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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.
Old Categories, New Frameworks: Asia-Australia
Writer, researcher and arts manager Christen Cornell studies the way China is now much more of a player on the international art curcuit than Australia and what it means to young Chinise-Australian artists.
Transcultural Radical
Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in Sydney Aaron Seeto attends to the artwork of Sumugan Sivanesan, Sangeeta Sandrasegar, Guan Wei and Kaleb Sabsabi to raise questions of experiences of cultural difference and the way they are inadequately critically interrogated in contemporary art practice.
Unrequited Language: Khaled Sabsabi
Freelance writer and doctoral candidate Farid Farid analyses the installations and videos of deep thinker Khaled Sabsabi which use sound and collaboration as a significant part of their presence.
Flight, Philippines: Nothing to Declare
Associate Professor at the University of the Phillipines and visiting research fellow at the University of New South Wales Flaudette May V. Datuin looks at the complex ideas of home, absence and presence in the work of artists examining the lives of Overseas Filipino and Filipina workers (OFWs).
Traditional Skills: Refugees
South Australia's Craftsouth ran an outstanding workshop series in May 2010 where refugees with traditional craft skills from six countries taught their secrets to Australian craftspeople.
Weeds without Frontiers: Stephanie Radok
Poet, novelist and broadcaster Cath Kenneally examines the recent work of Stephanie Radok which involves weeds painted on beer coasters and finds tenacity, diversity and survival-skills in it.
Iran: Scripts of Despair and Love: Nasim Nasr & Siamak Fallah
Curator, artist and doctoral candidate Lisa Harms writes about two artists, Nasim Nasir and Siamak Fallah, both originally from Iran who now live and work in Adelaide and make work that references their homeland.
Creative Adaption and Continuing Conversations
A flying journey through some of the Australia Council's most recent innovative projects which are also conversations with community partners and where outcomes are broad and diverse leading potentially to new forms of contemporary art practice...
Open House Singapore Biennale 2011
One of the curators of the Singapore Biennale Australian Russell Storer explains how the Biennale is a sited conversation, about place as well as process.
Curious and Collaborative: Encounters in Tokyo, Singapore & Yogyakarta
Next Wave Artistic Director Emily Sexton and Next Wave Artistic Program manager Ulanda Blair discuss the waves of Invisible Structures a project curated by Next Wave and supported by Asialink in which Australian artist collectives do exchanges with collectives in Tokyo, Singapore and Yogyakarta.
Gwangju Summer: Open 2010
London-based curator and postgraduate researcher Tania Doropolous discusses 10,000 Lives: the Eighth Gwangju Biennale as well as the curatorial summer school that accompanied it.
Reconnecting the Dots: Next Sydney Biennale Directors
Indigenous Canadian Gerald McMaster and Belgian Catherine de Zegher are joint directors of the next Biennale of Sydney. Joanna Mendelssohn interviewed Catherine de Zegher about the global and the local, difference and similarity...
Manifesta 8: Seeking a Dialogue with Africa
Curator and arts manager Alison Carroll visited Manifesta 8 the European Biennial of Contemporary Art held 9 October 2010 - 9 January 2011 in both Murcia and Cartegena in Spain and featuring over 100 artists.
After the Deluge
Novelist, freelance writer and contributor to Inside Story website www.inside.org.au Jane Goodall writes about the recent floods in Queensland in relation to climate change and art and how "we need the merging energies of many artists to shift the consciousness of an era mesmerised by determination to perpetuate a way of life that may well be no longer viable."
Designing with the Neighbours in Mind: Unlimited Asia Pacific
'Unlimited Asia Pacific' is a platform for the Queensland state government to join Victoria as a leading force in Australia’s emergent design economy. It coincides with the birth of the Australian Design Alliance as a lobbying group to promote design as a capacity across government.
Patronage of the Passionate
Stephanie Britton was very impressed by her visit to the country's only art gallery devoted to contemporary art made by Chinese artists - White Rabbit Gallery and its third six monthly hang titled 'The Big Bang'.
Resistance to Change: Art in the university environment
Novelist and former Director of Research and Postgraduate Studies in the College of Arts at the University of Western Sydney Jane Goodall responds to the new collection of essays edited by Brad Buckley and John Conomos called 'Rethinking the Contemporary Art School'. Goodall analyses the complexity and often dire times engendered by the incorporation of art schools into universities. However she is optimistic and suggests a first step to be a well-designed retreat system.
Art and Sport
Artist and art critic Peter Hill reflects on the boredom factor of sport and how the Basil Sellers Prize has got it right.
Art as a Catalyst of Change: Sydney's HotHouse International Symposium
Chief Curator at the National Institute for Experimental Arts (NIEA) at the College of Fine Arts, Uni of NSW, Felicity Fenner discusses the HotHouse Symposium the launch event of a longer-term research project called 'Curating Cities' being conducted by NIEA in association with Object: Australian Centre for Craft and Design and the City of Sydney. Other research partners include the Melbourne-based group, Carbon Arts, which facilitates opportunities for artists to generate awareness and action on climate change. The central premise of the project is that we can no longer simply curate art, but need to think more holistically, instead curating space in ways that are environmentally sustainable.
Is it Sacred? The Collarenebri Files
Senior curator Djon Mundine reflects on his experiences in the past of consultation with Aboriginal people about artefacts, in particular carved trees in NSW that he wanted to include in 'Spirit and Place' at the MCA in 1997.
Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera
One of Artlink's London correspondents Jo Higgins visited EXPOSED : Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera at the Tate Modern, an exhibition of photography first developed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and found it overwhelmingly strong.
Liverpool Biennial 2010: Touched
Former Head of Asialink Alison Carroll visited Touched the Liverpool Biennial and found 870 artists showing in 400 exhibitions over the 10 weeks of the event.
The Push Pull Decade
Artlink began thirty years ago in a corner of an office in Adelaide. Today it is available in the Tate Modern Bookshop purveying its unique brand of attention to important issues in contemporary art, mostly Australian, often international, wherever the ideas are sharp and the ideals are idealistic.
The Fourth Plinth
In Antony Gormley’s living portrait 'One and Other' for 100 days, from 6 July to 14 October 2009, 2400 randomly selected, otherwise unextraordinary, individuals continuously occupied the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square for an hour at a time.
Echigo-Tsumari: Public Art as Regenerating Force
Janet Maughan travelled to the Echigo-Tsumari Triennial in September 2009. With Stephanie Britton she interviewed the indefatigable Fram Kitagawa, Director of both the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial [ETAT] and of the new Niigata Water and Land Art Festival in the seaport of Niigata, and wove his words around the experience of seeing outstanding art in the unusual and delightful surroundings of the Japanese countryside.
Who Stole the Southern Cross? A Cautionary Tale for Public Art
Curator and cultural visionary Kevin Murray asks what happened to Southern Cross Station, once Spencer Street Station now lost under a morass of advertising. Where is the public art?
Torches in the Night: The Odyssey of Craig Walsh
'Craig Walsh Digital Odyssey' is a national touring Project presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art in association with the artist. www.digitalodyssey.com.au With his partner artist Hiromi Tango Walsh is also making complementary collaborative works called 'The Home Project".
A Public Spectacle: Next Wave Risks All
Next Wave: No Risk Too Great, directed by Jeff Khan, took place in Melbourne from 13 – 30 May 2010.
Strangers and the Slow Laneway Experience
Kate Warren examines Melbourne's laneways and the many way artists have used them to re-energise and re-familiarise local audiences with their urban environment. Artists mentioned are Sarah Rodigari and Tim Webster, Troy Innocent, Matt Blackwood, John Alexander Borley, Anthony McInneny, Sue McCauley and Keith Deverell, and QingLan Huang.
Social Conscience, Migration, Rivers and Oceans: Virginia King
New Zealand sculptor Virginia King is an artist who has long recognised the changing nature of public art and the part it can play in raising awareness and social conscience.
Solar Systems and Winter Glow: Cameron Robbins, Alexander Knox
Anna Zagala looks at two striking public artworks in Melbourne, Cameron Robbins and Christopher Lansell's The Solar System down at the St Kilda Foreshore and Alexander Knox's kinetic light work Maxims of behaviour on the corner of Bourke and Swanston Sts in the UBD of Melbourne.
Synergy Tasmania-Style - Ocean, mountains and windpower meet boardwalks, public art and a new museum
The Glenorchy Art & Sculpture Park (GASP!) project on the outskirts of Hobart is under construction just two kilometres from Australia’s largest private freely accessible art gallery the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), opening in January 2011.
Self in the City: Launceston Living Laneways
Public artworks surrounding the Regional Arts Australia National Conference and Festival held in Launceston in August 2010 set the cat among the pigeons.
Royal Mail vs McQueen: A very public memorial for the dead
Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen’s recent work 'Queen and Country' (2003-2010) overwhelmingly embodies the complexities and possibilities for memorial-making and public art today.
Thirteen paragraphs on the underground
Artist/ writer, curator/designer at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation Teri Hoskin's thirteen paragraphs sum up facts, apprehensions and suspicions about the underground.
Hiding in plain sight: regionalism and the underground
Margie Borschke was in Canada in the mid 1980s when she discovered the Underground.
1. Muffled sounds 2. The ear trumpet of the artworld has been struck by lightning
Emeritus Flinders University Professor and philosopher Donald Brook writes about his 'new theory' and why it has never been taken up. He wonders: 'Could it be that he is wrong?'
Stop the press: the allure of ink
Caren Florance is Ampersand Duck, a blog and nom de press for activities including letterpress printing. Florance has breathed the ink and describes the history of moveable type focusing on the recent past and the present and how something magical happens to text when it is printed.
When zines meet archives: above - and below - ground collections
Marmalade-maker and Phd candidate at the University of Technology in Sydney Jessie Lymn's writing focuses on her research into unconventional archival spaces that hold collections of zines, those idiosyncratic sites of memory.
Conquest for country: Rockhole or mine
Anthropologist Eve Vincent has done fieldwork in mining towns in South Australia. She writes about Ali Russell's documentary Keeper about mining on Kokatha land near Ceduna.
Dig it! The hole in Australian contemporary art
Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney Glenn Barkley surveys the hole in contemporary Australian art starting at the 1973 Mildura Sculpturescape.
Underground film in Australia
Writer and curator of the moving image Danni Zuvela examines underground film in Australia to draw out its spirit it from the pre-Seventies to now - 'profane, collective, improvised, transgressive, convivial, illegitimate'.
Seed bomb
Farmer, artist, writer Kirsten Bradley who works from Milkwood Permaculture Farm near Mudgee in the high country of NSW spills the beans on how to make a seedball or seedbomb to revegetate or vegetate urban spaces around you. Like guerilla gardening, it's quick, it's quiet and it creeps up on you.
Underground networks in the age of web 2.0
Media Theorist, nethead, activist and founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures Geert Lovink reports on the erotica of touching between 'weak links' and the importance of experimenting with new forms of organisation both on and offline.
Steampunk: gunpowder and cups of tea
Between 13 October 2009 and 21 February 2010, the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford held the world's first museum exhibition of Steampunk art. Writer, artist, emerging, networked and distributed culture geek Melinda Rackham was there.
Not black enough, the politics of skin
Bundjalung man, journalist and radio broadcaster Daniel Browning, guest editor of this issue of Artlink, writes about the current state of racism and Aboriginality in Australia.
Lin Onus: picturing histories, speaking politics
Art historian and painter Gamilaroi/Gamilaraay woman Donna Leslie examines the work and the legacy of Lin Onus, its humour, its depth and its urgency.
Learning to be proppa : Aboriginal artists collective ProppaNOW
Senior Research Fellow and Senior Curator at the National Museum of Australia Margo Neale presents an incisive account of the genesis of proppaNOW the Queensland collective of urban Aboriginal Artists who are making waves in Australia and internationally with their intelligent brash art.
Gordon Hookey : Flash Gordon’s message - language is a virus - the King's English (not)
Curator, artist and South Australian School of Art lecturer Brenda L. Croft gives the lowdown on Gordon Hookey's really rude and loud art that uses language and Australian animals to put the boot into racism and lend a voice to the silenced.
History is a weapon: Fiona Foley history teacher
Badtjala woman Fiona Foley is a sculptor, installation artist, painter, printmaker, photographer, public artist, curator, lecturer and public speaker. Her work addresses lacunae and silences in Australian history, opening wounds and drawing attention to important topics of the past and how it affects the present.
Art of glass: Yhonnie Scarce
The first Aboriginal student to graduate from the University of South Australia with a major in glass, Yhonnie Scarce makes blown glass objects that explore Aboriginal history and draw on her Kokatha and Nukunu ancestry.
Dianne Jones : a little less conversation
Curator of Indigenous Art at the Art Gallery of Western Australia Clotilde Bullen provides insight into Nyoongar artist Dianne Jones' use of humour and iconic images from Western art to make hard-hitting blak art about racism, the absence of black faces in history and the portrayal of black women.
Tony Albert: there’s no place like home
Wirri man Bruce McLean of the Birri Gubba nation is currently Associate Curator, Indigenous Australian Art at the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. He writes with personal insight about the art practice of the youngest member of proppaNOW Tony Albert who comes from Cardwell in Queensland and was included in the 2009 Havana Biennale.
From Tiwi with love: Bindi Cole
Yamatji man Stephen Gilchrist is curator of Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Victoria. He writes about recent winner of the 2009 'Victorian Indigenous Art Awards' Bindi Cole’s provocative artwork as an inventive addition to the genre of portraiture photography.
Gary Lee: the outsider
Photographer Gary Lee makes work saturated with beauty and homoeroticism. His photographs of Aboriginal men are celebratory, bold and uncompromising.
Beaver Lennon: painting country
Trainee curator of Indigenous Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia Nici Cumpston writes about the new art of Beaver Lennon a young emerging artist of Mirning and Antikirinjara people who lives in Ceduna on the far west coast of South Australia. His great-grandmother was the author of the memoir 'I’m the one that know this country, the story of Jessie Lennon and Coober Pedy'.
Nowhere Boy
Emeritus Curator Djon Mundine OAM, currently Indigenous Curator of Contemporary Art at Campbelltown Arts Centre, Western Sydney, spills his guts on the current state of play as he sees it in Australian Aboriginal art where fashion has overtaken activism and some artists are just so hot right now.
Look good feel good: the art of healing
Murri woman Jenny Fraser has recently completed a Masters in Indigenous Wellbeing at Southern Cross University in Lismore. She writes about different avenues for wellbeing for all Australians through practices known by Indigenous Australians.