greatest social art experiments the world has ever seen."

Vincent Alessi

Artist run spaces of the future

Christopher Lee Kennedy plays inside a living museum called Elsewhere, and is pursuing a PhD at the University of North Carolina. Here he culture-jams with Erica Curry of Lousiana, Paula Damasceno of Brazil, Aislinn Pentecost-Farrin of North Carolina, Wythe Marschall and Ethan Gould of New York, and Capp Larsen of Halifax, California, about their experiences of artist-run spaces, their passions, joys, discontents and plasticities.

Christopher Kennedy

Writing with art

Melbourne-based writer and curator Anusha Kenny discusses the writing about art that she likes by poets Ken Bolton, Alex Selenitsch and John Forbes and contrasts it with the situation described by Adrian Martin in a recent article in 'Discipline' lamenting the fact that so much art writing is chained to “the hit-parade values of the art market”.

Anusha Kenny

The original model - Australian Experimental Art Foundation

Long term resident artist at the department of Medical Biotechnology, Flinders University in Adelaide, Niki Sperou describes the fluidity of the Experimental Art Foundation (now the Australian Experimental Art Foundation)which is now almost four decades old.

Niki Sperou

No hotheads in this hothouse - Adhocracy

Self-confessed techno-evangelist and nomadic geek artist Fee Plumley is about to head off on a reallybigroadtrip. Before she left Adelaide she participated and revelled in Vitalstatistix's live art incubator Adhocracy. She suggests: "We should [all] take full advantage of Regional Arts Australia’s conference, Kumuwuki,(18-21 October 2012 in Goolwa, South Australia) where Sara Diamond (the creator of the Banff New Media Institute) will speak.

Fee Plumley

Every map has an agenda? PVI

Kellie McClusky is an artist, writer and Head Girl of the celebrated PVI Collective in Perth. She describes their new work 'deviator' and some of the experimental thinking and working processes of PVI including a wiki-map of connections.

Kelli McCluskey

Manifestations of Now: experimenting with strategy

Sapna Chandu

On SafARI in Sydney

SafARI is the unofficial fringe event to the Biennale of Sydney, presenting the work of unrepresented Australian artists across multiple artist-run initiatives and public spaces in Sydney. It was founded in 2004 by Lisa Corsi and Margaret Farmer. Artists are selected after an open call for submissions.

Robson Stromqvist

ARIna spaces for the unexpected

Curator Brianna Munting, who co-organised (with Georgie Meagher) the We Are Here Symposium of ARIs in Sydney in 2011, describes the new ARI online resource ARIna and asks: "Perhaps what we really need is to spend a lot more time asking each other whether our architectures and images, our hierarchies and ambitions, our ideas and narratives, are really any good for us or simply cultural fictions?"

Brianna Munting

Biennale of Sydney - Catherine De Zegher

Guest editor of Artlink and writer Din Heagney interviews Catherine De Zegher, one of the Directors of the 18th Biennale of Sydney (the first she curated) who is now the Director of the 5th Moscow Biennale 2013. De Zegher acknowledges the balancing act between the conventions of Biennales and attempting to experiment and step beyond them.

Din Heagney

Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art - Alexi Glass-Kantor & Natasha Bullock

Artlink Experiment Guest Editor, writer and critic Din Heagney probes the curators of the 2012 Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art and in particular their approach to the embedding of artworks in the colonial Elder Wing of the Gallery.

Din Heagney

Experimental International Biennial of Media Art - Abigail Moncrieff

Guest Editor of Artlink on Experiment and writer Din Heagney interviews Abigail Moncrieff, the curator of the '2012 Experimenta: speak to me' which explores 'interconnectivity' through the commissioning of new works and their location around Melbourne.

Din Heagney

Remembering: Rethinking a place in the sun

Alice Springs-based writer Kieran Finnane writes a tribute and homage to the work of Pamela Lofts who died on July 4 2012 of motor neurone disease. Since 1992 Lofts held 27 solo shows across Australia and was the founder in 1993 of the Alice Springs artist-run initiative 'Watch This Space'. Her legacy in the desert is profound with a singular and generous body of work arising from the contact zone between white and Aboriginal Australia. She will be deeply missed.

Kieran Finnane

Exhibitions to watch

Stephanie Radok

Artrave

Stephanie Britton

Contemporary Australia: Women

Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) and Queensland Art Gallery (QAG), Brisbane 21 April – 22 July 2012

Tess Maunder

dOCUMENTA (13)

Artistic Director: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev Kassel, Germany 9 June – 16 September 2012

Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll

Theatre of the World

Curator: Jean-Hubert Martin MONA (Museum of Old and New Art) in collaboration with TMAG (Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery), Hobart 23 June 2012 – 8 April 2013

Eliza Burke

18th Biennale of Sydney: all our relations

Artistic Directors: Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster Museum of Contemporary Art, Cockatoo Island, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Pier 2/3, Carriageworks 27 June – 16 September 2012

Lizzy Marshall

18th Biennale of Sydney: all our relations

Artistic Directors: Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster Museum of Contemporary Art, Cockatoo Island, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Pier 2/3, Carriageworks 27 June – 16 September 2012

Pat Hoffie

unDisclosed: second National Indigenous Art Triennial

Curator: Carly Lane National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 11 May – 22 July 2012

Tess Allas

Camouflage: Visual Art and Design in Disguise

Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art Helsinki, Finland 15 June – 7 October 2012

Alison Carroll

No Added Sugar: Engagement and Self-determination

Curator: Rusaila Bazlamit Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre 12 May – 18 July 2012

Julie Lien

Melissa Smith: Dissolve

Sawtooth, Launceston 27 April – 19 May 2012

Jane Deeth

The Kick Ass Painting Show

Curators: Brigid Noone, Ben Leslie Fontanelle, Adelaide 24 May – 30 June 2012

Polly Dance

Shaun Tan: Suburban Odyssey

Fremantle Arts Centre 18 May – 19 July 2012

Gemma Watson

In-Habit (Project Another Country)

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney 22 June – August 2012

Joanna Mendelssohn

Animal/Human

Curator: Michele Helmrich UQ Art Museum, Brisbane 12 May – 22 July 2012

Robyn Daw

South Australia Illustrated: Colonial painting in the Land of Promise

Curator: Jane Hylton Art Gallery of South Australia 2 June – 5 August 2012

John Neylon

Trevor Richards: Recent works 2009 – 2012

Turner Galleries, Perth 18 May – 16 June 2012

Louise Morrison

Hoppé Portraits: Society, Studio & Street

Monash Gallery of Art 9 June 2012 to 29 July 2012

Pippa Milne

We are all Flesh: Berlinde De Bruckyere

ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art), Melbourne 2 June – 29 July 2012

Stephanie Radok

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