In 2012 the Aboriginal Tent Embassy will commemorate forty years of Indigenous political activism at its Canberra site. Set on the front lawn of what is now Old Parliament House (OPH) and surrounded by monolithic buildings, such as the High Court of Australia, Treasury offices, National Gallery of Australia and National Library of Australia, the […]
We Are Here (WAH) was an international symposium for artist-run initiatives, developed by the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA), in collaboration with Firstdraft. It was funded by the Australia Council for the Arts, ArtsNSW, the Copyright Agency Ltd, the City of Sydney and the Freedman Foundation. Held in Sydney from September 1–4 in […]
Blacktown Arts Centre, Sydney Produced in collaboration with Performance Space, Sydney 23 June – 2 July 2011 Within & Without was a portrait of Manila. A hybrid theatre work set in a scaled-down replica of the city made from recycled cardboard boxes, it saw a sprawling and chaotic metropolis transplanted into Blacktown Arts Centre in […]
A collaborative text between Adrien Allen (director of Conical, Inc., Melbourne), Dr Hélène Frichot (senior lecturer, Program of Architecture, RMIT University) and Bridie Lunney (artist). Lunney’s exhibition Suspension Test at Conical in March 2011 engaged Frichot’s text and Allen’s space. Interleaving these three voices together expands an account of the work, while acknowledging its inseparability […]
Simon Maidment is the director of Satellite Art Projects, a not-for-profit arts organisation focused on presenting ambitious public projects outside of the gallery context. Working across platforms, Satellite’s projects and commissions involve collaboration between artists and other specialists — including architects, engineers and designers — to realise engaging site-specific public artworks. Trent Walter : What […]
Walking is not a medium, it’s an attitude. To walk is a very immediate and handy way of interacting and eventually interfering within a given context.[^1] — Francis Alÿs The practice of walking as a leisurely activity and not simply as an unavoidable mode of mobility and convenience is one that many of us take […]
Barkly Arts Centre, Footscray, Melbourne 3 June – 1 July 2011 Curated by Jessica Scott, artist-in-residence Footscrayism was one of three exhibitions produced as part of New Skin, a key outcome of the artist-in-residence program at Footscray’s Barkly Arts Centre, which required each artist-in-residence to utilise community involvement in their individual projects. Untangling Footscrayism from […]
A dwelling is extracted from the fine print of planning and building codes. A modest architectural prosthesis, connected physically and psychically to four apartments. Here the architect rests, calibrates acts in which to reconfigure the city’s code. In another location, across an ocean, a handful of portable structures stand, blue tarpaulins taut. A small village […]
In March of this year at Rear View Gallery, Melbourne, and Artbank, Vancouver, Kate Moss and Marilyne Blais simultaneously constructed transient and temporal structures through the use of found materials, Skype, projectors and volunteers. We Build Up became a communal structure that was both a mirror of itself and a quixotic attempt to join architectural […]
Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells, 2010–2011 Various libraries: Buenos Aires, Berlin, London, Warsaw, Stockholm, Copenhagen. No-one comes to a library to stay there.[^1] — Ant Hampton English artists Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells collaborated for the first time on The Quiet Volume, in which they explore the social and imaginative space created within a library. […]
Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne 10 June – 16 July 2011 Curated by Amita Kirpalani At the end of the exhibition Catching Trucks, a brief film clip played on a small screen located next to the reception desk. The scene was from Agnès Varda’s 2000 film The Gleaners and I which investigates contemporary gleaners; the people who […]
Elizabeth Newman & Nicki Wynnychuk Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide 19 May – 18 June 2011 Art that looks like furniture, and furnishings that look like art, and polychromes that look like monochromes, but only because the lighting’s too low, and monochromes that look polychromatic, but only because you’re standing too close. This is a […]
The work creates a space. Work makes its own dimensions. The body finds the most comfortable way of rearticulating its movements and repeating its techniques, edging outwards and converging inwards, marking out a perimeter within which all tools are at easy reach, and all the while remaining focused on the work. The work creates a […]
‘Work for life and not for palaces, temples, cemeteries, and museums’, wrote Aleksandr Rodchenko. His thought is profound but how does it play out? David Harris (aka DJ Toecutter) and Phoebe Torzillo built a yurt and lived in it for a year. Upon learning this fact, I had the hypothesis that their decision was most […]
Three projects by Danius Kesminas and collaborators Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne 5 May – 23 July 2011 Curated by Max Delany Visually, Danius Kesminas’s three projects included in Monash University Museum of Art’s survey show — covering his work with a varied cast of collaborators over the last decade — defied viewers to […]
The popping curves, motion lines and electric colour scheme of Keith Haring’s (1958–1990) Untitled mural of 1984 evoke vitality and energy. But things change. Today the mural, situated at the former Collingwood Technical College, is faded and peeling in parts. Its appearance speaks of time passed by way of a surface textured with absence and, […]
Time: Saturday morning, 20 August 2011 Place: Baptist Place, Melbourne Directions: Southern side of Little Collins Street, between Swanston and Russell The Urban Designer Hundreds of noises wove themselves into a wiry texture of sound with barbs protruding here and there, smart edges running along it and subsiding again, with clear notes splintering off and […]
The rationality of a grid on a map sinks into what it is supposed to define… One is liable to see things in maps that are not there. One must be careful of the hypothetical monsters that lurk between the map’s latitudes…[^1] What is legitimacy? What is it that makes a person, a group or […]
Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis 20 November 2010 – 15 January 2011 Culturgest, Porto, 5 February – 23 April 2011 If I’m going to be completely honest with you, I have never been to Minneapolis nor [sic] Porto so I too have never ‘seen’ the show. — email to the editor, 22 April 2011 ‘Completely honest’, […]
Like so many insidious and powerful organisations before them, Bababa International (BI) prefer to remain undefined. At present, its six members are nameless and the collective will only agree publicly on their location (Bababa International Airport, Redfern) and their commitment to making and exhibiting art under the BI designation. Perhaps it is this indifference to […]
The Narrows, Melbourne, 30 September – 14 November 2010 Curated by Dominic Hofstede In later covers, Mason moves through a variety of other art movements, such as arte povera, spatial art, colour field painting, geometric abstraction, abstraction, pop art and op art, to name a few. Such referencing kept Epicurean fresh and unhindered by a […]
In the 1960s, Joseph Kosuth claimed that conceptual art would usurp the place of a number of other writing-based practices, such as literature and philosophy. It is now widely known that this bold claim was connected to his idea that the task of contemporary art had become to question and expand the definition of art […]
Y3K, Melbourne, 4–24 December 2010, curated by Kate Briggs Finding is the first Act The second, loss, Third, Expedition for The ‘Golden Fleece’ Fourth, no Discovery — Fifth, no Crew — Finally, no Golden Fleece — Jason — sham — too.[^1] Extreme Beauty: Approaches to the Real followed the threads of the classic stories of […]
Contemporary Art Spaces Tasmania, Hobart 30 October – 21 November 2010 Kit Wise John Vella must be one of Tasmania’s, if not Australia’s, most anarchic contemporary artists. HANGBANG (nightshift) presented Vella’s work to date at Contemporary Art Spaces Tasmania (CAST), Hobart, but was no ordinary mid-career survey show. Vella took his entire artistic output of […]