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.

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Grant Dale Inflight Gallery, Hobart December 1-22 2007

Diana Klaosen

Artrave

Artlink

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

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

The winding way

Cairns-based artist Tijn Meulendijks considers the plant world as his medium. His exhibition, Natura est ars, held at Umbrella Studio in Townsville in 2007, was concentrated around a single plant community gathered while walking in a coastal Melaleuca swamp after fire had affected the environment.

Jacqui Stock

Handling the Adelaide Biennial

Stephanie Britton interviewed Felicity Fenner, curator of the 2008 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, to find out what Handle with Care really means in the twenty-first century.

Stephanie Britton

Replay: Christian Marclay

Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) Melbourrne 19 November 2007 - 2 February 2008

Dylan Rainforth

Robert MacPherson, Vernon Ah Kee and Jeremy Hynes

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

Timothy Morrell

World tree: sounds of a bigger picture. Alison Clouston and Boyd

Alison Clouston and Boyd use sound and sculpture in layered and immersive installations that draw attention to delicate and complex systems in nature and what humans have made of them. 2007 is the first year they have made an artwork with a formal carbon audit and offset. Their recent art-making has caused them to become vegetarian. They believe that Today we humans need to relinquish this deeply embedded sense that we will be saved by some force beyond us, we alone have to sort out the mess we have made of this planet Earth, our only home.

Clare Lewis

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

[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

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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