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.

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Grant Dale Inflight Gallery, Hobart December 1-22 2007

Diana Klaosen

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

Making it Modern The Watercolours of Kenneth McQueen

Curator: Samantha Littley Queensland Art Gallery 10 November 2007 5 May 2008

Pat Hoffie

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

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

Chance encounters: Pamela Kouwenhoven and Peter McKay

Two South Australian writers work with discarded materials to make strong commentaries on contemporary life. Pamela Kouwenhoven uses old empty plastic car battery cases to make Rosalie Gascoigne-like collages of faded colour and worn histories. Like her signature works using malthoid taken from beneath rainwater tanks, they have a strong environmental agenda, drawing attention to beauty as well as responsibility. Peter McKay makes playful works with serious messages. At night he makes patterns in oil stains on the road with glitter and photographs them. These works collapse the infinite into the accidental as galaxies appear on the ground.

Melinda Rankin

Artrave

Artlink

Wonderful World

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

John Neylon

Editorial

Ian Hamilton

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

The error of our ways: Madeleine Kelly

Brisbane-based artist Madeleine Kelly's oil paintings approach big issues through precise depictions of incongruous narratives which draw on both personal and mythological sources. Her comments on global issues like oil and pollution, human folly and its consequences, are framed like dream scenarios that touch us all. Kelly came to Australia from Germany when she was two and the celebrated 19th century German childrens story Struwwelpeter written and vividly illustrated by Heinrich Hoffmann echoes in her imaginative paintings of cautionary tales and surreal spaces.

Timothy Morrell

A rusty sign at the end of a bloody empire

At Magnet Gallery in Quezon City Filipino artist Norberto Roldans exhibition Oil goes beyond the local situation and deals with the theme of peak oil as the root of all geopolitical evil, with the United States of America as the primary agent of ill intent. Lourd de Vera vividly describes it as a deliberate exercise in propaganda and sloganeering. Roldan takes a broad historical view and reflects on US policy in the Philippines over time while the rusting Caltex sign embedded in the exhibition asserts a warning: no empire lasts forever.

Lourd de Vera

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