Psychology of Retrieval: Personal and Fictional Archives

How can (traumatic) memories be excavated? Many visual artists use records and material objects as documentation with which to resurrect their past experience and those of their families. Often using literary means, visual artists who archive their past employ text as well as images in poetic and haunting ways. Quotation and citation form the kernel of this pychology of retrieval and act of preservation.

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The TMAG Commissions 1998

Here at the end of the twentieth century, the world is having to come to terms with the socio-political, economic and environmental legacies of nineteenth century imperialism. Contemporary art participates in this post colonial discourse: issues of ancestry and inheritance, relations between indigenous and settler peoples, national and imperial mythology, mapping and borders, migration and language, ecology and exploitation - these are increasingly familiar themes.

David Hansen

A Dream of Earthly Organisation

Not only are artists fascinated with images and objects - it has been estimated that half the adult world population has been a collector at some point in their life. A number of different projects have been instigated by artists considering what it means to collect and archive.

Zara Stanhope

Market Mark-Art: Forgotten Fruit

In the final stages of the demolition of the old Adelaide fruit and vegetable markets, Margaret Dodd and Jennifer Hughes collaborate to produce an installation which caught the echoes of the history displayed in situ at the markets.

Noel Purdon

Fabricating Archives: Six New Zealand Artists confuse the system

In New Zealand, conceptual and post conceptual artists from the 1970s to the present have incorporated various references to the archive; its contents, classificatory systems and its institutional adjuncts, the library, the art gallery and the museum.

Christina Barton

Photosynthesis: Two approaches

The photograph as a source and subject for photographic practice iteself is characteristic of the work of a great many artists today. Tracey Moffatt and Margaret Dawson's works are considered. Each draws on photographs which precede their own, but work in markedly different ways.

Clare Williamson

Underbelly

November 22 to December 20 Cosmopolitan Cinema and Shopping Arcade

Samara Mitchell

Archives After the Seventies and After

Brown and Green are well known for their meticulously produced paintings, often involving the layering and juxtaposition of competing forms and histories. They continue to paint though photography has now assumed a major position in their practice. These photographs function as archives without narrative: scrambled mythology.

Tom Nicholson

Artrave

Artlink

Elizabeth Gertsakis: Tampering with the Archive

Elizabeth Gertsakis has excavated her family histories and Greek/Slavic heritage as part of understanding difference as a critical space of knowing. It is not an attempt to 'position' or 'locate' herself in Anglo Australian culture or in the art world, but to understand the mechanisms that produce dominant cultural histories and resultant exclusions.

Brett Jones

Vault: A Collaborative Installation Cluster

Ian North and Helen Fuller 12 November - 6 December 1998 Experimental Art Foundation

Lisa Harms

The Fleurieu Biennale 1998

McLaren Vale Fleurieu Peninsula 6 - 29 November 1998

Michael Newall

Wunderkammern: Actual and Virtual

The notion of the Wunderkammern is discussed in the work of Shiralee Saul (an on-line hypertextual essay for the World Wide Web WWW) and Luke Roberts ( a series of exhibitions from 1990 onwards).

Beth Jackson

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