The New Cosmopolitans

During his visit to Melbourne in April this year, Bombay-born, Oxford-educated, Harvard professor, Homi Bhabha spoke of Vernacular Cosmopolitanism, the global citizenry of refugees, economic migrants and minorities within cultures who must learn about translation because you survive that way.

More from this Issue

Out of the Dark

Out of the dark - night shots from indigenous artists is an exhibition I experienced online via the cyberTribe website. If you have not browsed the site, then you should. WiseART Gallery in Brisbane presented the physical exhibition from 7 –27 August.

Ngahiraka Mason

Hybrid World

Stephanie Britton

Henry Jones' Art Hotel

Hobart Opening on October 1, 2004 http://www.thehenryjones.com

Noel Frankham

The In-Between: Hybrid Arts Laboratories as Places to Question

Hybrid art laboratories - both funded and semi-funded - are dotting themselves around the Australian arts landscape. Most of them involve time away from the everyday, where experience can be intensified and where a new set of meetings between artists can take place. It is an experimental environment encouraging a mode of artmaking that struggles to exist between art form and another, one identity and another, one technology and another, one world and another.

Rachel Fensham

Shifting Gears: Asian Traffic

Asian Traffic was, outside the Asia-Pacific Triennial (APT), one of the most ambitious efforts undertaken in Australia aimed at exploring the multifarious nature of new Asian art and its complex intersection with contemporary Australian culture. Visitors were forced to join the Asian Traffic coming and going from the Asia-Australia Centre in Chinatown, Sydney, and in its ever-changing guises and fluid shifts in direction, the project successfully circumvented any traffic jams.

Felicity Fenner

'Aboriginalism' in Europe: On the Way Out?

Subsequent to Nicholls three month residency in several European regions, she has been examining some of the ways in which Australian Aboriginal art is currently being perceived, received and curated in this part of the world. As she states, the Salzburger Kunstvereins programme, juxtaposing photographic works and video installations by Destiny Deacon and Lisl Ponger was the only one of the four European Indigenous art exhibitions she saw that made any serious and genuine effort to address the postcolonial legacy of Anglo-European colonialism.

Christine Nicholls

1/2 Way: Scott Redford the Collages

Dell Gallery at Griffith University Queensland College of Art, Brisbane 13 August - 19 September 2004

Timothy Morrell

Lost Plot

Adelaide Central Gallery 20 August - 12 September 2004

Sera Waters

Grace Weir: A Fine Line

Experimental Art Foundation 27 August - 25 September 2004

Clint Woodger

A Response by a Fringe Dweller

Debates about what is mainstream, whether in global or national terms, seem to perennial. Some have claimed Aboriginal art is now mainstream. Stephanie Radok takes this notion apart.

Stephanie Radok

Fakery and Fabrication in Photomedia

A series of photographs, still images from Monika Tichaceks 2002 video/performance work Lineage of the Divine, were exhibited in Japan in Supernatural Artificial, an exhibition of nine contemporary Australian photomedia artists. Tichacek exploits a heightened intimacy between viewer and work to construct complex and ambiguous scenarios that simultaneously delight, unsettle and confound.

Jeff Khan

The Importance of Being 'Un-Australian'

Melbournes Moomba festival held in 1956 replaced the annual celebration of the winning of the eight-hour day. Thus an occasion that had originally been devised to commemorate an important victory of the Australian labour movement was transformed into a bipartisan celebration of civic pride and family values.

David McNeill

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