Catching Breath: tapestry commission for Australian High Commission in Singapore

Discussing Catching Breath 

Brook Andrew (artist) and Chris Cochius (weaver) talk about the collaborative process behind the tapestry project Catching Breath, woven by Chris Cochius, Pamela Joyce and Milena Paplinska.

Monday 25 August 2014 at the Australian Tapestry Workshop.

Video Link


Australian Tapestry Workshop director Antonia Syme shows off the work by indigenous artist Brook Andrew, titled Catching Breath. Photo: Paul Jeffers/Fairfax Media

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/melbournebased-indigenous-artist-brook-andrew-turns-to-tapestry-for-singapore-celebration-20141106-11i48g.html#ixzz3UCxRfeSe

Warlpiri drawings 1950

Warlpiri Drawings, Remembering the Future at the National Museum

link to ABC article here

Decolonial Aesthetics

Decolonial Aesthetics / Aesthesis has become a connector across the continents 

Walter Mignolo

Essay: Re:emerging, Decentring and Delinking. Shifting the Geographies of Sensing, Believing and Knowing
A review of Sharjah Biennial 11 curated by Yuko Hasegawa ( Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo)

The epistemic and cultural privilege of European modernity is over, as is the politico-economic privilege. The shift to the eastern hemisphere and the 'Global South' is founded in both economic growth and cultural confidence. Hasegawa noticed that the artists of the 'Global South' and 'Far East' are using the same techniques originating in the west, but privileging identity when using them. A parallel with the global economic order is in place: the planetary economic order is capitalist, but the BRICs countries are acting on politico-economic state identities and delinking from the IMF and the World Bank.[12] Dignity is at stake at every level here, for the simple reason that identity is what Eurocentrism taught the rest of the world to despise so as to become modern (postmodern or altermodern), developed and 'civilized.
---
But what is not fine is to expect the universalization of western localities and sensibilities, simply because you cannot universalize the local without erasing the localities of others. That was and is the problem with the Eurocentred idea of modernity. Once, people around the world believed that 'the way' was to embrace western modernity. Now, the trick has been uncovered and the departures have already begun. They are wide and far spread.

Essay Delinking

Decolonizing solidarity resources and ideas organised by Clare Land

Ulli Beier 1922 -2011 Obits

Important teacher, cultural academic, working in Nigeria in the 1950s, founded literary magazine Black Orpheus in 1957, in Papua New Guinea in the 1970s BEier founded the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies and the literary journal Kovave. In 1980s he founded IWALEWA Haus for contemporary arts Bayreuth University.

http://www.artlink.com.au/articles/3644/ulli-beier/

http://www.iwalewa.uni-bayreuth.de/en/in-memoriam/Ulli_Beier/index.html

Beier Archive

Contemporary& Gallery at University Bayreuth

Gordon Bennett 10 August 1955 - 3 June 2014

links to news of the death of artist Gordon Bennett 3 June 2014

Richard Bell tribute 

'Bennett will be remembered as a hero of Australian art whose practice took aim at race relations, power imbalances, dominant histories and social conventions, producing some of the most iconic images of Australian art history over the past three decades.'

ArtAsiaPacific 

Jeremy Eccles in Sydney Morning Herald

National Gallery of Victoria resources

Mellor in Edinburgh

Danie Mellor at the National Museum of Scotland

Acclaimed contemporary Australian artist Danie Mellor’s current exhibition Primordial: SuperNaturalBayiMinyjirral responds to an array of wonders and objects from the worlds of science and nature for his current exhibition in the light-filled Victorian architectural granduer that is the National Museum of Scotland.

Review

Marina Abramovic

Performance artist Marina Abramovic has influenced generations of performance artists since the 1970s and worked in partnership with Ulay from 1976 to 1988.

Marina Abramovic 512 Hours, Serpentine Gallery

Abramovic's durational performance 512 Hours is at the Serpentine Gallery from June 11 to 25 August 2014.
This work is experienced in a very individual and personal way since it calls all attendees to become participants in the durational performance just by being there.

Abramovic video diaries of 512 Hours is here

We MustWait review by Brian Lobel here
Immaterial Digital Diary & Archive and MA Institute here 

List of press articles with PDFs here

Of more interest to me is that Abramovic and Ulay spent time in Australia in 1979 they were west of Lake Disappointment in the Little Sandy Desert, then again in 1980-81 travelled to Papunya and the Gibson Desert ( Leonora to Mount Newman). In Papunya they met Charlie Tararu Tjungurrayi who collaborated with them to make 'Conjunction' (1983) in Amsterdam, one work out of 22 performance series Nightsea Crossing.

Link to Nightsea Crossing here  and a clip here
Conjunction here
A useful critique here

The ease with which the artists romanticised and orientalised others is clear in the 70s and 80s, and Green suggests:
Abramovic and Ulay, it might be argued, were indulging in a problematic exploitation – an orientalisation – of Aboriginality and Tibetan culture through stereotyping. The chromatic coding [of their costumes] could be understood to fix their collaborators in aspic, according to which ‘Aboriginal’ art or ‘Tibet’ would indicate the condition of a ‘spiritual’ thing, thus undermining from within the primary sense of the collective inaccessibility from which these works emerge. 
Charles Green The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism (Sydney, 2001)

Jennifer Phipps, 'Marina Abramovic/Ulay/Ulay/Marina Abramovic,' Art & Text, no. 3 (Spring 1981): 43-50
Charles Green, 'Group Soul: Who Owns the Artists Fusion?' in Third Text, Vol. 18, Issue 6, 2004, 595-608
DOI:10.1080/0952882042000285005

John Betjeman Goes By Train

John Betjeman Goes By Train: Kings Lynn to Hunstanton 

In 1962, Sir John Betjeman travels along the Kings Lynn - Hunstanton line and stops off at the Royal Wolferton Station.

Wolferton was a railway station on the King's Lynn to Hunstanton line which opened in 1862 to serve the village of Wolferton in Norfolk, England. The station was also well-known as the nearest station to Sandringham House, and royal trains brought the royal family to and from their estate until its closure in 1969. After spending some time as a museum, the station is now preserved in private hands. The signal box and part of the station are listed buildings, Grade II.

BFI and YouTube

and this in 1963 Branch Line

Glasgow Kiss

That Glasgow Kiss on 23 July as a Vine here

Great action from Scotland during the opening ceremony for Commonwealth Games 2014 taking the ground for equality and diversity and humanity.

Freedom Come All Ye

by Hamish Henderson 1960

Roch the wind in the clear day's dawin
Blaws the cloods heilster-gowdie owre the bay
But there's mair nor a roch wind blawin
Thro the Great Glen o the warld the day
It's a thocht that wad gar oor rottans
Aa thae rogues that gang gallus fresh an gay
Tak the road an seek ither loanins
Wi thair ill-ploys tae sport an play

Nae mair will our bonnie callants
Merch tae war when oor braggarts crousely craw
Nor wee weans frae pitheid an clachan
Mourn the ships sailin doun the Broomielaw
Broken faimlies in lands we've hairriet
Will curse 'Scotlan the Brave' nae mair, nae mair
Black an white ane-til-ither mairriet
Mak the vile barracks o thair maisters bare

Sae come aa ye at hame wi freedom
Never heed whit the houdies croak for Doom
In yer hoose aa the bairns o Adam
Will find breid, barley-bree an paintit room
When Maclean meets wi's friens in Springburn
Aa thae roses an geans will turn tae blume
An yon black boy frae yont Nyanga
Dings the fell gallows o the burghers doun

English translation here

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

Articulated Intersect  in Tasmania

o     ABC TV http://is.gd/p7RNNQ

o     News.com http://is.gd/3wUy8W

o     Creators Project http://is.gd/77uG3g

o     Sydney Morning Herald http://is.gd/J0Q60l

o     CCTV Chinese TV http://is.gd/SCXvbC

o     The Guardian http://is.gd/JE9ujN

o     Aphra Mag http://www.aphramag.com/dark-mofo-articulated-intersect/

o     Beat Mag http://www.beat.com.au/arts/articulated-intersect

o     ABC radio http://is.gd/oyxoDZ

o     Yahoo news http://is.gd/1Y073Y

Armory Show 1913

Famous for showing Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending Staircase 2 ; noted in some places as being a show that introduced European avant-garde to America which is also disputed.

Included Australian artists  Derwent Lees and Charles Condor in Gallery G 

Pipilotti Rist

Pipilotti Rist cover version of Chris Isaak's Wicked Games  a version of which is used in Mercy Garden Skin Retour (2014) here . Hilarious !

Hear interview with Rist at MoMa about process


Review of Mercy Garden Skin Retour installed at MCA Sydney for the 19th Biennale here

Review of Sydney Biennale in Art Asia Pacific

Rachel Maclean

Glasgow based video and performance artist

Maclean YouTube channel here


Q&A
Dazed Digital: What do you think of David Bowie asking Scotland to stay in the UK?

Rachel Maclean: Much of the media coverage and political machinations of the Yes and No factions of the referendum debate has already descended into bizarre farce, however this was the icing on the Great British cake of nonsense. It was amusingly surreal and I was particularly inspired by Bowie’s decision to filter the statement through the avatar of Kate Moss. I strongly believe that all future decisions affecting the unity and otherwise of these Great Isles should be delivered through the glamorous conduit of an international super model.
A Whole New World

Generation: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland
100 Artists/ 60 Venues
Exhibitions Scotland wide 

Rachel Maclean interviewed here

Scotland's Art Revolution on BBC Four here

Think We Must!

Donna Haraway
"Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble", 5/9/14
Art of Living on a Damaged Planet
Vimeo of her paper here
'What people have been doing on this planet has in fact changed the planet for ever and for everyone - anthropogenic processes'

'Think we must' - Virginia Woolf Three Guineas
We need to think the consequences of the worlding we are in
The Science of SF: String Figures/ Science Fact/ Science Fiction/ Speculative Fabulation/ Speculative Feminism/ So Far

As you know from your own experience, and there are facts that prove it, the
daughters of educated men have always done their thinking from
hand to mouth; not under green lamps at study tables in the cloisters
of secluded colleges. They have thought while they stirred the
pot, while they rocked the cradle. It was thus that they won us (59)
the right to our brand-new sixpence. It falls to us now to go on
thinking; how are we to spend that sixpence? Think we must. Let
us think in offices; in omnibuses; while we are standing in the
crowd watching Coronations and Lord Mayor’s Shows; let us
think as we pass the Cenotaph; and in Whitehall; in the gallery of
the House of Commons; in the Law Courts; let us think at baptisms
and marriages and funerals. Let us never cease from thinking—
what is this ‘civilization’ in which we find ourselves? What
are these ceremonies and why should we take part in them? What
are these professions and why should we make money out of
them? Where in short is it leading us, the procession of the sons
of educated men?   Virginia Woolf Three Guineas (Hogarth Press, 1938) p. 59-60
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91tg/chapter2.html


Inspired by Marilyn Strathern
It matters what stories tell stories
It matters what thoughts think thoughts
It matters what worlds world worlds

Situated Knowledges The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective1988
Feminist Studies Vol.14 No.3 (575 -599)

Marilyn Strathern
social anthropologist | writer |

Journal of ethnographic theory HAU

Brook Andrew resources

Brook Andrew website
Galerie Nathalie Obadia Paris/ Brussels
Tolarno Galleries Melbourne

Film made for SBS 'Hidden History' produced by Intafusion. Go to website then  'In Production/ Hidden History' to see clip.

Video interview Bruce McLean and Brook at QAGOMA 21st Century: Art in the First Decade. (2010)

Making Travelling Colony (2012)

De ANIMA (2014)
review in Bendigo Advertiser with video

Bordeaux, Port of the Moon

Bordeaux, Port of the Moon, is a beautiful city of 18th Century architecture and protected by UNESCO as an inhabited world heritage site sine 2007.
The Port of the Moon, port city of Bordeaux in south-west France, is inscribed as an inhabited historic city, an outstanding urban and architectural ensemble, created in the age of the Enlightenment, whose values continued up to the first half of the 20th century, with more protected buildings than any other French city except Paris. It is also recognized for its historic role as a place of exchange of cultural values over more than 2,000 years, particularly since the 12th century due to commercial links with Britain and the Low Lands. Urban plans and architectural ensembles of the early 18th century onwards place the city as an outstanding example of innovative classical and neoclassical trends and give it an exceptional urban and architectural unity and coherence. Its urban form represents the success of philosophers who wanted to make towns into melting pots of humanism, universality and culture.

UNESCO video 

UNESCO TV / © NHK Nippon Hoso Kyokai

Musee d'Aquitaine, on cours Pasteur, displays the port's role in the slave trade and its Caribbean colonies with objects, maps and photography.

Christian Thompson links

Some more marginalia for Christian Thompson (Bidjara people); a multidisciplinary artist using photography, performance, video, sculpture, sound who performs the fluidity of identity through these media to great effect.

Thompson's work Emotional Striptease 2003 reviewed here by Anita Angel at RealTime Arts

A comprehensive review of Emotional Striptease here on the blog of The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things.

On Thompson's own website here

Thompson is an inaugural Charlie Perkins Scholar at Oxford Ruskin School of Fine Art and Drawing: interview here in 2013

In We Bury Our Own at Pitt Rivers, Christian responds to photographic collections at Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. In the essay on this page he is quoted as saying he is involved with 'spiritual repatriation of the archive'.

Rather than directly invoking or re-presenting historic imagery, as is evident in the work of other artists such as Brook Andrew (who has also worked extensively with archives), Thompson has chosen to take the history of photographic representation of Aboriginal people as a starting point for the spiritual repatriation of the archive through the redemptive process of self-portraiture. Importantly, this process has not involved drawing on those historical markers of identity which are so prevalent in ethnographic imagery, but rather his own fluid and evolving transcultural identity, as well as biographical markers of another recent identity, that of an Oxford student in formal dress. 

I first saw the three channel HD video work Heat (2010) in Art Gallery Western Australian and have since seen in at Musee d'Aquitaine in Bordeaux (2014) Here is a clip from Heat (2010)

Hettie Perkins Art & Soul part 2 2014 promo here references a couple of his works.

Vimeo of interview with Hetti Perkins, art + soul 2 episode three aired 22 July at 8:30pm on ABC1. 14 mins, here

Lost Together (2009) here. I am writing on 'Dead as a Doornail' from this series shown in the 2013 Royal Academy exhibition 'Australia' in London.

Landscape, Siri Hayes,  and Lost Together series reviewed by Alison Inglis here 

Art writing links | incomplete

Micro fiction based on memories of exhibiting by artists and participants by Caitlin Griffiths
Art Histories

Leon Wainwright


Adrian Rifkin (ex Goldsmiths) Gai-Savoir

Courtauld 2010 project on writing art history

Frieze writing prize here

Open arts archive at the Open University

Alex J Taylor (Australian) American Art andVisual Culture Historian, Oxford

European digitised archives

Europeana is a single access point to millions of books, paintings, films, museum objects and archival records that have been digitised throughout Europe.
Link here

Photographer Wayne Quilliam

Wayne Quilliam featured gallery 

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/australia-culture-blog/gallery/2014/jul/10/australia-through-the-eyes-of-wayne-quilliam-in-pictures

Indigenous sciences | Indigenous astronomy

Article by astrophysicist Ray Norris in The Conversation about Aboriginal sciences here

Norris is Chief Research Scientist, for CSIRO Astronomy & Space Science, & Adjunct Prof., Dept of Indigenous Studies (Warawara), Macquarie Uni at CSIRO

Ray's website emudreaming collects research and articles

Check out his further reading list

Ethnoastronomy

Norris and Hamacher: Australian Aboriginal Astronomy: An Overview 

Danie Mellor travelling 2014

Artist and chair of Visual Arts Australia council Danie Mellor  out n about at Art Basel Hong Kong and Scotland

Primordial: SuperNaturalBayiMinyjirral, which opens on 1 August at the National Museum of Scotland, his first exhibition in Scotland

http://artery.australiacouncil.gov.au/2014/07/the-work-of-danie-mellor/

Additionally his exhibition Exotic Lies, Secret Ties is at TarraWara Museum until 27 July 2014

Danie Mellor Exotic lies and sacred ties (The heart that conceals, the tongue that never reveals) 2008. I
nstallation: pastel, pencil, glitter, Swarovski crystal and wash on Saunders Waterford paper, framed, with mosaic china, taxidermy animals and painted wood. 325.0 x 325.0 x 130.0 cm variable.
Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2009.

Archives | Australian art

Australian art archives online
Design and Arts Australia Online here

How the internet liberated Australia's art history by Joanna Mendelsshon

Researchers using the Design and Art Australia Online database no longer need to trek across the country to examine works such as Jean Goldberg’s “Wheels”. Powerhouse Museum, CC BY-SA

Starling murmuration

Link to RSPB website of Starling murmuration in the Cambridgeshire Fen Drayton Lakes

David Kjaer

Also in Avalon Marshes in Somerset

Starling murmuration is studied by computational biologists

George F. Young,

Luca Scardovi,

Andrea Cavagna,

Irene Giardina,

Naomi E. Leonard

Their paper Starling Flock Networks Manage Uncertainty in Consensus at Low Cost is here 

Author summary

Starling flocks move in beautiful ways that both captivate and intrigue the observer. Previous work has shown that starlings pay attention to their seven closest neighbors, but until now it was not understood why this number is seven. Our paper explains the mystery: when uncertainty in sensing is present, interacting with six or seven neighbors optimizes the balance between group cohesiveness and individual effort. To prove this result we develop a new systems-theoretic approach for understanding noisy consensus dynamics...more

Watch here - turn the music off (!)

Andrew Ross | Economic disobedience

The Rolling Jubilee is an initiative to free people from debt by buying debt then releasing it
The website is here - its a bail out of the people by the people.

'debts are the wages of the future claimed in advance'

This is a strike debt project from Occupy Wall Street and I heard of it from Prof Andrew Ross at Crossroads in Cultural Studies 2014 in Tampere, Finland

Australian Art in Paris

Commercial gallerist Stephane Jacob Arts d'Australie promotes and exhibits a wide range of work
His website here

art history & art writing

James Elkins is leaving art history
link to his website here
Link to Elkins 'writing with images' book project here
What is interesting writing in art history?

Durkheim links

Encyclopedia of Religion and Society: Hartford Institute for Religion Research | Durkheim

Wiki entry for Frances Gillan

Chicago University summary of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

The Durkheim Pages: Robert Alun Jones, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, History and Sociology at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Link.

David Émile Durkheim (April 15, 1858 – November 15, 1917) was a French sociologist, social psychologist and philosopher. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology. Wiki link.

r e a

Link to reference to r e a  PolesApart at Breenspace gallery in 2009 with essay by Dr Christine Nicholls

Enwezor on Sydney & Melbourne contemporary art scene

Curator Okwui Enwezor travelled to Melbourne and Sydney, checking out the scene and researching for the 2015 Venice Biennale
"I think this cross-section of practices, in a sense, describes the landscape of contemporary art – which means, rather than an Australian-ness of the work I see here, the key for me is the specific individual artist's own language"

"I'm excited about Australia on two levels – first of course, Fiona's work. We met and had a discussion of what she might be working on, but she was a bit cagey about it! Which is normal – it needs to be surprising," says Enwezor. "Second is the new pavilion. This is very exciting – it will be the first contemporary architecture in the Giardini since the South Korean pavilion. I'm looking forward to it. It's a very important milestone for Australia's presence in the Biennale."

 June 2014

Read more:

Fiona Hall's Big Game Hunting was at dOCUMENTA(13)

Link to audio from ABC radio

Fiona Hall and Big Game Hunting

(photo Sophie Reid http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/booksandartsdaily/fiona-hall-image-1/4671784)

Christian Thompson

Links for reference to artist
We Bury Our Own at Pitt Rivers Museum in 2013
Blouin Artinfo link to article by Nicholas Forrest 2013

Alex Speed article includes biog, Tree of Knowledge, Charlie Perkins award

At PICA in Western Australia for Hijacked III in 2012 link

one image from the series King Billy

Kimberley artists recorded

ABC Open Project archive
I am an artist: I come from the bush series on ABC open here

Right is Wrong: Bildmuseet Umea

Opening on 8 June Right is Wrong shows 40 years of Chinese contemporary art from the M+Sigg Collection
The exhibition runs to 12 October 2014. Link to website here

Wang Xingwei, New Beijing, 2001. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the M+ Sigg Collection.

19th century views of the European invaders

Rock paintings in Stone Country, Arnhem Land plateau, show observations of the incomers to Australia's north.
Link here

Anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, 25 years ago

Artist Guo Jian arrested

artnet reports here
CNN report here

Tom Mitchell Lunch with the FT: Guo Jian
'Now an artist creating work out of minced pork and litter, the former soldier and Tiananmen Square protester recalls the horrors of that night in Beijing 25 years ago.'

BBC report on journalist detained

China journalist Gao Yu detained in Tiananmen lead-up

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo

June Fourth in My Body poem by Liu Xiaobo read in English here

CNN report

Ma Jian remembers Tiananmen Square Massacre 4 June 1989

On 4 June 1989, when the Chinese Communist party (CCP) sent 200,000 soldiers in armoured tanks to suppress the peaceful pro-democracy protest in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, causing hundreds if not thousands of fatalities, it was unimaginable to me and most of my compatriots that, 25 years later, this barbaric regime would still be in power, and the massacre would be rendered a taboo. But despite the party's most ardent efforts to wipe the episode from history, memories of the massacre refuse to be crushed. On the milestone 25th anniversary, Tiananmen is more important than ever.
The Guardian 1 June 2014

Vale Maya Angelou: 28 May 2014

Maya Angelou


 Photograph: Jane Bown

4 April 1928 - 28  May 2014
Family Tribute
 Obituary 

 Alice Walker's tribute:
'She was special, she was rare, she was more beautiful than perhaps even she realised, because she was, among other things, such an artist, that she could not only create worlds on paper, or in a listener's imagination, but she also managed, over and over again in her long life, to create and recreate herself.'

Lennie Goodings

Gary Younge heartfelt recollection of interview with Maya in 2002

'When I asked her how she dealt with people's response to old age, she recited the final verse of her poem, On Aging:

I'm the same person I was back then
A little less hair, a little less chin,
A lot less lungs and much less wind.
But ain't I lucky I can still breathe in.

And then the laughing would start again.'
 ----
'She described the 9/11 attacks as a “hate crime”, and said: “Living in a state of terror was new to many white people in America, but black people have been living in a state of terror in this country for more than 400 years.” '
--
Cook Book

Maya Angelou speaks: And Still I Rise

British Landscape

Link to Constable at the NGA in 2006

Review of Constable, Turner, Gainsborough and the Making of Landscape at the RA in 2012-13 by Mark Prodger in the Guardian

How to Speak Artspeak (Properly)

How to Speak Artspeak (Properly)

A History of Australian Art

New volume published
Australian Art: A History by Sasha Grishin, ANU and published by Melbourne University Press

Grishin: " I think the best contemporary Australian art, the best 20th century Australian art, really stands up to any international competition, and I thoroughly believe in that."

Read more: http://www.canberratimes.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/grishin-shakes-the-tree-20140313-34oo3.html#ixzz2

Dan Rule reviews this new book in smh with visual references as here:


Fiona Hall, 'Paw Paw (Carica papaya)', 1989-90, NGA.

Visual art at the Adelaide Festival

Dark Heart at Tandanya in Adelaide until 11 May 2014

See gallery of images here

In May 2013, 28 life jackets belonging to asylum seekers washed up on Cocos Island, off the coast of western Australia. Alex Seton's installation, Someone died trying to have a life like mine, features 28 life jackets made of Wombeyan marble. Ben Quilty’s The Island is displayed on the wall behind
Photograph: Alicia Canter for the Guardian

The 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art taps into the hearts and minds of the nation – probing the personal, political and psychological dimensions of contemporary Australia. Titled Dark Heart, the 2014 Adelaide Biennialexplores Australia’s cultural identity through the lens of some of Australia’s leading contemporary artists.

Dark Heart presents twenty eight contemporary Australian artists and collectives, delivering their brave new visions in mediums that include photography, painting, sculpture, installation and the moving image. The issues and ideas explored by the artists encompass intercultural relationships, our ecological fate, gender and political power.

As Curator and Art Gallery of South Australia Director Nick Mitzevich explains: ‘My focus is on assembling an exhibition that connects with the viewer and provides a moving experience’.

Stuart Hall 1932-2014

Having been greatly affected by the life of Stuart Hall, I respectfully acknowledge his passing this week and the sorrow of so many colleagues and friends, and both his immediate and wider family.

Stuart Hall in the Stuart Hall Library at Iniva in Rivington Place

Obituary in The Guardian Education section here 

Martin Jacques in The Observer
'It is difficult to think of anyone else that has offered such a powerful insight into what has been happening to us over the past 70 years.'

Autograph ABP notice, photo and video interview here
Autograph ABP commissioned film by John Akomfrah The Unfinished Conversation is on at Tate Britain until 23 March 2014.

The Jacques Ranciere blog posting on remembering Stuart Hall here, and look for other entries. Paul Bowman calls for the project to continue, to us all to disrupt and reconfigure things

Mark Levine on Stuart's revolutionary legacy on Al Jazeera

The Stuart Hall Project (103mins, UK 2013) directed by John Akomfrah is available to rent online from the BFI player here

The Stuart Hall Project (2013) - trailer

Vivid Memories - An Aboriginal Art HIstory at Musée d’Aquitaine, Bordeaux

IDAIA post on this exhibition here

Here is a quote of Henry Skerritt:
“these works have to be stunningly beautiful because of what they’re trying to do … to enact all of the power of the landscape, and it’s a power that they see in the shifting of the light, in the blossoming of the desert blooms, in the movement of the sand dunes; all of these things are enactments of this spiritual power of the landscape. It has to be beautiful because what it’s trying to do is occupy you…. These are not sentinels standing guard to protect their culture against the onslaught of colonialism. These are not defensive paintings, these are actually occupying forces and the point of them is to travel out into the world … to impress upon you with this purely affective visual power, to realize how powerful this landscape is.”[v]

http://www.idaia.com.au/en/article-make-it-new-make-it-now-just-what-is-it-that-makes-australian-aboriginal-art-so-appealing-so-contemporary/

Critics

On the iconophilia website, full text of Ian McLean's paper : Anxious identities: reinventing Australia in a changing world presented at the symposium at the Royal Academy 1 November 2013


Ron Radford  (Director of the National Gallery of Australia and a co-curator of the exhibition)

writes in the Brisbane Times on 18 December 2013 ' Shedding light on the art of our continent'

The British have not been as exposed to contemporary Aboriginal art compared with, say, the French, Germans, Canadians or Americans. Indigenous painting was too baffling for some of the older British critics.

Royal visit, Rothwell commentary and menu

Australian Channel 9 News reports on Prince Charles' visit to Australia at the Royal Academy
link
And reported in Royal Central here


Nicolas Rothwell 'Hanging in a post-colonial disconnect ' in The Australian 6 December 2013
'The indigenous way of seeing the country is being woven more and more into the nation's understanding of its landscape - but that art's resonance is Australian, not global.
...
On its own, bereft of background, seen by eyes without sympathy, it remains hieratic, jumbled; it is patterns, emblems, decoration, nothing more. For us, it may reveal a degree of meaning; for outsiders, it is the exotic, resistant unknown. This is the divide Australia at the Royal Academy has brought out. And if indigenous art makes its strongest appeal only to those implicated in its stories, if it remains mute without interpretation, is it somehow diminished? Are we?'

Royal Academy restaurant review of Australian themed menu