Reflections on an exhibition of abstract art at Linden Gallery St Kilda, Melbourne March 1991. An emigrant artists once said to me "I can never abandon the figure and make purely abstract art, after all I am Greek".
Palimpsest...Vision of a multicultural Australia. An exhibition co-ordinated by the Multicultural Arts Trust of South Australia, December 1990 Chesser Gallery Adelaide. Great colour photos.
Since the birth of Australian television, non-anglo Australians have suffered from an acute case of foreign accent syndrome. Unfortunately 35 years on they are still suffering, not only from bad accents usually spoken by Anglo actors playing NESBs, but from the dearth of authentic storylines and subsequently the lack of accurate representation of NESBs on our TV and screens.
How much marketability is immanent in the artist's cultural background is a matter of delicate negotiation between dealer and client. Just now, it may appear to some artists an unfortunate fact that for them, Aboriginality is not an option.
Looks at the art practice of Gunta Parups who was and remains a displaced person. The experience of leaving one's homeland as a refugee at the age of thirteen during the war is etched indelibly into her being.
The Network links NESB, ethnic and arts organisations, sets up cross cultural and other training programs for artists, arts organisations and the media and lobbies governments and other funding bodies to reassess their policies and practices.
With the exception of some programming on SBS and the ABC, artists receive very little exposure on television. The limitations of television, the need to maintain a wide audience reach, the difficult question of what is 'good art' in a televisual sense, all may help to explain the absence of living artists from this, the most powerful of all media.
The alphabet was invented, so they say, in Lebanon. To some Lebanese, their country represents an un-broken link with the birth of human history. Non-Aboriginal Australians, by contrast, share stories of interrupted family ties, of exile and forgetting. How then do these Lebanese relate to life in Australia?
The Fairfield Community Arts Network is a community - based organisation which aims to develop cultural awareness in Fairfield with particular emphasis on the multicultural nature of the area.