Indigenous: Beauty & Terror
Issue 31:2 | June 2011
A bumper annual survey of current developments and issues in this rich and diverse field. Artlink Indigenous: Beauty and Terror 2011 follows in the footsteps of the groundbreaking blak on blak issue of 2010 with abundant images, profiles of contemporary Indigenous artists, analysis of exhibitions of Aboriginal art in Australia and overseas, and polemics on the politics of Aboriginal art.
In this issue
Rewriting the Labels
Indigenous culture is moving out of dedicated spaces and into the mainstream. Ultimately all Indigenous culture is claiming the space for experiences that have not been widely told and this broadens the space for the stories of everyone whose stories are untold.
An encounter with the National Galleries
Lecturer in the Australian Indigenous Studies program at the University of Melbourne, Odette Kelada describes her visit to the National Gallery of Australia's new Indigenous galleries and the National Portrait Gallery that is just next door and views them as sites of contemporary Frontier warfare.
Self-Abrasion of our Nations
Curator and artist Brenda Croft gets experiential in telling about Australia Day, her latest exhibition Stop (the) gap and what is shared by indigenous people around the globe.
Fearing Truganini
Tasmanian essayist and poet, currently working as Indigenous Visiting Research Scholar at AIATSIS in Canberra, Greg Lehman looks over David Hansen's recent award-winning essay entitled 'Seeing Truganini' and finds it wanting.
Trevor Nickolls: Other side Art
This is the first time that noted historian and writer on Aboriginal art Ian McLean has written a substantial interpretive artcile on the work of Trevor Nickolls. Nickolls began working in the 70s and is still painting his own particular brand of cross-cultural art.
Denis Nona: Art Terroir-ist
Griffith Artworks and Griffith University Art Gallery Director Simon Wright reviews the stellar career in sculpture and printmaking of Torres Strait Islander Denis Nona whose newest commission at the Musée des Confluences in Lyon is eight metres high.
Fiona Foley: Public and Political
Fiona Foley's recent public work has gone from strength to strength most recently at Mackay where her six large new works form a trail commemorating the Pacific and black history of the region.
Jason Wing: In Flight
Larissa Behrendt writes about both soothing and painful installations and paintings by Jason Wing that explore his Chinese and Aboriginal roots.
Jo Rootsey: Painting Country
Dina Ibrahim looks at the Joe Rootsey Retrospective curated by Bruce McLean at the Queensland Art Gallery in 2010 to find an artist who in his short life achieved compelling evocations of his relationship to country.
Darren Siwes: dialogue with Rembrandt
Dutch art historian Marianne Riphagen, whose PhD looked at contemporary Indigenous photo-media artists, draws togther the dark and light in the artwork of Rembrandt and South Australia-based Darren Siwes to question the Dutch Golden Age.
Yalangabara: Art of the Djang'kawu
'Yalangabara: Art of the Djang'kawu' curated by Banduk Marika and Margie West includes art made from 1939 till recently. All works are about the same creation story and all comprise a history of creative and spiritual custodianship by the Marika family of the Rirratjingu clan.
To hold and protect: Mulka at Yirrkala
The Mulka Project is a Yolngu archive and production centre incorporating a theatre, media lab, project office, audio video library and museum. “As the Mulka Project is growing up we need to be clear that it is just a resource and the law and culture is coming from the land where people are staying, even where there is no one staying, its patterns, the designs and culture, are coming from the country.” states Djambawa Marawili.
Romantic Landscapes
Laura Fisher worked for three years on indigenous artists' biographies for the DAAO (Dictionary of Australian Artists Online) and is now completing a doctoral thesis on the indigenous art market at the University of NSW. Here she brings her wide knowledge to bear on representational and romantic landcape paintings by indigenous artists.
Blandowski's Illustrated Encyclopaedia
Freelance curator, honorary associate of Museum Victoria and Blandowski-ite from way back John Kean analyses this prickly Prussian polymath's Illustrated Encyclopedia on Australia at last brought together and to light by the efforts of New Zealander Harry Allen. The book includes contributions by Mark Dugagrist, Brook Andrew, Luise Hercus and Thomas A. Darragh.
Torres Strait Islander watercolours
The Queensland State Library Executive Manager of Indigenous research and projects Tom Mosby writes about the Margaret Lawrie Works on Paper Collection and the role of art in the lives of Torres Strait Islanders. Between July and October 2011, the watercolours in the Margaret Lawrie Works on Paper Collection will, for the first time, be exhibited together as part of 'Strait Home' at the State Library of Queensland.
Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route
Sarah Scott reviews and questions Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route exhibition at the National Musuem of Australa. She asks: "Why don’t the NMA’s collections of Indigenous material culture feature more strongly in their exhibition program? Why are both the NMA and the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) collecting the highly sought after and expensive works produced by major Papunya artists? If the commissioning of art and associated documentary material is a priority for the NMA what other Indigenous material culture may they be neglecting?"
Remembering Forward at the Museum Ludwig
Curator at AAMU Georges Petitjean describes the 'Remembering Forward' exhibition at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in detail, how it came about, what surrounds it and what it might mean.
CoBra and Aboriginal art at AAMU, Utrecht
Newtown fellow at the University of Cambridge Khadija La visited AAMU (the Musuem of Contemporary Aboriginal Art) in Utrecht to see "Breaking with Tradition" an exhibition curated by Georges Petitjean that hangs works by CoBrA artists together with work by Indigenous artists and Roar artists who work or worked in Indigenous art centres.
A Third Path: the Musée des Confluences
French curator Arnaud Morvan, who recently completed his Phd at the University of Melbourne on the art of the East Kimberley, writes about the new approach to showing and consulting about Indigenous art taken by the still-under construction Musée des Confluences (due to open in 2014) in Lyon. "It represents a first step towards an abolition of the segregation endured by non-Western art in Europe and an attempt to rise above the antiquated opposition between art and ethnography."
Elcho Island: Morning Star over London
Artlink's UK contributing editor Jo Higgins interviewed Melbourne-born London gallerist Rebecca Hossack about her Indigenous art program and her attempts to raise its profile in London. She has two galleries and each summer for three months both galleries show only Australian Indigenous art in her Songlines series. Recently Elcho Island art featured.
New displays at Pitt Rivers Museum
In 2009 eight new case displays were added to the legendary 1884 Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Indigenous art scholar and lecturer Susan Lowish examines how Aboriginal art fared in this rejig of history.
Rising Queensland Indigenous artists
As leaders of unique working partnerships between the Indigenous art industry and the Queensland Government, pioneers like Judy Watson, Dennis Nona, Vernon Ah Kee, Richard Bell and Sally Gabori have established strong international reputations.
Donning Oxford
Christian Thompson who is one of the two inaugural Charlie Perkins Scholars at Oxford University writes about this experience and how it makes him think of his upbringing and the responsibility it entails. "...it is our arrival at Oxford that reminds me of how much work we still have ahead of us as young Aboriginal people and future leaders of our communities. This is something you feel as an inherent responsibility when you meet people daily from all around the world, whose communities are facing similar hardships and the symptoms of the ravages of colonisation; time is of the essence."
Action at Canopy Artspace in Cairns
Canopy Artspace first opened for the 2009 Cairns Art Fair. It houses the Australian Art Print Network, New Flames Foundation and Editions Tremblay NFP (no Fixed Press). Paloma Ramos who works at Editions Tremblay vividly decribes the intense and fertile work in printmaking and sculpture that happens at Canopy.
Euraba Paper Company, Boggabilla
Associate Lecturer at the College of Fine Art in Sydney Tess Allas writes about when she was NSW Regional Indigenous Cultural Officer and first met the women of Boggabilla who formed the Euraba Paper Company which won the Parliament of NSW Aboriginal Art Prize in 2010.
Working in Indigenous Art Centres
Felicity Wright speaks from long experience, as a worker and as a reviewer of art centres on Aboriginal lands. Her thoughtful article teases out many do's and don'ts in this highly contested field.
John Barbour
John Barbour (1954-2011), a complex, intelligent and much loved South Australian artist and academic, was in the prime of his life and at the height of his career when he died on Sunday 17 April 2011.
Ulli Beier
Ulli Beier (1922-2011) I remember a Yoruba saying that Ulli often quoted: “If an old man dies, you shall not weep but congratulate his family for that his life has come full circle.”
Victorian Indigenous Art Awards 2011
Article on VIAA, Indigenous arts in Victoria – from the VIAA Curator.
Tracey Moffatt / Stop(the)Gap / <BR>tall man
Tracey Moffatt: Narratives Curators: Stephen Zagala, Maria Zagala Art Gallery of South Australia 26 February - 20 March 2011 Stop (the) Gap: International Indigenous art in motion Curator: Brenda Croft Samstag Museum of Art 24 February - 21 April 2011 Vernon Ah Kee: tall man Australian Experimental Art Foundation 23 February - 26 March 2011
Dialogues with Landscape
Exhibition Co-ordinator: Katie Lenanton University of Western Australia Cultural Precinct 15 February – 6 March 2011
Landscapes and Horses: Ivan Durrant
Curator: Rodney James Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery 16 February - 26 April 2011
Space Antics: Sue Henderson, David Marsden, Penny Mason
Burnie Regional Art Gallery 19 March - 8 May 2011
Ken and Julia Yonetani / Janet Tavener
Still Life: The Food Bowl: Ken and Julia Yonetani Artereal Gallery, Sydney, June 2011 Mildura Palimpsest #8, 9-11 Sept 2011 GV Art, London, October 2011 Melting moments: Janet Tavener Incinerator Art Space, Willoughby 2 -27 March 2011
Networks (cells & silos)
Monash University Museum of Art
1 February – 16 April 2011
Curator: Geraldine Barlow
1 February – 16 April 2011
Curator: Geraldine Barlow
Dis-covery
Long Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart 25 March - 1 May 2011 Curator: Colin Langridge
Paint every hill: Billy Benn
Billy Benn Perrurle and Catherine Peattie with essays by Ian McLean and Judith Ryan IAD Press RRP $34.95
