Diorama of the City: Between Site & Space 13 September - 13 October 2008 Tokyo Wonder Site Artists: Alex Gawronski, Gail Priest, Tim Silver, Hiraku Suzuki, exonemo, Paramodel
As Director of Asialink Arts Alison Carroll has had twenty years of experience curating and facilitating the curation of exhibitions in or connected to Asia. Her analysis emphasises the complexity and cultural differences experienced by Asian curators in their home countries and looks forward to a more glocal future as they increase their international presence.
Outgoing Director of the Experimental Art Foundation Melentie Pandilovksi spills the beans on the current state of play internationally in terms of powerful independent curators moving into important positions in museums. He puts forward the prevalence of a 'new institutionalism' seeking to redefine contemporary art institutions from within. The EAF is about to release a Futures paper on this topic.
Joanna Mendelssohn, author and Associate Professor at the College of Fine Art, University of New South Wales where she co-ordinates the Master of Art Administration, writes about the highly competitive and financially unrewarding realities of getting a position as a curator in an art musuem.
Director of Wollongong City Gallery Craig Judd writes about the memorable experience of curating Wild Thang: post pop from the MCA, a show that combined works from the MCA's collection with corresponding pieces in the collections of the towns the exhibition visited: Bathurst, Armidale, Gold Coast and Albury.
Juliette Peers, art historian and lecturer at RMIT, surveyed a number of freelance curators to find out how they work and why they embrace this insecure, interstitial existence. Hannah Mathews, Elizabeth Gertzakis, Vivonne Thwaites and Anne Kirker are among the freelance curators to whom she spoke.
London-based Macedonian artist and writer Nadja Prlja compares the urban and modern 5th Berlin Biennial BB5: When Things Cast No Shadow (5 April - 15 June 2008) with Manifesta 7 (19 July - 2 November 2008) which occupied the whole arae of Trentoni in Italy. Prlja pays particular attention to the differences in the ways the projects were curated.
Curator of the 2008 Adelaide Biennale Felicity Fenner discriminates between site-specific and site-responsive art practices in an analysis of the last two Singapore Biennales. She suggests that responding to the site may be the best way for a biennale to become more than an expo.
The Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT)'s Curator of Southeast Asian Art and Material Culture Joanna Barrkman curated Husi Bei Ala Timor Sira Nia Liman /From the Hands of Our Ancestors which is on at MAGNT in Darwin from 21 November 2008 to 12 July 2009. The show celebrates the survival of Timor-Leste's cultural inheritance and asks whether traditional art forms and techniques have a role to play in the formation and assertion of Timor-Leste's national and cultural identity.