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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.
New Creations in Aurukun: Ceremonial Art
For the Adelaide Festival, Aptos Cruz Gallery in the Adelaide Hills is showcasing an extensive range of art from senior and emerging Aurukun artists, with about 35 works representing all artists using the art centre. This is a great opportunity to see new creations coming from the community. The exhibition continues to 4 April 2010.
Queensland Indigenous Artists Creating More than Great Art!
The Queensland Indigenous Arts Marketing and Export Agency (QIAMEA) was established in 2003 to promote the export of quality Queensland Indigenous art globally and nationally. A focal point for Queensland Indigenous art will be the 2nd Cairns Indigenous Art Fair (CIAF) to be held from 20 to 22 August 2010.
The Ramingining Megaphone
Distinguished pioneer Indigenous Curator, activist and writer, Curator of Contemporary Art at Campbelltown Arts Centre Djon Mundine tells a very funny and intriguing story about how modern communication technology came to Ramingining and how it intersected with 'community consultation' by government departments.
Lean, mean and living dangerously
Associate Professor of Fine Art at the College of Fine Arts, Uni of NSW, Joanna Mendelssohn analyses a slice of the current state of art publishing in Australia from reviews in newspapers to the DAAO (Dictionary of Australian Artists Online - now rechristened Design and Art of Australasia Online).
From here to everywhere: the evolution of blogging
'The Art Life' blogmeister Andrew Frost spills the beans on the genesis of that infamous and lively blog in 2004 and its ongoing evolution in the context of new technologies and their uptake by publishing and by readers.
Artists want catalogues
Campbelltown Arts Centre Director Lisa Havilah writes about the crucial importance of catalogues to artists. Famous Chinese artist Ai Weiwei had his first international survey exhibition at Campbelltown in partnership with Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation. The incentive for Ai Weiwei was that a 2,000 print run book on his art would be published.
Environmental costs of going digital
Director of the Media and Communications Program at the University of Melbourne Professor Sean Cubitt asks: what is the weight of the internet, is it green, clean and immaterial with no environmental costs? The answer is a scary and resounding no.
Measuring the footprint: dead trees vs live text
Freelance writer, author of True Green @ Work and editor Tim Wallace discusses the conflict between new technologies making everything available for free and writers and content creators needing to be paid. He quotes from on a book by Kevin Kelly called New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World: 'The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention.'
Zine publishing and the long tail
Adelaide-based Zinemeister Dr Ianto Ware discusses how prophecies of digital dominance are colosally wrong with regard to zine publishing a genre which remains exclusively hardcopy. He finds zines to be quintessential examples of Editor of Wired Magazine Chris Anderson's Long Tail in which tiny niches multiply and thrive.
Finding the right balance: print + online
Managing editor of RealTime Keith Gallasch describes what the web means to print journalism and how RealTime manages its website and its hardcopy in a careful adaptation to a changing and unpredictable publishing ecology.
Copyright: Copyleft
Copyright lawyer Zoe Rodriguez discusses the implications of digitising works of literature and the contentious Google Book Settlement of 2009.
Libraries, creators and Google
The University of Sydney Librarian John Shipp describes the changing world of university libraries and the way they handle information in a digital age. He has nightmares about the Google settlement and his mantra is that 'creators should retain their rights.'
Communicating and the law
Bill Morrow, artist and legal expert in copyright law, sets out the current state of play. He says that some form of copyright is here to stay but it is in flux with regard to digital rights and the upcoming introduction of laws providing greater privacy protection.
Creative commons: fair to share?
Research Assistant at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries Elliott Bledsoe throws light on (rants about) the wide-ranging implications of Creative Commons - the way of the future for copyright?
Artistic intention, branding and value
Artist Zina Kaye of www.laudanum.net writes about the importance of branding for artists and how artists play with copyright and fair use. She examines the artwork of Deborah Kelly, Soda_Jerk and Shepard Fairey to show variants on artist's intentions and outcomes.
Writing in the age of graphomania
Novelist and sinologist Linda Jaivin rejects the excess writing and publishing that the internet affords every person with a keyboard and compares it to Milan Kundera's definition of graphomania(an obsession with writing books). She would rather have fewer readers than more scanners believing that a 'long form' like a novel or book-length non-fiction needs slow writing and carefully crafted prose.
Copyright materials in university teaching
Art History Librarian at the Barr Smith Library, University of Adelaide Margaret Hosking explains the way fees and access are currently worked out for copyright materials in teaching at universities in Australia.
Mix and mash, take it, change it
Writer and curator Danni Zuvela celebrates remix or mashup culture and traces its history back through the Dadaists, Futurists, Max Ernst, Esther Shub, Arthur Lipsett, Joseph Cornell, Bruce Conner and Stan VanDerBeek. In a remix culture people valorise appropriation and talk about being copyfighters who believe the idea of text as property is a joke.
Collaborative Practice
Amanda Matulick is the managing editor of the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT)'s publication Filter magazine, which is hardcopy as well as online at http://filter.anat.org.au. Filter uses open source Creative Commons licensing for its contributors. This means free sharing of information and ideas or as she puts it: "creation for creation's sake".
Don't look it might bite: censoring the visual arts
Executive Director of the National Association for the Visual Art (NAVA) Tamara Winikoff looks at the recent situation in Australia regarding censorship, art, politics and the law.
Freedom of expression and the mode of detachment
Art theorist, philosopher and Emeritus Professor at Flinders University Donald Brook advocates 'detached contemplation' as the most desirable, appropriate and potentially rewarding response to art.
Netting the big and the little fish: monographs and biographies
Emeritus Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia and highly respected investigative curator and writer Daniel Thomas pulls out the stops in a far-ranging appraisal of art book publishing in Australia. He writes: "Once the artist is well dead, even if the book is 'only' a monograph, disregard the family and friends; we need to know everything."
Lives of the 'settled' artists
Tess Allas is the Researcher of Storylines, an ARC funded project officially titled This Side of the Frontier: Indigenous Artists in Settled Australia. It focuses on biographies of Aboriginal artists from all over Australia except for the remote regions. Storylines can be found online at www.daao.org.au - the DAAO (Dictionary of Australian Artists Online - now rechristened Design and Art of Australasia Online).
Living palely
The Stoics may have taken rationality too far in their resolute minimisation of all feeling. Are emotions no more than disturbances in the logical landscape? What of Pascal’s ‘the heart has its reasons that reason is not acquainted with’? Perhaps the rationality/emotion divide is overdrawn, risking battle lines forming around pure opposites never found in real life examples. Yet the issue has bite, relevance to intimate features of our life: our friendships, our sense of safety in the world, how much we give of ourselves and give up of ourselves to our working life and the living texture of what it feels like to be us: fugitive, or having the ‘warm antiquity of self’.
Speed of dark: Boris Eldagsen
Artist Boris Eldagsen and writer Robert Cook are both looking down the barrel of forty. Cook is fascinated by other members of his exact generation. In his words: 'They are alternative selves, part of my body. Mid-life is hard life, the life as lived not the life not lived, the other path, the no stepping back.' Cook and Boris did not meet.
Strange bedfellows
Why write or think about the work of Patricia Piccinini and Richard Billingham together? Because the work of each of them elicits a visceral response, a response characterised by emotion and gut feeling. Because the border between humans and animals and the relationships between us are examined by both Piccinini and Billingham in a manner that emphasises our relatedness. These are intensely moral artworks with a strong documentary flavour that ask us questions about responsibility and connection that go to the very heart of our lives.http://www.artlink.com.au/admin/article_edit.cfm?id=3280
Notes on melancholy and anxiety in the works of Sanja Pahoki
The artworks of Sanja Pahoki walk a zigzag between melancholy and its contemporary cousin, anxiety. Curator and writer Hannah Mathews interviewed Sanja Pahoki about her recent work while thinking about Daniel Birnbaum's comment about the relationship between melancholy and the arts: "The idea of the melancholic as someone not only passive and depressed but also creative is the basis for the Renaissance idea of the genius – the dialectic between darkness and light, destruction and creation."
Astra and the ventilation hypothesis
Astra Howard’s 'Action Research/Performances' necessarily require participation by members of the public. This makes them unpredictable. Astra’s presence is not about entertainment. It is not a show. There is no star. There is no attempt to expose any individual. There are simply sincere attempts to understand them. Astra acknowledges and responds sincerely to one of our deepest and most affective human needs – our need for emotional expression. Our need to have our voice heard. Our need to vent.
William Kentridge between chance and a programme
Pat Hoffie interviewed William Kentridge on the phone to 'draw' out some of his ideas about drawing and art. His work remains committed to a sense of the tactile, and to the slow grainy effort of drawing. In his words: ‘I would repeat my trust in the contingent, the inauthentic, the whim, the practical, as strategies for finding meaning. I would repeat my mistrust in the worth of Good Ideas.'
Personal Political Emotional
Artist Megan Evans was for some years the partner of Aboriginal activist and artist Les Griggs who suicided in 1993. Fifteen years later she has begun to write his story - a story of reconciliation with herself and her country, through a relationship that undid her and put her back together again.
Ann Newmarch: Opening Pandora's box
In 2007 Ann Newmarch was represented in 'WACK, Art and the Feminist Revolution', a major exhibition in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Newmarch embraced feminism in the early 1970s. Her art practice manifests the view that all representation is political. Her new work, reiterates a position that she adopted in 1972 : "I try to get onto the page visual images that combine to make memory: past memories incorporated in new sensations and new images related back to past experience. Contemplation ...of our environment that recalls other times, places and relationships."
The Second Life of Pye: Daniel Jay Mounsey
Social media is the new buzz word and trend - like it or not. Daniel Jay Mounsey is ahead of the pack in having Pyewacket Kazyanenko as his well-established alter-ego in Second Life, AND collaborating and performing online through an avatar with Stelarc and others, AND(!) performing onstage live as anime character Hell Girl. Curator and writer Charity Bramwell interviewed all she could find of him.
Art and occupation: Raeda Saadeh
Raeda Saadeh is a Palestinian artist who was born in Umm Al-Fahem, a Muslim village (now a city) in the northern region of Haifa. She completed art studies at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, where she now lives. Her questioning of the forces of both political occupation of the Palestinian territories, and personal occupation by traditional cultural and social expectations, have inspired her to focus on her own body with performance and photography.
Choosing who will keep the stories strong
In early 2006, the renowned Liyagauwumirr painter Mickey Durrng Garrawurra died in his home on Milingimbi. For many years, Durrng (1940-2006) and his brother Tony Dhanyala (1935-2004) were the only people authorised to paint the Liyagauwumirr’s most important clan designs. Before his death, however, Durrng made the seemingly unorthodox decision to pass this knowledge and authority to his sister Ruth Nalmakarra (b.1954) and her family. What followed was a flowering of tradition, as Nalmakarra and her sisters used this broadened authority to instigate a cultural revival that united their community around these ancient designs.
Inside Sydney's new Outsider art centre
Outsider Art is enjoying increasing attention in Australia. STOARC – the Self-Taught and Outsider Art Research Collection – at the University of Sydney opened its public face at Callan Park Gallery in March 2009.
Transforming East and West dialogues
Haema Sivanesan, Curator and Executive Director of SAVAC ( South Asian Visual Arts Centre) in Toronto Canada, analyses the current situation of Asian contemporary art by looking at work that is not only cross-cultural but concerned with bridging cultures and being a form of social action rather than simply engaging with commodity culture.
Collapsing the Bilateral: creating consciousness
The Long March Project founded by Lu Jie is an ongoing art project that began with a philosophical evaluation of the complex role and meaning of art and selfhood, in all its political, economic, cultural, and social guises. It is critical that new opportunities are found for artistic reciprocity that exist beyond the presumed centres of art validation (ie. America and Europe). The Long March directs the gaze of Chinese cultural producers to re-assess how art can be a tool through which ideas of making – self, thought, object – can be critically empowered and conceived.
China welcomes Australian ceramics
Potter and Head of Ceramics at ANU School of Art Janet de Boos writes about her journeys to China since 1996 and her current collaborations in bone china tableware. She writes : 'Rather than just a place where we can appropriate techniques and technologies and source cheap labour, China becomes a place for Australians to work and research collaboratively with fellow artists.'
Resuscitation through paper
On a residency at the Taipei Artists Village in Taiwan in 2007 Gregory Pryor researched a plant from which tongcao or pith paper was traditionally made. The complex collaborative journey to find the plant and the way its pith is removed forms a celebratory echo to his previous work Black Solander 2005 about endangered plants in Western Australia.
Hired hands: the Filipino collaborations of David Griggs
Neil Fettling asks; 'Why does an Australian-based artist like David Griggs, living and working in the first world, have such strong connections with a third world community, and how do these linkages affect his work?' and answers this question through an analysis of Griggs' recent art as well as comparing it to the work of Pat Hoffie and Wim Delvoye.
Jelek in East Timor
*(jelek means ugly in Indonesian) Artist Ruth Hadlow lives and works in East Timor. Her thoughts about it question notions of beauty and ugliness.
Contemporary Art in the Hermit Kingdom
Artists who have created fascinating works within the DMZ (Korean Demilitarized Zones) include the Spanish artist Santiago Sierra, the Italian artist Armin Linke and the Australian artist Lyndal Jones.
New climate for an old world: Paul Carter's Nearamnew
Paul Carter's Nearamnew, a public art work which is embedded in the 7,500 square metres of paving at Federation Square, asks for multiple, inclusive and open-ended responses.
Old Gods new lives: Exhibiting traditional Cook Islander art
In late 2008, the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) established its first Pacific Arts department. From the opening of the controversial Musée du quai Branly in Paris in 2006, to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s creation of permanent new galleries for Oceanic art in 2007, there has been an international surge of interest in Pacific art, accompanied by hot debate surrounding exhibition protocols. Among the many works exhibited at these institutions are rare carvings of traditional gods from the Cook Islands: works that are still of great cultural significance to many Islanders today. Jacqui Durrant asked artists, curators and cultural professionals in the largest of the Cook Islands, Rarotonga, their opinions as to how images of their ‘old gods’ might be best exhibited, to see what a Western art gallery might take on board.
Bilum breakout: fashion, artworld, national pride
In the past decade bilum fashion has really taken off in Papua New Guinea and is now getting wider exposure through a few PNG gallery and designer websites like Pasifik Nau and Lava Lava Innovations. Since the late 1990s, local trendsetters of high fashion, including Cathy Kata and Florence Jaukae, have made a name for their original bilum outfits.
An Unlandscape of words and painting: from Meenamatta to paradise
This article explores new territory opened up by a cross-cultural collaboration between Indigenous poet Jim Everett and visual artist Jonathan Kimberley.
Threads, traces and legacies of the mission
Artist Kylie Waters works with the history of her own family and the way it is embedded in South Australian history. Specifically she explores the space between negative and positive evaluations of Lutheran missions in Central and South Australia.
Island improvisations: Nathan Gray
In 2008 Nathan Gray spent two months on Itaparica, a Brazilian island in the Bahia region, as part of an exchange initiated by The South Project Inc. At the end of the year the exhibition Tudo Que Acho was held to show the work created and produced as a result of the residency. The title in English means ‘everything I think’. In Portuguese the phrase also denotes discovery, as ‘to think’ and ‘to find’ signify the same act. Tudo Que Acho: Nathan Gray was shown 4 – 20 December 2008 at The Narrows, Melbourne.
What would you do?
A number of practising artists were invited to respond to a scenario in which a local council asked them to organise an exhibition featuring local artists from a sister city in a third world country. It seems a noble gesture, but one fraught with potential missteps. How would they proceed?
NAVA Now
Timothy Morrell provides the reader with a keen description in relation to the role that the art organisation NAVA (National Association for the Visual Arts) has within Australia's government but also the empowerment they claim to provide practicing artists. Morrell also includes some insight towards the rights of the common artworker by presenting some examples as to where they stand within Australian society but also how they operate in co-relation with the governments guidelines and in particular the controversial portrayal of nudity in art. A conclusive article articulating the importance of government organisations such as NAVA, Morrell provides an insightful discussion towards the role of the artist within Australian society but also the co-operation needed from the government to enable a sufficient means of expression from artists.
Daniel Crooks: the future of the past
An edited version of a lecture by Laurence Simmons, Associate Professor in the Department of Film, Television and Media Studies at the University of Auckland, given in association with Daniel Crooks' exhibition everywhere instantly curated by Justin Paton at the Christchurch Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu in 2008. Simmons links Crooks' work to Walter Benjamin's Angel of History and the experiments of Etienne-Jules Marey, the inventor of chronophotography.
dreamTime
An analysis of Aboriginal conceptions of time and its similarity to the ideas of modern physics, science fiction, and those of artists such as Monet, Cézanne, Picasso, Breton, Klein and Richter, and philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Deleuze and Derrida. They too have sought to feel and know spacetime in the pressing and intimate way that Aborigines do.
Atomic Clock: microtime of the molecular and good old-fashioned molar beer
The responses of digital artists David Haines, Jon Hunter and Pete Newman to the molecular scale on which our world is now micromanaged are contrasted with the work of the late Jon Wah whose work stopped time with a saddhu-like discipline of the will. Jon Wah died in August 2008, aged 27. A posthumous retrospective was held for him at Serial Space, Chippendale, Sydney, 8-18 December 2008.
About visual imagery, intuition, and teleportation
Melentie Pandilovski's article is adapted from a paper he gave at the ISEA conference in Singapore in 2008. He writes about interactions between the arts, science and technology through looking at the work of British artist Lei Cox's work Teleportation Experiment.
Joe Felber: Moments of time
Joe Felber's art practice is interdisciplinary and acquisitive, absorbing, assembling, composing and de-composing, playing and re-playing elements from a vast collection of fragments collected across the world in cities and art galleries.
OK with my decay: Encounters with chronology
Susan Milne, Izabela Pluta, Annie Hogan and Hannah Bertram work with the idea of the theatre of decline set within the grounds of the domestic environment.
Time and motion studies: Twin strategies
Gabriella and Silvana Mangano undertake their art as a shared style of communication between siblings. Now showing at MUMA (Monash University Museum of Art) their collaborative work embraces intimacy and repetition in performance, drawing, video, sound and installation.
Crystalline signs of the small and poetic
In Audrey Lams Under Development (2007), two detectives investigating a murder seek answers in an ominous, half-built structure. Close attention to the lush, inky compositions reveals the frozen temporality of a Brisbane landmark: the film records the historic erection of the Gallery of Modern Art.
Ghost in the backyard
Using the work of two current Antipodean artists, Amy-Jo Jory and David Pledger, Melbourne-based Kate Sandford explores the place of suburbia in our consciousness and the way that even though real suburbia has changed, some representations of it have stayed the same.
Enduring duration
Two video artists William Mansfield and William Lamson whose recent works pay homage to the 'poetics of the banal' and the history of durational practice.
Keep your eyes on the prize: Hold on, Aboriginal art competitions, ethical dilemmas and mining companies
In this article Djon Mundine poses a prolific and detailed insight into the world of art in relation to what art is, how can it be judged and as a re-occurring theme, the alleged honesty in contemporary art. Mundine predominately focuses on Aboriginal art and the political, ethical and criterial implications modern society imposes on it. That is to say what can be deemed an honest work of art that expresses the artists intentions but also allows the artwork to speak for itself. Mundine talks about indigenous artwork and how it was viewed by the original colinisers of Australia. Particularly how the colinisers set down criteria towards what a valuable artwork was. Further elaborating on competitions whereby artworks are judged in accordance to rules that pose more questions in relation to what an honest or pure artwork is. Mundine cites several quotations that portray interesting examples that reinforce his argument towards modern day criticism and objectivity. The final message being to what extent can any one person be declared appropriated to criticising artwork and judging its authenticity, quality and honesty. Mundine states that we should only hope for honesty in today's artwork irrespective of its outside marketed criticism. All in all Mundine presents the reader with an insightful article that will leave you questioning the integrity of today's critical approach to fine art.
On talking walls
Recent sound and electronic media work by two Tasmanian artists Scot Cotterell and Matt Warren remaster images and sounds from older technology to make a past-present present.
Life and times: Eternal wake in three chapters
Life. Death. Thereafter was at Silvershot Gallery in Melbourne from 16 September 29 November 2008. Melbourne-based curator Mark Feary produced a relatively new exhibition model, three separate, distinct, but thematically entwined shows, running end to end for eighteen days each showing the work of Kate Just, Steve Carr, Patricia Piccinini, Paolo Canevari, Rob McLeish, Ronnie van Hout, Jesper Just, Jason Greig, Sally Blenheim and Blair Trethowan.
Curators, creators and catalysts
Marcus Westbury, former director of Noise, Next Wave, TINA (This Is Not Art) festivals, and writer and presenter of Not Quite Art on ABC TV, writes about the need for art to get away from reflecting too hard on gatekeepers and their requirements. He looks at the Biennale of Sydney at Cockatoo Island, the Next Wave's The Containers Village and the Melbourne Laneways projects as good examples of stepping outside the cube. He concludes that: 'Artists are best to invest their energy in finding their audiences and their communities.'
Right now I am unravelling: notes on the 2008 Next Wave Festival
A lively coverage of the exciting 2008 Next Wave Festival directed by Jeff Khan. Next Wave began 24 years ago and in 2008 presented the work of around 400 artist over 61 projects.
Curating a psycho-geography Campbelltown Arts Centre and the genius of Lisa Havilah
Campbelltown Arts Centre's chief curator and director Lisa Havilah creates challenging and confronting exhibitions like For Matthew and Others (2006), News from Islands (2007) and Ai Weiwei: Under Construction (2008). She believes that: 'contemporary art centres that sit outside of the metropolitan centres provide the highest level of opportunity for the development and application of new forms of curatorial practice.'
Beyond the temples: the way of idiosyncracy
Professor and artist Pat Hoffie interviewed highly creative, innovative and idiosyncratic curator Kevin Wilson, once Director of Linden, Director at Noosa Gallery where he devised The Floating Land project and most recently Program Director with the Queensland Artworkers Alliance and their ARC Biennial that opens in October 2009.
To curate or not to curate, 2008 in Europe: urban BB5 and post-industrial Manifesta 7
London-based Macedonian artist and writer Nadja Prlja compares the urban and modern 5th Berlin Biennial BB5: When Things Cast No Shadow (5 April - 15 June 2008) with Manifesta 7 (19 July - 2 November 2008) which occupied the whole arae of Trentoni in Italy. Prlja pays particular attention to the differences in the ways the projects were curated.
Curatorial Asia a twenty year perspective
As Director of Asialink Arts Alison Carroll has had twenty years of experience curating and facilitating the curation of exhibitions in or connected to Asia. Her analysis emphasises the complexity and cultural differences experienced by Asian curators in their home countries and looks forward to a more glocal future as they increase their international presence.
Places and contexts in two Singapore Biennales: curating courtrooms, containers and camps
Curator of the 2008 Adelaide Biennale Felicity Fenner discriminates between site-specific and site-responsive art practices in an analysis of the last two Singapore Biennales. She suggests that responding to the site may be the best way for a biennale to become more than an expo.
Curating Chinese themes: cheap labour, migration and capital, Shanghai Biennale and Guangzhou Triennial
In September 2008 Dylan Rainforth went to both the 7th Shanghai Biennale (Translocalmotion) and the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial (Farewell to Post-Colonialism). While he found mixed messages in Shanghai which was curated by artistic director Zhang Qing assisted by Julian Heynen and Henk Slager, it was Guangzhou curated by Gao Shiming, Sarat Maharaj and Johnson Chang that hit the sweet spot with 'witty, people-powered ways forward.'
Manray Hsu taking a political position
Prominent Australian curator Victoria Lynn interviewed Berlin and Taipei-based independent curator Manray Hsu about his notions of decentralised cosmopolitanism and Archipuncture (a sort of acupunture that artists do to cities)..
Hello Tokyo! Good to see you again
Artspace curator Reuben Keehan reflects on the Australia-Japan Visual Art Forum convened by Asialink in June 2008 as the Biennale of Sydney opened. The thirty delegates concluded the stimulating forum with recommendations about ongoing collaborations between curators using a variety of models, as well as the new ideas to be pursued of audience-in-residence programs and an Asian version of Manifesta.
Hello Tokyo! Process is all
Diorama of the City: Between Site & Space 13 September - 13 October 2008 Tokyo Wonder Site Artists: Alex Gawronski, Gail Priest, Tim Silver, Hiraku Suzuki, exonemo, Paramodel
Hello Tokyo! Flagging it
Some Material Flags, MOT Tokyo, 22 October - 12 January 2009. Louisa Bufardeci
Throwing voices
Senior Curator at Christchurch Art Gallery Justin Paton reflects on curating the exhibition that he remembers most fondly and that speaks to him of the magic of curating - the show of wall paintings called Big Talk by US word- artist Kay Rosen in 2004 at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.
Back from the brink: culture in Timor-Leste
The Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT)'s Curator of Southeast Asian Art and Material Culture Joanna Barrkman curated Husi Bei Ala Timor Sira Nia Liman /From the Hands of Our Ancestors which is on at MAGNT in Darwin from 21 November 2008 to 12 July 2009. The show celebrates the survival of Timor-Leste's cultural inheritance and asks whether traditional art forms and techniques have a role to play in the formation and assertion of Timor-Leste's national and cultural identity.
Firing across the gaps
In May 2008 Wagga Wagga Art Gallery's new Director Cath Bowdler curated Crossfire, an exhibition of resonating artworks from the Gallery's two major collections, the National Art Glass Collection and the Margaret Carnegie Print Collection, as a way of introducing herself to both the space and the place. Bowdler was initially inspired by the glass work Salt on Mina Mina by Dorothy Napangardi.
Species enhancement by international gene pool
Director of Wollongong City Gallery Craig Judd writes about the memorable experience of curating Wild Thang: post pop from the MCA, a show that combined works from the MCA's collection with corresponding pieces in the collections of the towns the exhibition visited: Bathurst, Armidale, Gold Coast and Albury.
Curating paths, musical chairs
Outgoing Director of the Experimental Art Foundation Melentie Pandilovksi spills the beans on the current state of play internationally in terms of powerful independent curators moving into important positions in museums. He puts forward the prevalence of a 'new institutionalism' seeking to redefine contemporary art institutions from within. The EAF is about to release a Futures paper on this topic.
So you want to be a curator?
Joanna Mendelssohn, author and Associate Professor at the College of Fine Art, University of New South Wales where she co-ordinates the Master of Art Administration, writes about the highly competitive and financially unrewarding realities of getting a position as a curator in an art musuem.
I've looked at love from both sides now: reflections on freelance / independent / guest curating
Juliette Peers, art historian and lecturer at RMIT, surveyed a number of freelance curators to find out how they work and why they embrace this insecure, interstitial existence. Hannah Mathews, Elizabeth Gertzakis, Vivonne Thwaites and Anne Kirker are among the freelance curators to whom she spoke.
Emerging, educating and unruly: Vivonne Thwaites
Hahndorf Academy Curator Melinda Rankin reflects on the recent work of legendary freelance curator Vivonne Thwaites who introduced Rankin to the deep levels of research, the surprises, the risks and the sheer hard work of being a curator.