Donning Oxford

Christian Thompson who is one of the two inaugural Charlie Perkins Scholars at Oxford University writes about this experience and how it makes him think of his upbringing and the responsibility it entails. "...it is our arrival at Oxford that reminds me of how much work we still have ahead of us as young Aboriginal people and future leaders of our communities. This is something you feel as an inherent responsibility when you meet people daily from all around the world, whose communities are facing similar hardships and the symptoms of the ravages of colonisation; time is of the essence."

Published June 2011

Ben McKeown: Sunshine and Lollipops

Melbourne-based Ben McKeown was the overall winner of the 2011 Victorian Indigenous Art Award with a mysterious photograph called Untitled of an Aboriginal man concealing hinself behind two heavy boomernags. McKeown's artwork is inspired by a quest for belonging, by the genealogical researches of the anthropologist Norman Tindale, by the city and the suburbs.

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

CoBra and Aboriginal art at AAMU, Utrecht

Newtown fellow at the University of Cambridge Khadija La visited AAMU (the Musuem of Contemporary Aboriginal Art) in Utrecht to see "Breaking with Tradition" an exhibition curated by Georges Petitjean that hangs works by CoBrA artists together with work by Indigenous artists and Roar artists who work or worked in Indigenous art centres.

Published June 2011

Denis Nona: Art Terroir-ist

Griffith Artworks and Griffith University Art Gallery Director Simon Wright reviews the stellar career in sculpture and printmaking of Torres Strait Islander Denis Nona whose newest commission at the Musée des Confluences in Lyon is eight metres high.

Published June 2011

Ken and Julia Yonetani / Janet Tavener

Still Life: The Food Bowl: Ken and Julia Yonetani
Artereal Gallery, Sydney, June 2011
Mildura Palimpsest #8, 9-11 Sept 2011
GV Art, London, October 2011

Melting moments: Janet Tavener
Incinerator Art Space, Willoughby
2 -27 March 2011

Published June 2011

Why is there a donkey in that painting?

Published June 2011

Remembering Forward at the Museum Ludwig

Curator at AAMU Georges Petitjean describes the 'Remembering Forward' exhibition at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in detail, how it came about, what surrounds it and what it might mean.

Published June 2011

Exhibitions to Watch

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

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