The elephant in the room: public art in Brisbane

Artist-activist Fiona Foley recounts a recent incident of the commissioning of a public art work for Kurilpa (place of the kuril or native water rat). Kurilpa is the cultural precinct where GOMA is located. Foley imagines works by prominent Queensland Aboriginal artists dotted along that place.

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Editorial: Making history

Stephanie Radok takes the temperature of Aboriginal art and history in 2012.

Stephanie Radok

Restless – Adelaide International 2012

Curator: Victoria Lynn Flinders University City Gallery Samstag Museum of Art Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia Australian Experimental Art Foundation March 2012

Stephanie Radok

The performative print: Alick Tipoti's Girelal

Jan Hogan

Postcards from China

Multi-disciplinary artists Jason Wing, who has both Aboriginal and Chinese forebears, undertook a residency in Xucun, a remote village in China, where Chinese artists Qu Yuan and Shen Shaomin have established the Xucun Art Commune in order to protect the village's beauty and heritage.

Jason Wing

Ancestral memory: out of the shadows

University of Melbourne Research Fellow Fran Edmonds along with Victorian artists Lee Darroch, Maree Clarke and Vicki Couzens looks at the story of Aboriginal art in Victoria as a determined reclamation of the past, a cross-generational celebration in the present and a visionary guide for the future.

Fran Edmonds

I Forgive You: Bindi Cole's Seventy Times Seven

Bruce McLean

Chiharu Shiota: State of Being Sue Saxon and Jane Becker: All that is solid melts into air

TarraWarra Museum of Art 25 February - 27 May 2012

Juliette Peers

Trepang: crossing cultures / creating connections

by Alison Inglis and Susan Lowish

Alison Inglis and Susan Lowish

Andrew McQualter: A partial index

Daine Singer, Melbourne 27 January - 3 March 2012

Emily Cormack

Big wave: Desert Country

Legendary curator John Kean looks at three recent large exhibitions of Aboriginal art - Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art, Desert Country and Living Water, and questions whether the same spirit sings in all of them.

John Kean

How did Aborigines invent the idea of contemporary art?

Brenda L Croft, artist, curator and Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute for Experimental Arts, UNSW, reviews and finds gaps in the big pink book put together over many years by Ian McLean that collects iconic bits of writing about Aboriginal art and knits them together.

Brenda L Croft

For architecture and country

Torres Strait Islander Kevin O'Brien, who is commissioning and directing an independent exhibition called 'Finding Country' at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2012 running from August to 25 November 2012, writes about an Aboriginal architecture that is not about buildings shaped like native animals.

Kevin O'Brien

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