what to do

FOCUS 2017, by Courtney Martin and Wendy MacNaughton

From Brain Pickings Maria Popova’s site:
  ‘With an eye to the various brokennesses of the world, past and present, Toni Morrison writes: This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art.’ (‘No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear,’ The Nation, April 6, 2015, p.185)

Julie Gough

collecting refs to artist Julie Gough
YouTube channel here
artists are a pressure gauge for society | art is a way to show what's coming
interview NAVA
Artist website

more than material

Terri Bird
More than material: art and the incorporeality of the event
material thinking

history | theory

Dr. Heather Igloliorte
Concordia Canada
thesis contributes the first art history of the Nunatsiavummiut, focusing on over 400 years of post-contact production, Nunatsiavummi Sananguagusigisimajangit / Nunatsiavut Art History:  Continuity, Resilience, and Transformation in Inuit Art (2013)

Principal Investigator, Exceptional Grant, Canada Council for the Arts, Project Title: Indigenous Theories and Methodologies for Art History Workshop (co-edited volume with Dr. Carla Taunton)

Participants in Teachings Theories and Methodologies for Indigenous Art History in North America

documenta and la biennale

la biennale and documenta
curators choose to include partners

documenta’s traditional home, the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel
Photo: Carroy via Wikimedia Commons

Fanny Balbuk Yooreel

Fanny Balbuk Yooreel: resistance fighter Whadjuk Noongar country

National Trust Project Gina Pickering

Art market - a view

Ralph Hobbs of nanda\hobbs gallery King St Sydney
An insider's observation

Armenia

24 and 25 April 1915
Armenia | Australia | Ottoman

Australia's Armenian story
by Vicken Babkenian & Judith Crispin
Inside Story

'Australia has had a long relationship with Armenia and its people. But since Australia also has a Turkish past – because Gallipoli in Turkey is such an important part of Australia’s understanding of the place of the first world war in our history – it also needs to come to terms with what happened to the people of Armenia during and after that conflict.'

This is an extract from The Honest History Book, edited by David Stephens and Alison Broinowski, published this month by NewSouth.

Sydney Biennale 2018

Mami Kataoka- director
“The biennale is a great opportunity for me to rethink or to look at the world of today, geographically, and also historically,” Kataoka said. “We are really living in a time [in which] multiple, plural values are colliding and competing. How can we see this from a bigger perspective?”
Announcement re artists included
16 March to 11 June 

Read Haraway

'Read the fucking book' says Ben Denham

"thinking one thinking practice at a time will get us no-where, but the job is to build contact zones that matter" (DJH)

Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene
by Donna J. Haraway
(Duke University Press, Sept 2016)

On John Berger

Ben Lerner
Postscript: John Berger, 1926-2017
The New Yorker

Read Confabulations (Penguin Random House, 2016)
review by Kate Kallaway: 'People forget that Berger is funny. And curious. And that he listens – how he listens.'

Berger: “The way I observe comes naturally to me as a curious person – I’m like la vigie – the lookout guy on a boat who does small jobs, maybe such as shovelling stuff into a boiler, but I’m no navigator – absolutely the opposite. I wander around the boat, find odd places – the masts, the gunwale – and then simply look out at the ocean. Being aware of travelling has nothing to do with being a navigator.”