Conducting Mobility

Artists thinking and making work about fuel span the globe and delve into a wide range of ramifications. UK-based PLATFORM have done a multi-pronged report called Unraveling the Carbon Web on four oil-producing hot spots, Iraq, Nigeria, Russia and the Caucasus. Chicago-based Laurie Palmers Notions of Expenditure solicits renderings of exercise equipment and gyms redesigned for the production of electricity. Brian Collier wanders the edges of Illinois highways to locate thriving non-human life forms. kanarinka documented her running of the official evacuation route out of Boston while collaborators Kim Stringfellow, Amy Balkin, Tim Halbur, Pond and Greenaction made an audio guide for a Californian highway drawing its military, residential and agricultural stories together.

More from this Issue

Robert MacPherson, Vernon Ah Kee and Jeremy Hynes

Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane 8 December 2007 - 2 February 2008

Timothy Morrell

Our Lucky Country - (Still Different)

Nuha Saad, Soda_Jerk, Ron Adams, Mimi Tong, Nana Ohnesorge, Liam Benson, George Tillianakis, Huseyin Sami, Adam Norton, Ruark Lewis, Maria Cruz, Elizabeth Day, Michelle Hanlin, Sarah Goffman, Anna Peters Hazelhurst Regional Gallery 8 December 2007 - 3 February 2008

Jo Higgins

ON' n 'ON

Khaled Sabsabi Campbelltown Arts Centre December 1, 2007 - February 3, 2008

Naomi Gall

Watching as the enchanted land meets its end: Qiu Anxiong

With traditional Chinese brush painting skills Qiu Anxiong's three screen video animation New Book of Mountains and Seas, Part 1 shows the history of the world from its genesis as a vast sea to cities on the edge of destruction. It shows cycles of animal, bird and human life, oil drums and pipes, trees, mountains, the last ten yeas in China and the Great Wall of China. A modern version of the Shanhai Jing (The Classic of Mountains and Sea) the two thousand year old Chinese fanciful geography, Qiu Anxiong's animations brilliantly use scale to combine drawing with political comments.

Yuko Hasegawa

Power and art in East Timor

Recent art made by East Timorese artists is contrasted with work by Australian war artists Wendy Sharpe and Rick Amor. Artworks made by artists from the Arte Moris Free Art School in Dili are full of passion and deep knowledge of the incongruities of war and the poverty of their lives while the artworks made by Sharpe and Amor seem remote and generalised.

Jennifer Phipps

Wonderful World

Curator: Erica Green 12 October 7 December 2007 Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art

John Neylon

Fierce or Friendly: Humans in the Animal World

Curators: Craig Judd, Kathryn Medlock, Peter J. Hughes, Vicky Farmery Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) 14 December 20076 April 2008

Judith Abell

Writing images with words: an inheritance of ambiguous faces

Beirut-based artist and writer Walid Salek's book of essays, called Jane-Loyse Tissier, deals with stereotyping in art. He is concerned with the way the Third World is often treated as a cliche of constant emergency and crisis and not as a subjective and historical space. His essays reinterpret some canonical works of Western art by artists like Titian, Courbet, Ensor, Giotto and David. His claim is that all pictures and all interpretations are contingent and thus in defending the Third World's right to its own interpretations based on its own values the entire world is being defended.

Bilal Khbeiz

[the space in between] Book project

Curated by Tara Gilbee VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne 13 July -4 August 2007 Sidney Myer Work on Paper Gallery, Bendigo Art Gallery 15 March - 13 April 2008 Umbrella Studio Contemporary Arts 8 August - 14 September 2008

Simon Gregg

The Road to Here

David Martin 17 November 2007 - 6 January 2008 Devonport Regional Gallery

Hawthorne Lucy

The revolution will not be televised: the changing landscape of film and video production in the Arab world

The situation of Arab cinema today, while it varies from Morocco to Abu Dhabi, is at an interesting turning point due to digital technology and political and economic events. In spite of censorship there are increasingly more film festivals and a burgeoning audience of cinephiles. The 2007 Cinema East Film Festival in New York celebrated independent film production: At a moment when mainstream news seems helplessly captive to global conflicts, the war on terror and the clash of fundamentalisms, independent cinema has come to be regarded as a substitute for representing people, places and their stories. Filmmakers from the region are the most enchanting human rights activists, the most playful analysts, the most imaginative historians but first and foremost, the most generous and emboldening artists.

Rasha Salti

Obscure dimensions of conflict

Lyndell Brown and Charles Green travelled in early 2007 for five weeks to the Middle East, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf as the Australian War Memorials official war artists. The artists will make a series of oil paintings for the War Memorial from some of the many photos they took as well as developing a series of photos outside the official commission. The photos show an abstracted ruined world, shadows, machinery, stockpiles of weapons behind barbed wire, aircraft, campsites and deserts. The Ziggurat of Ur is evident in two photographs of Iraq and eloquently symbolises the rise and fall of cultures and armies across the land.

Warwick Heywood

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