Lately I’ve started driving around Tasmania again, making another film. Since 2009 I’ve made twenty-four of them, I can’t stop. Short, long, some seem unwatchable, nevertheless they record and become a record, a counter to so much that seems missing. They are my memory work. Sometimes it is hard to start, to reverse out of […]
Georgina Watson currently lives in Tāmaki Makaurau and has recently completed an MFA at Elam School of Fine Arts. Recent projects include ‘Haughty Skies’ in Distracted Reader #3, Auckland, forthcoming (2018), Anxious Garden, Enjoy Gallery, Wellington (2017), Pack Lite Organised by Stella Corkery, NY, LA, Auckland (2017) ‘Collective Fruits’ in Wormhole, Melbourne (2016), amongst others. […]
Lowlee: Can we just talk like now and you can record or…? Beth: Yeah yeah yeah OK I’m recording now Lowlee: Ye, kele. Beth: Ye, ka… Lowlee: Werte! Beth (laughs): Werte! Ayenge Arrernte akweke ware akaltye-irre….ke, no – how do I say it in the past tense? Lowlee: Ke Beth: ke, akaltye-irreke, akweke ware, ke […]
What you are about to read is a demonstration of Ara Irititja given at the International Australian Studies Association (InASA) Conference in December 2016.[^1] In the darkened lecture theatre, a clip from the Ara Irititja archive is projected onto the wall. It shows old people including Rene Kulitja’s father Walter Pukutiwara performing inma at a […]
In southeast Australia the Aboriginal population is young; more than fifty percent are under twenty-five-years old. Yet, Aboriginal young people in Victoria remain a minority within the broader community. Many have limited opportunities to engage in programs reflecting their everyday experiences or to identify with others from similar backgrounds. The following is a conversation between […]
Settlers Miners Same Thing – Jacky Green Although I know Aboriginal sovereignty as always present, embedded within country, I find my strongest encounters with specific sovereignties of place often occur in unexpected moments – like a bolt of remembering – chanced upon in the presence of a scar tree or a reference found deep within […]
Between the subjugation and indifference of colonial governance, Ngurungaeta, William Barak leads the Wurundjeri people in a sustained decolonising movement, seeking land-rights at Coranderrk. They petition ministers, writing letters and walking to Melbourne to protest directly to the Premier. is goes on in the face of dispossession. And, in 1881 there is a rupture in […]
I have long been concerned with memories of colonial violence in the Australian landscape; places that have witnessed harm and continue to hold these traumatic memories in the present. Their existence was something I was attuned to as a child constantly travelling regional New South Wales with my family, visiting places and people, connecting with […]
American contemporary mythologies spring from American founding mythologies. The events of Columbus’ arrival, the American revolution, and the signing of the Constitution washed away terra nullius to reveal the American nation. The enduring desire to avoid facts or truths is evident in America today via the fervor for conspiracy theory.[^1] Nearly fifty per cent of […]
The archive is built to keep out water. The archive is built on the edge of the floodplain of the Moonee Ponds Creek on the land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. Water is excluded from the archive because of the risks it poses to paper and other organic materials. Mould can germinate […]
Motifs in Matthew Harris’s lurid works include flowers, copulating pigs, and a gravestone inscribed with a gold sad face. Born in 1991 and raised in Wangaratta, Matthew’s artistic output to date has included video, tapestry, sculpture and painting. He works within a gay camp parlance. Artifice, riffs, cuteness, violence and comic eroticism come together in […]
We were sitting in a dark lecture theatre when it happened. I can’t believe it happened. My hand was raised. The moderator looked at me in acknowledgement. And then it happened. I asked Marcia Langton a question. I said, ‘Can you speak to the humour in Brook Andrew’s work?’ She replied with a deafening silence, […]
But that’s work that I’m doing. And if taking art out of an art gallery is a necessary step for me to enjoy myself, then surely that speaks more to a problem with galleries than anything else? What can art spaces actively do to meet us halfway? Certainly, the proper curation of comedy is a […]
Experimental music desperately needs a turn to humour, satire, parody and, most of all, reflexivity, if it is to remain listenable. I can almost see this turn taking shape in the form of a long and unfolding joke. But, like any joke, the punchline can only work if you’re alive to the setup. I propose […]
The Karrabing Film Collective (KAC) is a grassroots arts and film cooperative consisting of friends and family members whose lives interconnect along the coastal waters west of Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia. Begun in 2008 when members of the extended family found themselves homeless in the wake of deteriorating conditions on their natal […]
SW : Can you give us more of a moving description of the video work’s narrative? MC : One of the things to note is that there’s a lot of Nepali text in the film as it was intended to be a Nepali film. Yet there’s only one scene of dialogue; one robot says ‘What […]
un Magazine got in touch with me to see if I’d write a piece on humour for this humorous issue. They asked me because I’m a woman, and I make performance-based work which always seems to have a humorous twist to it, somewhere. For instance, with my West Space show last year, I had people […]
Two Harpic Lemon Toilet Rim Blocks is an ongoing series of interventions involving the installation of toilet rim blocks within the toilets of various art galleries and museums across Victoria. As a wry service provision and play on the colloquial use of the term lemon, the series suggests an institutional irreverence that extends to include […]
i wish the earth would j swallow me. Keep on dancing till the world ends. Dreams of the volcanoes in Tāmaki Makaurau violently convulsing. Clasping hands together under the table. Our breath moving in sync. Stripping back the flesh to reveal the whiteness of our bones. Grinding bones into dust. Bone marrow and blood absorbed […]
In the early years of the twenty-first century, a very clever executive producer at Bravo had the multimillion-dollar idea of pairing the character clichés of Desperate Housewives with the consumerist content of MTV Cribs. In 2006, The Real Housewives of Orange County was born. Ratings soared over the late 2000s as The Great Recession ravaged […]
Andrew Frost : Is there ever a wrong time to laugh at an artist’s work? This is a question that has worried me. I suppose the answer is, when the humour isn’t intentional. But it’s a tricky business. I remember going to a few early shows by Guy Benfield and thinking the work was really […]
Following his third arrest, Christopher D’Arcangelo’s father Allan D’Arcangelo, a prominent painter at the time, asked him, ‘Why are you going after the art institutions? You should be going after the banks. They’re the real criminals.’ With this preface in mind, it could be said that the two distinctly separate practices of Christopher D’Arcangelo, and […]
I can never have a poker face. Anybody looking at me can tell exactly what I’m thinking. — Gena Rowlands In May 2016, I invited 100 men to participate in a short scene derived from a John Cassavetes film, Opening Night, as part of a 24-hour durational performance at Australian Centre for the Moving Image […]