Snapshot of a Culture

Cover of Snapshot of a Culture
1.126
Foreign returned: Between expatriate and repatriate in Mumbai
Feature
Balamohan Shingade

Published 01 September 2018
1.126
Human flow in Melanesia: Taloi Havini's artefacts and habitats
Feature
Nicholas Thomas

Published 01 September 2018
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Living and dying under surveillance: Xu Bing's Dragonfly Eyes
Feature
Sasha Grbich

Published 01 September 2018
NAVA
1.122
Inhuman flow: Censorship and art in the two Chinas
Feature
Darren Jorgensen and Tami Xiang

Published 01 September 2018
1.126
Sublime Plight: Richard Mosse, Ai Weiwei and the social turn
Feature
Wes Hill

Published 01 September 2018
1.3
YARN: The art of conversation
Feature

Coby Edgar interviews Warren Roberts, CEO of YARN Australia

Published June 2018
Artlink Subs Promo
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Editorial: Kanarn Wangkiny/Wanggandi Karlto (Speaking from Inside)
Feature
Clothilde Bullen with James Tylor

Published 01 June 2018
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Katie West: Living well
Feature
Katie West

Published 01 June 2018

A conference about Indigenous arts and crafts was held in 1999 and was a useful sounding board for issues from the new Label of Authenticity and copyright, to the new Goods and Services Tax and art in cyberspace.

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More from this Issue Full Issue Contents

Good Brother Working with our Kids
Feature
Tjalaminu Mia

Ron Gidgup was the first Aboriginal fashion designer in WA. Since getting the Aboriginal of the Year Award in 1997 he began to turn his skills towards helping Aboriginal youth in crisis. He runs workshops in textile and clothing design and brought many young people back from the brink of death from substance abuse. He has worked in urban and rural settings, with schools and other groups.

Published March 2000
Health and Art: Can art make people (feel) well?
Feature
Felicity Wright

Art can function in a wide range of ways beyond what is normally regarded as its arena. It can empower by raising confidence, providing income which can be used to improve diet and living conditions, it can be therapeutic, liberating and provide an emotional and intellectual outlet, while posters and TV ads can convey important messages about health issues. When a culture is strong the people are healthy.

Published March 2000
Boomalli: Fact or Fantasy: you decide!
Feature
Ken Watson

Boomalli, founded in 1987, enters an unlikely future where anonymous benefactors help them to buy premises in an inner city suburb, to employ curators and become independent of funding bodies. Tax-free havens are set up for indigenous artists in NSW and Boomalli members exhibit regularly at MOMA in New York.

Published March 2000
George Milpurrurru and David Malangi
Tribute
Michael O+Ferrall

Tributes to two painters from Ramingining in Arnhem Land, George Milpurrurru and David Malangi who helped to place this region on the map. Paintings were included in the 1979 Sydney Biennale. The iconography, style of painting and the public response to their work and interaction with the wider art world is discussed. Both of these major artists died during the 1990s after careers of around four decades.

Published March 2000
Homeland: Sacred Visions and the Settler State
Feature
Marcia Langton

In spite of supporting a vast artworld of curators, critics and collectors, the 'otherness' of Aboriginal art in the Western canon persists, fuelled by white settler reluctance to acknowledge history. The valorisation of the life and work of Emily Kame Kngwarray is one of the great imponderables of our time. Her extreme age, traditional origins, style of painting and prodigious output were the causes. Most significantly she demonstrated the possibility of human intimacy with landscapes.

Published March 2000
Rover Thomas
Tribute
Kim Akerman

A tribute to the Western Australian artist Rover Thomas who died in 1998 aged around 72. After a full life spent as a stockman and an important leader of ceremonial life through the Kurirr-Kurirr dance cycle in the Warmun community, in 1982 he began establishing a new mode of painting based on Kimberly rock art. His bold and original painting depicts the land and the massacres that took place there up to the 1950s. The National Gallery of Australia accorded him a retrospective exhibition Roads Cross in 1994.

Published March 2000
Political Theatre in Beyond the Pale
Feature
John Kean

The Adelaide Biennial of Australian Artin 2000 was a survey of new indigenous art titled Beyond the Pale. This attempt to show the best of new work was staged as a series of rooms each with a different mood from baskets and shimmering paintings to rooms of confrontation where works invited viewers to be shocked by figures of authority seen in very unflattering mode.

Published March 2000
The 'Aboriginal Art Scandals' Scandal
Feature
Vivien Johnson

A chronicle of a spate of so-called 'Aboriginal art scandals' which happened in the late 1990s, some of which involved white artists passing off work as Aboriginal. The custom amongst indigenous artists of family members working with an artist on paintings creates problems for the western art market and leads to claims of fraud. The media is often guilty of distorting and sensationalising events. The newly launched Label of Authenticity enters the scene.

Published March 2000
Snapshots of Contemporary Sound, Movement and Words from Broome
Feature
Cynthia Coyne

Broome is a town in WA with a long history of many cultures living and working together. It is the home of a vibrant Indigenous music industry, its most famous sons being the Pigram brothers and Jimmy Chi, author of the musicals Bran Nue Day and Corrugation Road . Magabala Books is flourishing, and the Stompen' Ground Festival is gaining in strength and reputation.

Published March 2000
Nomad to TV star in three years: Walala Tjapaltjarri meets the world
Feature
Lotte Waters

In late 1984 Walala Tjapaltjarri and other Pintupi tribespeople walked out of the Gibson desert in WA and met Europeans for the first time. Within a few years Walala adapted his traditional ground and body painting to painting on canvas and was filmed by Robert Hughes for his TV series Beyond the Fatal Shore.

Published March 2000
Charting Co-existence
Feature
Maurice O+Riordan

Mapping Our Countries was an exhibition at the short-lived Djamu Gallery in Sydney, curated by artist Judy Watson and archaeologist Dr Paul Taon. They collected objects and works of art to illustrate how
they relate to the idea of mapping land or sea. Mapping is done for a huge variety of reasons, for exploiting resources, for proving theories, for simply finding one's way.

Published March 2000
Labelled - Buyer Be Aware
Feature
Brenda L Croft

The introduction of a Label of Authenticity has some problems for contemporary urban Aboriginal artists who feel once again that they are being asked to confirm their status. Another issue is that any indigenous person can apply for the Label regardless of the integrity of their art practice. Is the Label too blunt an instrument to be useful to most artists?

Published March 2000
 
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