Contributors

Una Rey

Tarntanya / Adelaide, Australia

Dr Una Rey is Editor of Artlink, where she commissions, manages and contributes to Artlink's publication program. She joined Artlink in August 2021 and previously worked as an academic (teacher/researcher in art history), a freelance editor and arts writer and an independent curator and arts manager.

Website

Articles

Two Painters, Two Laws and One Big Spirit

April 2025 marks twenty-five years since Rusty Peters (Dirrji) and Peter Adsett painted Two Laws One Big Spirit at Humpty Doo near Darwin. The fourteen canvases—seven pairs, in formal association with each other—are now permanently housed in the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), gifted by GRANTPIRRIE.

A quarter of a century is a long time in the politics of reconciliation, the framework within which the series has mostly been discussed. ‘A dialogue in paint’ as Adsett refers to the career-defining project, the works are evidence of a correspondence between unlikely painting peers, born of acutely different world views and visual vocabularies.

Narrative + Painting
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Ben McKeown and the films of Mark Street

Like genealogies, archives hold and hide information. They ask as many questions as they answer. In 2011 in Artlink’s Beauty + Terror issue, Daniel Browning profiled Ben McKeown’s practice when, as an emerging artist, he was awarded the Victorian Indigenous Art Award. The work in question Untitled (2011) presents a strong young man in a singlet wielding two hardwood fighting boomerangs. His Aboriginality is inferred, but his personal identity is deftly masked by the weapons. There is a sparring session underway, a flirtation, a provocation, a staging in which humour and menace play equal parts. The image entreats interpretation and deflects it. As Browning wrote, its ‘enigmatic, a question mark. But what is it trying to say?’...
 

INDIGENOUS_Working Voices
1.296
Kader Attia
4 Jul 2017
1.226
Collisions: The Martu respond to Maralinga

On the cross‑cultural collaborations of filmmaker Lynette Wallworth working with Nyarri Nyarri Morgan and Curtis Taylor

Indigenous_Trans Cultural
0.825
Out of darkness
Mazie Turner 1954–2014
Bio Art
1.482084690553745928338762
Speaking in Colour
Artist and curator Una Rey writes about the exhibition 'Speaking in colour' that she curated for the Newcastle Gallery from their collection in March-May 2011. Her experience of working with Indigenous artists in Central Australia coloured her choices and her interpretations of them.
Phenomena
Perks Bendigo Art Gallery Country Arts SA Wollongong Art Gallery