By Nadine Lebde — 15 May, 2020
This is the second article in a series produced in partnership with Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement and Diversity Arts Australia, as part of the StoryCasters Project. The Terra inFirma program was originally intended to take place in three parts over 2020. It has been delayed due to Covid-19, and will now extend into 2021. • This year marks 250…
By June Miskell — 11 December, 2019
This text is in dialogue with Caroline Garcia and JD Reforma’s collaborative exhibition The Fullness of Time at Verge Gallery. The exhibition explores the way time is recorded in materials and language through two distinct, yet interrelated, approaches: a choreography of transliteration, oscillating between Tagalog and English (Garcia), and an accretion of gestures and distilled…
By June Miskell — 23 July, 2019
‘Embracing a love ethic means that we utilize all the dimensions of love in our everyday lives.’ bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (2001), p. 94 ‘Love’ remains devoid of a singular definition. Manifesting in many forms—be it ‘care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect and knowledge’, love is more than something we feel, it…
By Naomi Riddle — 19 July, 2019
‘Recalcitrant’ is one of those four syllable words that’s fun to say out loud. It’s a mouthful of stones, a jumble of hard-edged consonants that mimic the word’s definition: disobedient, difficult, wayward, wilful, and above all, uncooperative. Contemporary Recalcitrants, curated by James Gatt, brings together the works of Christopher Hanrahan, Anthony Johnson, Elizabeth Pulie and…
By Rebecca Hall — 17 July, 2019
In place of a wall text, OK Democracy, We Need to Talk leads with a TV screen that plays a brief, simulated text conversation—a digital quarrel—between the curators and ‘Democracy’: I think things could be better between us. You’ve changed… OMG…is this a conversation or a provocation!? It is both—according to the extended curatorial statement…
By June Miskell — 8 March, 2019
This text is in dialogue with the exhibition Do You Know This Feeling? at Firstdraft. Curated by Sebastian Henry-Jones, the exhibition featured the work of Arben Dzika, Athena Thebus, Cee Powell, Chi Tran, Cristine Brache, Frontyard, IchikawaEdward, JD Reforma and Trinh T. Minh-Ha. This text riffs off JD Reforma’s work Why should I be sad?…
By Nadia Odlum — 1 March, 2019
To say that discussions of gender equality were prevalent in 2018 would be a gross understatement. Marches, movements, protests, trials and new accusations brought these conversations to the fore—both locally and internationally—and in the arts as much as in other sectors. As we move into 2019, two Sydney exhibitions are ensuring that these conversations stay…
By Paul Kelaita — 12 October, 2018
There’s a provocative question asked in one of the many video works in The Public Body .03 that lasts for only a second—‘but what if a species is nothing more than a set of relationships?’ The question appears in Korakrit Arunanondchai’s ‘with history in a room filled with people with funny names 4’ (2017), a…
By Abdul Karim Hekmat — 14 September, 2018
‘Modern Western culture is in large part the work of exiles, émigrés, refugees.’ Edward Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’ (1984) In a half-darkened space at Blacktown Arts in Western Sydney, you see two vests hanging on the gallery wall. They are reminiscent of the vests worn by suicide bombers, and a few grenade-shaped objects protrude…
By Lily Golightly — 23 August, 2018
This text is in dialogue with the exhibition Session Vessels at Airspace Gallery, and is the next instalment in RD’s feature series of paratextual responses. Organised by Rafaela Pandolfini and Ainslie Templeton, Session Vessels featured the work of twenty artists and collectives from Australia and the US. I planted a wattle tree in our front yard in November…