Inflight ARI in partnership with Queenstown Heritage Festival

Queenstown
12 - 14 October 2012

Published December 2012

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."

Published December 2012

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

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

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

Remarking | Remaking: Contemporary Australian Drawing Connections

Curators: Abdullah M. I. Syed and Wenmin Li
Nicole Barakat, Denis Beaubois, Nick Brown, Muamer Cajic, Anie Nheu, Ana Pollack, Nusra Latif Qureshi, Marikit Santiago, Shay Tobin, Teo Treloar

Remarking | Remaking Community Project

Nicole Barrakat in collaboration with Blacktown Indian Subcontinent Women’s Group
Blacktown Arts Centre
20 July – 1 September 2012

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

Pat Brassington: Á Rebours

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

Published December 2012

HERE&NOW12

Curator: Katie Lenanton
Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Perth
11 August – 6 October 2012

Published December 2012

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.

Published 01 December 2012

Contained fear: Ken & Julia Yonetani's uranium art

Published 01 December 2012

Somewhere: Manuwangku life with a nuclear waste dump

The current touring exhibition by Jagath Dheerasekara, Manuwangku: Under the Nuclear Cloud (2012) is a salutary reminder that the struggle for self-determination by Aboriginal people continues unabated. Jagath’s project dates back to July 2010 when Beyond Nuclear Initiative (BNI) organised a forum in Sydney to inform people of the impact of a decision made in mid 2005 by the Howard government to dump nuclear waste at Manuwangku, or Muckaty as it is popularly known, 120 km north of Tennant Creek.

Published December 2012