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.

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Cambodia and youth arts

Life is tough in Cambodia if you are not a tourist. Dragonfly Tours is run by a unique partnership model which results in terrific holidays as well as contributing to the betterment of life in Cambodia for its residents.

Felicity Wright

Editorial: Art in the face of disaster

Humanity seems to be on the brink of annihilating the natural world on which we depend. Our quarrelsome species has built a gigantic web of capitalism, connecting global corporations, consumerism, the markets, the military, rhetoric machines called politicians and the organisations and institutions that now include, tragically, the universities.

Stephanie Britton

The art of climate change

Paul Downton

Shen Shaomin: The day after tomorrow

The Day After Tomorrow is Chinese-Australian Shen Shaomin’s first solo show in Australia in ten years. His visions of a warped natural world tap into anxieties about civilisation’s ghastly effects. “The space for our lives is shrinking,” Shen said in a recent interview. “The world is more and more dangerous because of the way that we live our lives.”

Christen Cornell

History of Cultural Responses to Disastrous Storms (1612-2012)

Jennifer Hamilton reviews English and European responses to big storms over time and suggests that even today we need "the more metaphysical dimensions of our existence – the cultural, social and political – to even begin to understand how thunder, lightning, strong winds and an abundance of water falling from the sky can still completely destroy a city and change the course of history."

Jennifer Hamilton

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?"

Ann Finegan

Inflight ARI in partnership with Queenstown Heritage Festival

Queenstown 12 - 14 October 2012

Lucy Hawthorne

Calamity Japan: grieving artists respond to quake, tsunami and nuclear crisis

Former editor of Japanese Art Scene Monitor and the current Arts, Entertainment and Features Division Chief at The Japan Times, Edan Corkill looks at the wide variety of sensitive works produced by Japanese artists in the wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake and the subsequent Fukashima Daiichi nuclear Power Plant disaster.

Edan Corkill

Khmer pop-lock: saving kids through breaking

It's tough being a refugee, really tough for some. Cambodian Tuy 'KK' Sobil's story begins in a refugee camp in Thailand, travels to the US where he winds up in prison for eight years and more happily shifts to Phnom Penh where he landed as a deportee from the US and has since become an important role model teaching hiphop dancing and music to vulnerable children.

Annemarie Kohn

Ian Burns: In the Telling

ACMI, Melbourne 24 July 2012 – 20 January 2013

Juliette Peers

Colour by number

!Metro Arts, Brisbane 19 September – 6 October 2012

Angelita Howell

A Universe of Small Truths: Julie Henderson

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

Littler Kim

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