Back in 1998, the PVI (Performance, Video, Installation) Collective were a neat group and a fledgling collective. In 2004, seven years and eighteen major works later, the group has expanded to include new members, in addition to remote cells and networks of groups and individuals across Australia. The PVI refer to themselves as shape-shifters, and in this sense the shifting evolution of the collective has been influenced as much by the consequences of their national and international residencies as their addoption of new technologies.
Emily Floyd, Sharon Goodwin, Irene Hanenbergh, Louise Hearman, Rebecca Ann Hobbs, Ronnie Van Hout, David Noonan, Lisa Roet, Kathy Temin. Curator Lisa Vasiliou Faculty Gallery, Monash University 9 September - 5 November 2004
During his visit to Melbourne in April this year, Bombay-born, Oxford-educated, Harvard professor, Homi Bhabha spoke of Vernacular Cosmopolitanism, the global citizenry of refugees, economic migrants and minorities within cultures who must learn about translation because you survive that way.
While many art institutions are just coming to terms with incorporating networked media into their exhibition programs, the genres have been exponentially expanding and mutating. In recognition of the newly hatched species that is networked media art, the ISEA2004 (the nomadic biennial festival held in Finland, Estonia and onboard a Baltic cruise ship) and the Australian ARS ELECTRONICA, dedicated a stream of their conference and exhibition programs to networked themes.
Bridget Riley is an artist who has pursued her own agenda for over thirty years with no concessions and has made a place for herself within the heart of the art world not only with her work but through her extraordinary desire and willingness to communicate. On the occasion of her major survey exhibition in Sydney in the summer of 2004 at the Museum of Contemporary Art she kindly assembled for Artlink some excerpts from some of these interviews.
The position of long-term visitor or unfaithful citizen affords a view from both within a culture and outside it. The art of Pasifika is as diverse as its people, it is a 21st Century hybrid reality. Pasifika is urban.
Britton follows up from Peers examination of Art and Globalism to discuss the trends of international art residencies and the evident exchange in cultural values and creative receptibility that comes as a result of working in a foreign country; the buying of time away from other strategies for staying solvent - part time or full time jobs, or feeling under pressure to make work with commercial appeal.
Asian Traffic was, outside the Asia-Pacific Triennial (APT), one of the most ambitious efforts undertaken in Australia aimed at exploring the multifarious nature of new Asian art and its complex intersection with contemporary Australian culture. Visitors were forced to join the Asian Traffic coming and going from the Asia-Australia Centre in Chinatown, Sydney, and in its ever-changing guises and fluid shifts in direction, the project successfully circumvented any traffic jams.
Hybrid art laboratories - both funded and semi-funded - are dotting themselves around the Australian arts landscape. Most of them involve time away from the everyday, where experience can be intensified and where a new set of meetings between artists can take place. It is an experimental environment encouraging a mode of artmaking that struggles to exist between art form and another, one identity and another, one technology and another, one world and another.