New Orleans': Resilience goes way back before Katrina

The Big Easy is a nickname for New Orleans, USA, referring to the easy-going, laid back attitude to life that jazz musicians and local residents indulge in there. Carol Schwarzman, with the aid of her brother, reviews some resilient responses to the Big Hurricane Katrina's path through it on 25 August 2005. In the words of US writer Tom Piazza: "The ‘underprivileged’ people of New Orleans “spun a culture out of their lives – a music, a cuisine, a sense of life – that has been recognised around the world as a transforming spiritual force.”

Published December 2012

Roads cross: contemporary directions in Australian art

Curators: Vivonne Thwaites, Fiona Salmon, Anita Angel
Flinders University City Gallery
29 June – 26 August 2012

Published December 2012

Pat Brassington: Á Rebours

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne
11 August - 23 September 2012

Published December 2012

Jarragbu-nungu Warrambany: Flood in Warmun

On 13 March 2011 a deluge of water swept through the Warrmarn [Warmun] community. It rushed into Turkey Creek from the tributaries that flow northward from the Purnululu ranges and from the eastern hills. Assistant manager and curator at Warmun Arts Centre Cate Massola asks how much consultation with residents occurred around their evacuation and the rebuilding of their homes.

Published December 2012

Promoting the long view

Artist and filmmaker Malcolm McKinnon's current practice is focused around documentary filmmaking and social history, motivated by an appreciation of living memory and local vernacular. He writes about the Illuminated by Fire project, an initiative of Regional Arts Victoria, that involved a dozen artists working with eleven local communities in the wake of Black Saturday.

Published December 2012

A Universe of Small Truths: Julie Henderson

AEAF (Australian Experimental Art Foundation), Adelaide
20 July – 18 August 2012

Published December 2012

9th Shanghai Biennale: Re-Activation

Chief Curator: Qiu Zhijie
Co-curators: Boris Groys, Jens Hoffmann, Johnson Chang

Shanghai Power Station of Art
and other venues
2 October 2012 – 31 March 2013

Published December 2012

Coming soon: Big mining and the question of scale

Ann Finegan raises the alarm on the fiendish short-sighted depradations of Big Coal open cut mining in the lower Hunter Valley and other places currently under threat. She describes the work done by artist/activists in response and asks: "How does one fight such incommensurables of scale and the slow unfold of food bowl and water disaster? Where do we start? With protective changes to State and Federal legislation? With commensurable economic data?"

Published December 2012

Artrave

Published December 2012

2012 Deadly Ennui

Pat Hoffie riffs off Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous 18th century poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner with its curse brought on by the killing of an albatross all the way to Lars Von Trier's recent film Melancholia about the end of the world. "Nowadays shit is happening all the time everywhere to everybody."

Published December 2012

Contact lenses: Lloyd Godman's ecological art

New Zealand-born ecological artist, Lloyd Godman, who now lives in Australia, has in his own determined way for over thirty years, pondered and acted upon questions of how aesthetics might be involved in creating sustainable solutions to environmental problems. Historian Helen McDonald uses eco-critic Timothy Morton's notion of ambient aesthetics to examine three of Godman's multimedia projects.

Published December 2012

Conversations in ellipsis: an exercise in affect & association... time & (e)motion studies, or things unsaid

Curator: Lisa Harms
Adelaide Botanic Garden, FELTspace, SASA Gallery
31 July – 26 August 2012

Published December 2012