The position of long-term visitor or unfaithful citizen affords a view from both within a culture and outside it. The art of Pasifika is as diverse as its people, it is a 21st Century hybrid reality. Pasifika is urban.
The artists featured in ACMIs latest exhibition of new media work, SenseSurround, both use and develop cutting edge audio/visual technology to enhance sensorial experience for the spectator. The idea was to use the film soundtrack to trigger massively boosted low frequency signals, below the audible threshold, in the theatres. This would cause vibrations of the ear-drum and the body of the spectator and provide the sensation of earth tremors.
PerceptualDifference John Curtin Gallery, Perth 8 September - 12 December Curator: Chris Malcolm BigDifference Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Perth 12 September - 3 October Curators: Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr
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.
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.
Britton follows up from Peers examination of Art and Globalism to discuss the trends of international art residencies and the evident exchange in cultural values and creative receptibility that comes as a result of working in a foreign country; the buying of time away from other strategies for staying solvent - part time or full time jobs, or feeling under pressure to make work with commercial appeal.
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.
Sutapa Biswas was born in Santinekethan, India, in 1962 and immigrated to the UK with her family at the age of three. Her subsequent life and studies in Britan have resulted in a truly cross-cultural, multi-layered dialogue within her work. Her 2004 film Birdsong encapsulates the realisation of a young boys dream (in this case her son). Sutapa believes for a child, there is nothing that holds them back if you allow them to dream....
Emily Floyd, Sharon Goodwin, Irene Hanenbergh, Louise Hearman, Rebecca Ann Hobbs, Ronnie Van Hout, David Noonan, Lisa Roet, Kathy Temin. Curator Lisa Vasiliou Faculty Gallery, Monash University 9 September - 5 November 2004
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.