An Unlandscape of words and painting: from Meenamatta to paradise
This article explores new territory opened up by a cross-cultural collaboration between Indigenous poet Jim Everett and visual artist Jonathan Kimberley.
The Long March Project founded by Lu Jie is an ongoing art project that began with a philosophical evaluation of the complex role and meaning of art and selfhood, in all its political, economic, cultural, and social guises. It is critical that new opportunities are found for artistic reciprocity that exist beyond the presumed centres of art validation (ie. America and Europe). The Long March directs the gaze of Chinese cultural producers to re-assess how art can be a tool through which ideas of making – self, thought, object – can be critically empowered and conceived.
A number of practising artists were invited to respond to a scenario in which a local council asked them to organise an exhibition featuring local artists from a sister city in a third world country. It seems a noble gesture, but one fraught with potential missteps. How would they proceed?
Artists who have created fascinating works within the DMZ (Korean Demilitarized Zones) include the Spanish artist Santiago Sierra, the Italian artist Armin Linke and the Australian artist Lyndal Jones.
On a residency at the Taipei Artists Village in Taiwan in 2007 Gregory Pryor researched a plant from which tongcao or pith paper was traditionally made. The complex collaborative journey to find the plant and the way its pith is removed forms a celebratory echo to his previous work Black Solander 2005 about endangered plants in Western Australia.
In late 2008, the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) established its first Pacific Arts department. From the opening of the controversial Musée du quai Branly in Paris in 2006, to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s creation of permanent new galleries for Oceanic art in 2007, there has been an international surge of interest in Pacific art, accompanied by hot debate surrounding exhibition protocols. Among the many works exhibited at these institutions are rare carvings of traditional gods from the Cook Islands: works that are still of great cultural significance to many Islanders today. Jacqui Durrant asked artists, curators and cultural professionals in the largest of the Cook Islands, Rarotonga, their opinions as to how images of their ‘old gods’ might be best exhibited, to see what a Western art gallery might take on board.