An interview with First Nations curators Kathleen Ash-Milby, Maia Nuku and Nigel Borell.
 

Eve Sullivan___How did you become the creative lead for the Kaldor Public Art Project Symposium on Art Education? What did this entail?

Agatha Gothe‑Snape___I was invited by Kaldor Public Art Projects to participate (or intervene) in the program as an artist. Throughout the development and planning of the event I spent time “in residency” in the KPAP office as a kind of “participant–observer.” I also did research into the current discourses around art and education, reflecting upon my own experiences and those of others, and spoke to primary and secondary school teachers about their approaches to teaching art.

Sanjay Kak  Tell me about that first cup of nun chai in Kashmir, that first conversation. Were you prepared for what you were to encounter?

Alana Hunt  My first cup of nun chai was actually in Delhi in the home of a Kashmiri artist friend. I initially came to Delhi, with the support of the Australia Council, as an artist in residence with the Sarai Programme, after which I pursued studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University. During my first few weeks in the city I came across a small flyer for a screening of a film about the Safar-i-Azadi (Journey to Freedom) campaign led by the pro-independence leader and former armed fighter Yasin Malik. SAR Geelani was also there, and I learnt that he had already spent several years on death row in connection with the attack on the Indian Parliament, for which he was eventually acquitted. At the same time, protesting in the streets outside were the Hindu group Roots in Kashmir, wholly opposed to the idea of Kashmiri self-determination. I was new to Delhi, but from that point confronted with the multilayered tensions surrounding India’s occupation of Kashmir. It led me to the book The Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament, and your film Jashn-e-Azadi (How we Celebrate Freedom).

Eve Sullivan interviews Lisa Slade Curator of the 2016 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Magic Object 

Art, performance, and spoken or now written text, all belong to the same register of cultural practice in the First Nations I am familiar with or belong to: ceremony. This ceremonial register takes place in a set of spaces created to enact cultural responsibilities to place, people and balance. Galleries and museums, as sites of cultural production and presentation, have the potential to nurture new ceremonies and new working methods.

Eve Sullivan in conversation with Fontanelle directors Brigid Noone and Ben Leslie
 

Editor Daniel Browning interviews artist Vernon Ah Kee who discusses the lack of criticism of Aboriginal art and the abundance of 'mass production' Aboriginal art emanating from remote communities seen by some as 'real Aboriginal art' but in the eyes of Ah Kee simply and uncritically playing into false romantic notions of the lives of Aboriginal people.

Renowned French curator Catherine David visited Auckland to judge the Walters Prize; she awarded the $50,000 prize to Peter Robinson. John Hurrell artist, curator and blogger of NZ art reviews and critical discussion site eyeCONTACT spoke to Catherine about her curating of the Lyon Biennial which touches down in late 2009, and the relationship between artists and curators.

Urban ecologist and architect Paul Downton interviewed 2002 Telstra Adelaide Festival Director Peter Sellars and Associate Director Cathy Woolcock about urban design and ecology and the attempts to create a shift from the idea of 'ownership' to 'participation' between people and the urban and natural environments. This feature also weaves in comments by Bert Flugelman, Judith Brine and Francesco Bonarto about the way they are prepared to express their feelings about their city and the way it looks and feels.

Eve Sullivan in conversation with director Dale Buckley about a new gallery in the basement of a former department store in Fremantle