New Exhibitions Projects Initiatives

Published June 2011

Aboriginal art at the Vatican

The National Museum of Australia's Margo Neale writes in depth about the curation of a 100 year old collection of Aboriginal art at the Vatican in Rome. She asks: "How do Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, previously captive to the anthropological gaze and to unequal power relations, not only interrogate the histories that defined them as ‘other’ and ‘lesser’, but also regain their voice and agency over historic cultural objects that reside in collections around the world?"

Published June 2011

Exhibitions to Watch

Published June 2011

A Third Path: the Musée des Confluences

French curator Arnaud Morvan, who recently completed his Phd at the University of Melbourne on the art of the East Kimberley, writes about the new approach to showing and consulting about Indigenous art taken by the still-under construction Musée des Confluences (due to open in 2014) in Lyon.
"It represents a first step towards an abolition of the segregation endured by non-Western art in Europe and an attempt to rise above the antiquated opposition between art and ethnography."

Published June 2011

Networks (cells & silos)

Monash University Museum of Art
1 February – 16 April 2011
Curator: Geraldine Barlow

Published June 2011

Dialogues with Landscape

Exhibition Co-ordinator: Katie Lenanton
University of Western Australia Cultural Precinct
15 February – 6 March 2011

Published June 2011

Romantic Landscapes

Laura Fisher worked for three years on indigenous artists' biographies for the DAAO (Dictionary of Australian Artists Online) and is now completing a doctoral thesis on the indigenous art market at the University of NSW. Here she brings her wide knowledge to bear on representational and romantic landcape paintings by indigenous artists.

Published June 2011

Victorian Indigenous Art Awards 2011

Article on VIAA, Indigenous arts in Victoria – from the VIAA Curator.

Published June 2011

John Barbour

John Barbour (1954-2011), a complex, intelligent and much loved South Australian artist and academic, was in the prime of his life and at the height of his career when he died on Sunday 17 April 2011.

Published June 2011

Branded: The Indigenous Aesthetic

I hate the word brand. People have forgotten the importance of sub-culture. We are a community and an intervention.

Ben Watt, Founder, Buzzin’Fly Records

Published June 2011

To hold and protect: Mulka at Yirrkala

The Mulka Project is a Yolngu archive and production centre incorporating a theatre, media lab, project office, audio video library and museum. “As the Mulka Project is growing up we need to be clear that it is just a resource and the law and culture is coming from the land where people are staying, even where there is no one staying, its patterns, the designs and culture, are coming from the country.” states Djambawa Marawili.

Published June 2011

Darren Siwes: dialogue with Rembrandt

Dutch art historian Marianne Riphagen, whose PhD looked at contemporary Indigenous photo-media artists, draws togther the dark and light in the artwork of Rembrandt and South Australia-based Darren Siwes to question the Dutch Golden Age.

Published June 2011