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.
Melbourne is the host city of the South Project, a project designed to celebrate the creative energies of people living in the southern hemisphere and create south-south dialogue between artists of the countries of the south. South 1 encouraged all kinds of responses: philosophical and whimsical, creative and conceptual, contesting and renewing ideas, in the first gathering of its kind.
As with Feminism in the 1970s certain ideas are in the air and finding widespread expression amongst artists and art institutions. Globalism impacts upon artists options and this phenomenon of artists and curators on the move is the result of the explosion of communication around art. Peers looks at the influx in globalism and its various influences in the Australian and international art scene.
Bridget Riley is an artist who has pursued her own agenda for over thirty years with no concessions and has made a place for herself within the heart of the art world not only with her work but through her extraordinary desire and willingness to communicate. On the occasion of her major survey exhibition in Sydney in the summer of 2004 at the Museum of Contemporary Art she kindly assembled for Artlink some excerpts from some of these interviews.
Back in 1998, the PVI (Performance, Video, Installation) Collective were a neat group and a fledgling collective. In 2004, seven years and eighteen major works later, the group has expanded to include new members, in addition to remote cells and networks of groups and individuals across Australia. The PVI refer to themselves as shape-shifters, and in this sense the shifting evolution of the collective has been influenced as much by the consequences of their national and international residencies as their addoption of new technologies.
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
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.
While many art institutions are just coming to terms with incorporating networked media into their exhibition programs, the genres have been exponentially expanding and mutating. In recognition of the newly hatched species that is networked media art, the ISEA2004 (the nomadic biennial festival held in Finland, Estonia and onboard a Baltic cruise ship) and the Australian ARS ELECTRONICA, dedicated a stream of their conference and exhibition programs to networked themes.