The enchanted forest: new gothic storytellers Curator: Jazmina Cininas Geelong Gallery, 12 April - 9 June 2008; Bendigo Art Gallery, 19 July – 17 August 2008; Shepparton Art Gallery, 1 November – 14 December 2008; Latrobe Regional Gallery, 21 February – 19 April 2009; Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery, 1 May – 7 June 2009; Dubbo Regional Gallery , 4 July – 13 September 2009; Tweed River Art Gallery, 1 October – 15 November 2009
Paul Carter's Nearamnew, a public art work which is embedded in the 7,500 square metres of paving at Federation Square, asks for multiple, inclusive and open-ended responses.
Potter and Head of Ceramics at ANU School of Art Janet de Boos writes about her journeys to China since 1996 and her current collaborations in bone china tableware. She writes : 'Rather than just a place where we can appropriate techniques and technologies and source cheap labour, China becomes a place for Australians to work and research collaboratively with fellow artists.'
In late 2008, the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) established its first Pacific Arts department. From the opening of the controversial Musée du quai Branly in Paris in 2006, to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s creation of permanent new galleries for Oceanic art in 2007, there has been an international surge of interest in Pacific art, accompanied by hot debate surrounding exhibition protocols. Among the many works exhibited at these institutions are rare carvings of traditional gods from the Cook Islands: works that are still of great cultural significance to many Islanders today. Jacqui Durrant asked artists, curators and cultural professionals in the largest of the Cook Islands, Rarotonga, their opinions as to how images of their ‘old gods’ might be best exhibited, to see what a Western art gallery might take on board.
A number of practising artists were invited to respond to a scenario in which a local council asked them to organise an exhibition featuring local artists from a sister city in a third world country. It seems a noble gesture, but one fraught with potential missteps. How would they proceed?
In 2008 Nathan Gray spent two months on Itaparica, a Brazilian island in the Bahia region, as part of an exchange initiated by The South Project Inc. At the end of the year the exhibition Tudo Que Acho was held to show the work created and produced as a result of the residency. The title in English means ‘everything I think’. In Portuguese the phrase also denotes discovery, as ‘to think’ and ‘to find’ signify the same act. Tudo Que Acho: Nathan Gray was shown 4 – 20 December 2008 at The Narrows, Melbourne.
Artists who have created fascinating works within the DMZ (Korean Demilitarized Zones) include the Spanish artist Santiago Sierra, the Italian artist Armin Linke and the Australian artist Lyndal Jones.
On a residency at the Taipei Artists Village in Taiwan in 2007 Gregory Pryor researched a plant from which tongcao or pith paper was traditionally made. The complex collaborative journey to find the plant and the way its pith is removed forms a celebratory echo to his previous work Black Solander 2005 about endangered plants in Western Australia.