By Naomi Riddle — 21 February, 2020
The Museum of Contemporary Art’s summer exhibition, Cornelia Parker, is a retrospective of the celebrated British artist’s work. Parker is the tenth artist to feature in the Sydney International Art Series—an initiative undertaken in partnership with the NSW Government to bring internationally recognised artists to Australian audiences. Parker is best known for her large-scale installations,…
By Andrew Brooks — 7 February, 2020
This is part two of an extended review considering Vernon Ah Kee’s The Island at Campbelltown Arts Centre. You can read part one here. At the centre of Vernon Ah Kee’s exhibition are two multiple channel video works—one old and one new—that bring into sharp relief how central policing and detention are to the preservation of…
By Andrew Brooks — 5 February, 2020
This is part one of an extended review considering Vernon Ah Kee’s The Island at Campbelltown Arts Centre. ‘That’s not an accident.’ Lex Wotton ‘Settlers always think they’re defending themselves.’ Fred Moten The ‘island’ continent often referred to as Australia is underpinned by a carceral imagination. A national mythology casts settlers as a bunch of…
By Chloe Watfern — 16 August, 2019
‘Why cover the same ground again?…It goes against my grain to repeat a tale told once, and told so clearly.’ Homer, The Odyssey ‘It is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it.’ Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller, (1936) I’m not going to tell you about the…
By Neha Kale — 21 June, 2019
PARADISE Nightclubs are places, but they are also ideas. For 50 Cent, ‘the club’ is the logical nexus of hedonism and capitalism (You can find me in the club/ bottle full of bub). Kendrick thinks it’s a bad habit (Don’t say I didn’t tithe for you/ or push the club to the side for you)….
By Tyler Patterson — 11 June, 2019
On the first day of spring in 1914, a train tore through the Australian countryside en route to Toowoomba from Brisbane. Belching smoke and swallowing shovelful after shovelful of coal, it carried the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, who was touring Australia with the British Association for the Advancement of Science Congress, and his childhood friend—the artist-playwright…
By Dr. Jessica Olivieri — 20 February, 2019
Megan Monte and Josephine Skinner mark one year at the helm of Cement Fondu with The Ropes, an exhibition that brings together the work of First Nations artist/choreographer/performer Amrita Hepi and American conceptual artist/philosopher Adrian Piper. Alongside The Ropes is an exhibition of contemporary woven sculpture by the Yirran Miigaydhu Weavers. Placing these three practices…
By Matthew Crookes — 15 August, 2018
The Ghosts of Nothing / In Memory of Johnny B. Goode is the culmination of a four-year collaborative project featuring the eponymous (and fictive) rock group comprising Sean Lowry and Ilmar Taimre. A visually rich, multi-layered presentation, it initially existed as a ‘rock opera of expanded cover versions’. At The Lock-Up Gallery in Newcastle, the…
By Cherine Fahd — 29 June, 2018
In the front matter of a yellowing paperback copy of Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse (1990) I have inscribed the date—23 July 2000. Looking at it now, I can recall this time eighteen years ago, reading Barthes’ work during a long period of romantic solitude. I hadn’t been in a relationship for at least six…
By Lauren Carroll Harris — 8 June, 2018
Football becomes an algorithm in Baden Pailthorpe’s new solo exhibition at UTS Gallery. Or rather, a football algorithm feeds moving image art. Data artists translate gluts of information into aesthetic forms—here, Pailthorpe aestheticises an AFL game, tracking the movements of the players in the 2017 AFL Round 23 Swans v Carlton game, before visualising this…