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

Editorial

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.

Published December 2012

Before and after: the haunted image in a post 9/11 era

From September 11, 2011 to January 8, 2012 an exhibition called September 11 curated by Peter Eleey was held at MoMA PS1 in New York. Charity Bramwell describes key works in this "shocking and intriguing" exhibition which commemorated the tenth anniversary of the historic attacks on the World Trade Centre Twin Towers.

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

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

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

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.

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

Falling through time

In September 2011 at the UTS Gallery in an exhibition called The Fall before the Fall Elvis Richardson and Daniel Mudie Cunningham showed work reflecting on 9/11. Anna Gibbs analyses how their works make this trauma "articulable, shareable and ... to some extent, bearable."

Published December 2012

The art of climate change

Architect, writer and urban evolutionary Paul Downton asks where the great climate change art is, finds some examples and suggests that more is sorely needed. "Have you ever seen climate change activism that made you laugh? While your jaw may drop slightly when confronted with some of the hard facts about climate change impacts, have you ever really gasped at a work of climate change art?"

Published December 2012

Bungaree: the First Australian

Curator: Djon Mundine
Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney
1 September – 25 November 2012
then touring

Published December 2012

Exhibitions to watch

Published December 2012