Published March 2014
Published June 2013
Published March 2013
Published September 2012
Published June 2012
Published March 2012
Published December 2011
Published September 2011
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
AEAF (Australian Experimental Art Foundation), Adelaide 20 July – 18 August 2012
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne 11 August - 23 September 2012
Curator, film programmer and writer Danni Zuvela reviews the genre of disaster films since 1903 and finds that the most recent example 'Beasts of the Southern Wild' expresses a spirit of resilience that is both wild and magical.
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.
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."
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?"
In 2011 at Tin Sheds Gallery in Sydney as part of The Right To The City project an installation and performance by NZ/Australian artist D.V. Rogers called DISASTR explored the idea of shelter in times of disaster by building a functioning Hexayurt Hotel in the centre of Wadigal Green at Sydney University.
Queenstown 12 - 14 October 2012
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.
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.
