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The expanding praxes of Indigenous curatorial and conservation roles in Australian art museums is shaped by an active response to, and challenge of, power imbalances, along with the tension between who is writing history, which artists are collected, and how both are talked about and displayed in the present. We write this essay as Aboriginal relations from the Southeast region, from Ngiyampaa territory in the northwest of New South Wales (NSW), to Bundjalung and Yuin Country within the northern and southern coastal areas of NSW. We also write as a Blak curator and conservator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art at one of the country’s leading and largest collecting institutions, the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW)...
In August 2023, we (Ethel and Madeline) travelled to Sydney from Gija Country in the East Kimberley region of Western Australia, where we met with Cate Massola whom we have worked with at the Warmun Art Centre and known for many years since. Our trip was to introduce and welcome a suite of paintings, by four generations of women in our family, to the John Olsen Gallery. The exhibition Nyoorn-nyoorn boorroorn daam bandarran (Country to canvas), consisted of works from the Estate of Madigan Thomas, made many years ago, alongside more recent paintings by younger members of the family. Through the exhibition, the past and present converged, making us think about the ways we work together...
The exhibition Past Their Flesh marked a first-time collaboration between Perth-based artists’ Natalie Scholtz and Curtis Taylor. The gathered works, primarily collaborative mixed media paintings on canvas, presented roving yet condensed post-colonial fever dreams, pulling signifiers from a locus of personal-political histories and the settler-state of Western Australia. Past Their Flesh is an encounter with the ever-morphing contours of race, gender, human and non-human beings, an imaging of the messy, fleshy spaces within shifting complexes of identity. While Scholtz has worked primarily as a painter, and Taylor as a filmmaker, multimedia and installation artist, both artists have a knack for working with potent symbols drawn from Australian imaginaries—the visions, desires, projections and containments therein, and the various escape routes that visual art might plot out. Across these works they appear to doubly-condense the embodied self within wider political and relational schemas. What follows is a close reading of several selected works from the exhibition...
The Blue Mountains Cultural Centre (BMCC) has a long relationship with artist, educator and curator Leanne Tobin. She has been part of the art scene in the Blue Mountains prior to the Cultural Centre opening in 2012, and Rilka Oakley, Artistic Program Leader, and the BMCC team have worked with her on multiple projects as both an artist and curator. When the idea of working with the National Gallery of Australia’s (NGA) Sharing the National Collection initiative was put forward, alongside bringing First Nations video works into the World Heritage Interpretive Centre at BMCC, Tobin was invited to co-curate the project. She knows the Blue Mountains community and its First Nations artists; she understands First Nations practice at a local and national level and has personal connections with the artists selected...
Indulkana, the most eastern community in the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands, has a strong history of engagement, experimentation and innovation. The first wave of Iwantja’s senior artists—many of whom were among the first generation to see colonisers— expressed aspects of Aṉangu culture from before, during and after frontier conflict. Now younger generations of artists are rearticulating their culture amid the new frontier of western social influence. And hence, a new western emerges...
A paradox: ‘the photographic’ is central to visual culture inflected by artificial intelligence (AI), and yet AI is rapidly destabilising photographic practice. A cyclical theme, the notion of what constitutes a photograph and what it means to be a photographer are fundamentally questioned once more, especially since the release last year of novel text-to-image models capable of generating so‑called photorealistic images from text prompts (DALL·E, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, etc.). In a curious reversal of the conventional process of captioning a photograph after it has been taken or printed, professional image makers and publishers are now negotiating the ability to synthesise photographic-looking images from executable texts. In the process, the still-dominant paradigm of photography as a contingent encounter between a camera user and the world is being upended by proprietary AI algorithms trained on datasets of existing photographic images, raising vital ethical questions on authenticity, biases and authorship.
In The Economist recently, historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari claimed that ‘AI has hacked the operating system of human civilization.’ Highlighting the existential risk that artificial intelligence could possibly supersede the human mind and disrupt the order of human history, he proclaims: At first, AI will probably imitate the human prototypes that it was trained on in its infancy, but with each passing year AI culture will boldly go where no human has gone before. For millennia human beings have lived inside the dreams of other humans. In the coming decades we might find ourselves living inside the dreams of an alien intelligence.
Although Harari’s hypothesis reflects the complexity of our future with AI, throughout history technological innovations have raised concerns towards the new ‘other,’ whatever its form. So, in what way is this progression—or rather, regression—with ubiquitous AI different to any other tool humanity has previously crafted?
On the 15th of June, 2023, students from The Australian National University’s School of Arts and Design hosted a funeral and memorial service to celebrate the life (and death) of Photography at PhotoAccess, Canberra.
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In the rapidly expanding literature on the Tennant Creek Brio, writers have touched upon a decidedly ‘masculine’ quality in the group’s work. John McDonald calls the Brio’s work ‘incredibly aggressive’ and ‘raw’ and ‘wild.’ Erica Izett, the Brio’s regular curator and greatest advocate, refers to their work as a form of insurgent ‘guerrilla theatre.’ These masculinist tendencies should be of little surprise. The Brio started in 2016 as an art therapy group as part of Strong Men, Strong Families through funding from the Anyinginyi Health Aboriginal Corporation facilitated by painter Rupert Betheras. It grew to have about twenty men involved before moving to the Nyinkka Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre in 2017, where it was declared an artist collective.
All struggles are essentially power struggles. Who will rule, who will lead, who will define, refine, confine, design, who will dominate. – Octavia E. Butler. Some struggles are invisible simply because a single word is missing from public discussion. I find that this is particularly the case with words that carry life-giving concepts and that challenge social hierarchies. Their absence can give clues to who might be excluded and what is considered of less value within a given society. One such word is ‘neurodiversity’, and it is missing from exhibition records within some of Aotearoa New Zealand’s leading public art galleries.
