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Territory style: Salon des Refusés
Yanuwa/Larrakia/Bardi/Wardaman woman Franchesca Cubillo, Senior Curator/Advisor National Gallery of Australia, writes about the first Salon des Refusés (conceived and brought to fruition by gallerists Matt Ward and Paul Johnstone) held in Darwin in 2013 as a pendant to the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards.
Melbourne Now: The defining moment for a century of art schools?
Juliette Peers looks at the big picture of the NGV homegrown blockbuster Melbourne Now and finds its origins reach back in time.
Double-dare ya
Author and broadcaster Craig Schuftan looks at the perennial issue of the co-option of anti-establishment culture as seen in the different approaches of Kurt Cobain and the band started by his friend Kathleen Hanna - Riot Grrrl.
“This is [not] for everyone” – forewarning the end of a free and open web
Digital nomad Fee Plumley reviews the state of the internet and Facebook's new algorithm that wants to tell you what you want to know.
How the demographic got screwed
Associate Professor Joanna Mendelssohn looks over the last twenty-five years of tertiary art education and wonders where the intake of students from a broad socio-economic spectrum has gone and where the subsequent shrinking cultural conversation leaves Australia?
Back to the future: contemporary or alternative?
Professor Pat Hoffie of Griffith University, interviews the two new Directors of the IMA, Aileen Burns and Johan Lundh, and contextualises their appointment in the Contemporary Art Space context of 2014.
Letter from a young woman artist (after Janine Burke)
Diana Smith writes back to Burke questioning how much has changed.
The (white) elephant in the room: Criticising Aboriginal art
Does Aboriginal art exist in a critical vacuum?
Toward Indigenous Criticism: The Ah Kee paradox
Métis artist, curator and academic David Garneau explores the current situation of indigenous art through increasing global links and connections.
Ich Bin Ein Aratjara: 20 years later
Aboriginal super-curator Djon Mundine, who travelled to Europe in 1994 as touring curator with the significant exhibition Aratjara: art of the first Australians, looks back at the genesis and reception of that exhibition. He asks where is the political impetus evident in Aratjara today and where is the Aboriginal input into the development of national survey exhibitions.
The limits of criticism
Anthropologist John Carty casts his eyes over the last ten years of writing on Desert art, mostly in newspapers, and finds many cliches and inconsistencies. He asks: "Where are the fine-grained localised art histories, the rich biographies of our most interesting and important individual artists? Where are their voices?" And replies: "They are still waiting in the Desert."
Spirits beyond borders: Shadowlife
Curator and Associate Director of Taiwan Culture and Creative Platform Foundation Antoanetta Ivanovna, resident in Taiwan since 2011, discusses the travelling exhibition Shadowlife curated by Djon Mundine and Natalie King, and its impact in Taiwan where consciousness of their indigenous people is not as developed as it is in Australia.
Ghostnets go global, and local
Ghost nets are fishing nets that have been abandoned at sea, lost accidentally, or deliberately discarded. The GhostNet Project, which began on islands and in communities around the top of Australia, uses the nets to make artworks, to raise awareness of marine pollution, to be creative. Awareness of Ghostnets is on the rise both nationally and internationally.
Disquiet and resistance in the art of Julie Gough
Senior Curator of Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Victoria Judith Ryan surveys the complex and inventive art practice of Julie Gough who is concerned with "developing a visual language to engage with the unsettling space between conflicting and subsumed Australian histories."
Ken Thaiday Senior, Darnley Man
Exhibitions Manager at Cairns Regional Gallery Justin Bishop tells the rich story of how Ken Thaiday Sr. came to be a major Torres Strait Islander artist. In August 2013, Cairns Regional Gallery, in partnership with Cairns Indigenous Art Fair (CIAF), will be presenting a survey exhibition of Ken Thaiday Sr.’s work.
Jimmy Pike: there is more
Curator and writer Karen Dayman fills in the background of the development of the work and broadens the profile of Great Sandy Desert artist Jimmy Pike whose skills took him around the world and into collaborations with Desert Designs, with his partner Pat Lowe and with the theatre.
Rekospective
Yorta Yorta and Wiradjuri curator and lecturer Jirra Harvey traces the career of self-taught graffiti and studio artist Reko Rennie. He uses a traditional Kamilaroi patterning in neon and in graffiti as a contemporary statement of sovereignity. Harvey says: "The subtext to such works is a running narrative on government practices that work to control and restrain Aboriginal communities and the subsequent rebellion of the people."
The road to Pormpuraaw
Filmmaker Peter Hylands writes about a recent visit to the remote Pormpuraaw Art Centre in Far North Queensland. Here he talks with artist Sid Bruce Short Joe who speaks nine languages, the ninth is English.
Rainforest identity (past and future)
Napolean Oui is a Cairns-based, mid-career, Djabugay artist and a proud advocate of the rainforest art style unique to Far North Queensland. 2012 was a breakthrough year for him, he did a residency at Studio PM with Paul Machnik and others in Montreal, developed new work at Djumbunji Press for a solo show at Kickarts Contemporary Arts in Cairns during the Art Fair, AND sold work to the National Gallery of Australia.
String theory: Karen Mills
Michelle Culpitt examines the work practice of Northern Territory artist Karen Mills whose paintings are inspired by the string bags made by the women weavers of Arnhem Land. Culpitt writes: "The articulation of her painterly vision is only possible at the nexus of her experience and influences as an Aboriginal woman in contemporary Australia, a place of both deep connection and belonging to country, and also disjuncture and dislocation from a nation in denial of its own history."
Black prints* @ Cicada Press
Cicada Press is a research group within the School of Art at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales (COFA UNSW). For the past six years Cicada Press, with Tess Allas from the School of Art History and Art Education, have been working closely with a number of Aboriginal artists from across the country.
New currency: Ryan Presley
Ryan Presley's 2011 series 'Blood Money' is remarkable. These commemorative banknotes substitute the heroes of the white Australian monoculture (Banjo Patterson, Dame Mary Gilmore, Dame Nellie Melba and Sir Henry Parkes) with Aboriginal heroes, resistance fighters such as Pemulwuy, his son Tjedaberiyn (also known as Tedbury), Dundalli and Jandamarra and others such as the Gurindji stockman Vincent Lingiari who led the Wave Hill walk-off, and the late Wik elder Gladys Tybingoompa.
NUNGAODRADEK - AEAF 2013
odradek is a window exhibition space at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide. nungaodradek is a season of works by four emerging nunga (Aboriginal) artists based in South Australia curated by Ali Gumillya Baker. Their overall theme is sovereign protest.
Shen Shaomin: The day after tomorrow
The Day After Tomorrow is Chinese-Australian Shen Shaomin’s first solo show in Australia in ten years. His visions of a warped natural world tap into anxieties about civilisation’s ghastly effects. “The space for our lives is shrinking,” Shen said in a recent interview. “The world is more and more dangerous because of the way that we live our lives.”
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.
Jarragbu-nungu Warrambany: Flood in Warmun
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.
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.
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.”
The cinemas of disaster
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.