Tell me you’ll come: ‘THE PARTY’ at UNSW Galleries

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Queer nightlife in Sydney stands at a critical juncture. The relaxing of lockout laws have temporally coalesced with a COVID-era appreciation for leisure and togetherness. We’ve had more than enough time with certain apps and the city seems once again desirous of bodies-meeting-in-space. This moment presents itself with an opportunity, then, to revere our wonderful history, to take stock of all that has come before. To energise and organise for the city we deserve.  

‘THE PARTY’ arrives like Bianca Jagger on a white horse. A collaborative exhibition between José Da Silva, Director of UNSW Galleries and Curator of the 2024 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, and Nick Henderson, Curator and Volunteer Collection Manager of the Australian Queer Archives, ‘THE PARTY’ explores Sydney’s queer party ecologies between 1973 and 2002, presenting a dizzying array of handmade ephemera including posters, flyers, tickets, photographs, videos, wearables and more.

The objects on display skilfully shift the focus away from luminary designers like Ron Muncaster and Peter Tully, giving space for a great many others to be honoured and remembered. Crucially, the exhibition brings attention to the revellers themselves and evidences the intensely collaborative and grassroots spirit of those decades. 

The exhibition leads us through a chronology of sorts, beginning with a series of posters for early gay liberation club gatherings from the late 1970s: ‘Hot ’n Sloppy / Blatant Outrage’ reads one; ‘Tell Me You’ll Come?’ another. The biggest space is dedicated to the biggest parties, including the 1980s Mardi Gras, Sleaze Ball, RAT (Recreational Arts Team) Parties and Sweatbox. There are hand-drawn set designs for the Hordern Pavilion events, the tease of a Stephen Allkins cassette-tape set list for the Dome, and fashions by Martin Harsono, Kathy McKinnon, Mark O’Brien and Billy Yip.  

A room designated ‘Dyke Decadence’ showcases lesbian nights, including the radical 1990s women’s takeover of a men’s bathhouse: ‘On the Wet Side’ at Ken’s at Kensington. A screen-printed poster by Anne Sheridan paraphrases the Emma Goldman catchcry: ‘IF I CAN’T DANCE … I DON’T WANT TO BE PART OF YOUR REVOLUTION.’ Nearby, Peter Schouten’s posters for Homo Eclectus showcase their masterful approach to graphic design.

The deepest enclave of the exhibition echoes a darkroom and holds objects of a kinkier nature. There are exquisite scenes captured by Jamie James from Hellfire, Club Kooky, Sex and Subculture and more, alongside posters and photos from long-running leather party Inquisition – events that feel a world away from the saccharine palatability of the parties of ‘Sydney WorldPride 2023’.

Times have changed. Producers here struggle. Artists struggle. We can’t ‘go back’ and nor should we. We deserve something new, something beautiful, and to dance with the ghosts of history as practical, ethical and spiritual foundations for what comes next. And when sex workers organise a queer strip club in an abandoned cinema, when femmes and dolls snap up every ticket to ‘Xaddy’s Boat Party’, when fetish folk gather at the Hide, when a dive bar acquires a new sex-on-premises licence, when the Bearded Tit gets butch on ‘Sad Dyke Sundays’, when Loose Ends heaves, when Arq reopens, and when House of Mince ‘minces’ – it feels like what’s next is already upon us.

Blake Lawrence, Warrang/Sydney

Curated by José Da Silva and Nick Henderson, ‘THE PARTY’ is presented by UNSW Galleries and ‘Sydney WorldPride 2023’ and is being exhibited at UNSW Galleries in Warrang/Sydney until 23 April 2023.

The 7th Singapore Biennale: In search of Natasha

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‘Who is Natasha? What is Natasha? Where is Natasha? Am I Natasha?’ I found myself asking as I explored the conceptually enigmatic and modestly scaled 7th Singapore Biennale. Commissioned by the National Arts Council and organised by the Singapore Art Museum (SAM), the biennale aims to reflect the diversity of contemporary art practices from a Southeast Asian perspective. The current edition, embracing multiple viewpoints, has been curated by four Co-Artistic Directors – Binna Choi (South Korea), Nida Ghouse (India), June Yap (Singapore) and Ala Younis (Jordan) – and named, rather than titled, ‘Natasha’.

By choosing to reflect on the meaning and relevance of a biennale in a world experiencing the global pandemic’s aftermath, the Singapore Biennale turns itself inwards, bringing increased awareness to interiority, intimacy and systems of being. Spanning 13 venues including nearby islands, the commercial centre, an historic industrial port, a shophouse, libraries, hoardings and a Ferris wheel, the biennale comprises over 100 works by more than 50 artists and collaborators.

Most projects are exhibited at Tanjong Pagar Distripark, SAM’s temporary venue while renovations are underway at the original museum. Highlights here include: Norwegian artist Elina Waage Mikalsen’s Áhcagastá – Tales of the Ember (2022), which explores fire and its cultural uses through an installation of Sámi weaving and sound elements; Shan artist Sawangwongse Yawnghwe’s The Opium Parallax and Footnotes (both 2019) that feature a series of 23 thoughtfully rendered intimate paintings narrating the domestication of the opium poppy and its effects; and Raed Ibrahim’s Scripted Tablets (2022), a series of 45 engraved terracotta sculptures that retell history in a range of permutations according to their linear arrangement through the Jordanian artist’s creation of a visual code, and in a medium which is materially vulnerable.

South Korean artist Haegue Yang’s newly commissioned work, The Hybrid Intermediates – Flourishing Electrophorus Duo (2022), is one of the few installations that quietly dazzles. The two life-size sculptures of electrical outlets as bodies housed in positive and negative forms ­topped with colourful plastic vegetable gardens are made from densely woven rattan and plastic twine; they captivate (and intermittently activate) as they explore notions of hybridity and mobility. Elsewhere, projects such as Trevor Yeung’s Pavilion of Regret (2022), a makeshift greenhouse where visitors can exchange plants, and Heman Chong and Renée Staal’s The Library of Unread Books (2016– ), a temporary public reference library where people can read or donate books, help to further deepen the community engagement and participatory aspects prevalent in this biennale, whereby small gestures or acts on a personal level can impact the greater whole.

Held at a time when Singapore is seeking to emerge as a new centre for art in the region, the artists in ‘Natasha’ have staged works that are rich in culture, ideas, place, history and politics. While intimate in scale, it is a biennale that looms large as it questions how we see ourselves and each other in this complex and nuanced world. ‘Natasha’ is therefore a journey, both of the art and of oneself – an elusive being, a place, a moment in time, nature, community or simply a non-existent but amusing figment of the curators’ imaginations.  

Sarah Hetherington, Singapore

The 7th Singapore Biennale, ‘Natasha’ opened in October last year, and is installed across 13 venues until 19 March 2023.

‘The Return’: An intimately scaled encounter

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The gallery day01. is in the front room of a bald-face terrace in Warrang/Sydney’s Darlinghurst. There is an immediacy to this typical inner-city style of house: with no buffer zone between interior and street, the contrasts and coherences between the two are heightened. Staff from the adjacent cafe hand-deliver cups of tea to gallerist Eloise Hastings and her guests in this pristine tiny space on a busy intersection. The cultural precinct in which day01. is situated also includes the National Art School and numerous commercial galleries such as COMA, Liverpool Street Gallery, Robin Gibson Gallery and KRONENBERG MAIS WRIGHT (the latter being another example of art being showcased in a small domestic-scale space).

‘Te Hokinga (Te Reo Maori), Malaku Pitjangu (Pitjantjatjara), The Return’ is an exhibition of paintings by New Zealand artist Raukura Turei (Ngaitai ki Tamaki [Tainui], Nga Rauru Kitahi) in conversation with the ceramic work of the late Kunmanara (Pepai) Jangala Carroll (Luritja/Pintupi). ‘The Return’ is characteristic of day01.’s programming. Since its inception earlier this year, the gallery has presented intimately scaled exhibitions that bring together the work of local and international artists in unexpected encounters. Rather than representing a roster of artists, its program is built on curatorship and collaboration.

While Turei has seen her profile steadily growing in her home country for several years now, her work is relatively new to Australian audiences. ‘The Return’ includes a selection of small- and medium-scaled canvases, which, through materials and process, refer to experiences of grief in the artist’s life. The creation of these works starts with the artist’s body, with traced details forming the basis for an abstract composition built from organic materials. Turei applies layers of blue clay collected from her ancestral lands of Ngai Tai ki Tamaki, and black iron sand from Auckland’s west coast, which then are dug into with oil stick forming fingerprint-like marks. The resulting swirls of ochre, pale blue-grey and shimmering black conjure the contents of a Petrie dish, clusters of crustations and galaxies of stars.

Anchoring Turei’s paintings, on a low plinth in the centre of the gallery, is a ceramic work by Kunmanara Carroll (1950–2021). The bust-like white ochre form of Walungurru (2019) is tracked across and around with inky black, suggesting both a path across his father’s Country near Walungurru/Kintore in the Northern Territory, and Carroll’s own personal journey which involved a range of community leadership roles in Eagle Bore, near Pukatja/Ernabella, prior to turning to artmaking. Together, the works of Turei and Carroll create a restrained, delicate and surprising harmony which calls up the vital, magnetic yet enigmatic relationship between people and place.

Chloé Wolifson, Warrang/Sydney

‘Te Hokinga (Te Reo Maori), Malaku Pitjangu (Pitjantjatjara), The Return’ is being exhibited at day01. in Warrang/Sydney until 17 December 2022.

Saucepans and data: Justene Williams’s ‘Victory over the Sun’

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In 1913, the premiere of Victory over the Sun resulted in a riot due to its absurdity. The Russian futurist anti-opera’s libretto was written by Aleksei Kruchyonykh in an invented untranslatable Zaum language, with experimental music by Mikhail Matyushin, and bold set and costume design from Kazimir Malevich where he first debuted his seminal Black Square painting design. Despite its initial negative reception, Victory over the Sun is attributed to revolutionising the Russian avant-garde and has seen several restages over the past century. 

The performance centres around a group of futurists who seize the sun and navigate the conflicts and consequences following its capture. Its most recent adaptation saw a re-imagination by the Meanjin/Brisbane-based artist Justene Williams, commissioned for the 20th Biennale of Sydney in 2016. This 2022 version, co-presented with Sydney Chamber Opera and the Australian National University Chamber Choir, with production by the Street Theatre, was performed recently at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) for the gallery’s fortieth anniversary. 

Describing her modern iteration as ‘baroque grunge’ with an ‘arte povera aesthetic’, Williams transformed the NGA’s Gandel Hall into an unrecognisable dark space filled with colourful square collages. The floor-length installation made from felt, plastic sheets and sunshades draped over the walls and windows, blocking out all natural light. Neon pink and blue spotlights lit up the room in all directions, creating a playful atmosphere that welcomed the audience. A bright orange acrylic cube hung from the centre of the ceiling above a black box. It represented the sun, suspended in midair, waiting to be seized, defeated and locked away in Malevich’s signature square. 

The material experimentation was most visible in the elaborate costumes which expanded from Malevich’s original designs to incorporate objects such as saucepans attached to a headdress and chimes sewn to sleeves, serving as percussion. The voluminous and vibrant outfits were showcased with the performers’ exaggerated movements throughout the hour-long performance.

The elaborate choreography was highlighted by the open stage design that allowed for the costumes to be viewed at every angle from the stretch of three-tiered benches facing each other – a set-up mirroring a fashion runway, creating an immediate engagement with the audience.  

The nonsensical libretto and a video montage were projected onto the walls. Mixed with wordplay, references to Kruchyonykh, data, time travel and contemporary machines (such as a coffee maker), the amusing non-linear verses were consistently met with laughter. In a similarly unpredictable manner, the footage ranged from Aztec temples to blood cells, and from rocket launches to superimposed geometrical shapes making nods to the suprematism movement. Small vintage TVs placed around the space broadcast the live musicians playing experimental compositions from an ensemble of the theremin, keyboard, flute and strings. 

The numerous moving components in the undefined stage were visually overwhelming at times, evocative of the saturated ways in which digital content is increasingly consumed in shorter intervals. In this way, the restaging of the 2016 iteration of Victory over the Sun felt extremely timely as its chaotic nature encapsulates current anxiety-inducing discussions about the future.

Chin-Jie Melodie Liu, Kamberri/Canberra

Produced as part of the National Gallery of Australia’s fortieth anniversary celebrations, Justene Williams’s Victory over the Sun was performed in the gallery’s Gandel Hall, Kamberri/Canberra, on 14 and 15 October 2022. 

Patriarchal heroism and ‘The Picasso Century’

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Everything about this exhibition is heroic: the large number of works on display, including about 80 by Picasso and over 100 by his friends and acquaintances; the extensive and thorough research; the highly informative 84-page website and the 441-page complete and very heavy catalogue. It takes hours to see the exhibition carefully and almost as much time to navigate the website. The catalogue is so vast that it could have been the work of an eighteenth-century German philosopher. Like Picasso, the exhibition is larger than life and twice as dominating. And yet we are long past the time when serious questions have been asked about the very nature of this sense of heroism, especially with the re-evaluation of the image of Picasso as a bourgeois patriarchal hero – the epitome of an aesthetic and singularly masculine productivity. Patriarchal heroes are no longer tenable and this exhibition demonstrates why, although this is probably not the intention of the show.  

Since ‘The Picasso Century’ opened in June, perhaps armies of amateur artists have been inspired to produce large numbers of analytic cubist paintings in their garden-shed studios, especially as the warmer months arrive. Maybe this is the exhibition’s intention: to contain the aesthetic imagination within the heroic ideas of Picasso, to once more enthuse entire populations with the myth of the creative genius standing alone at the apex of culture and to whom the rest of us must pay obeisance by copying him. The works on show make Picasso’s ideas accessible.  

Yet, in this exhibition, the cracks are there in a number of ways. The fragile nature of the image of patriarchal heroism is now very clear to those of us looking. These flaws are not in the well-known, often-recounted and prodigious sexual exploits of the great Picasso. They are, rather, in the way that his problems with gender remained the basis for his practice for his entire life, and that these problems emerged from a number of effects from his early life to his old age. The romanticised yet rigid ways of thinking about gender identity inherited from nineteenth-century bourgeois European society remained undeterred and also developed throughout his life, like the small child whose appetites become more complex as they age and who still retains the same inner foundation. 

For Picasso, gender is war and the exhibition is a celebration of Picasso’s battles with both his own masculinity and with the feminine as if they were victories. Yet there is also an abiding sense of melancholy and loss in his work. It is as if his constant search for new ways of making art leaves him with the feeling of unfulfillment for what he has abandoned. This, of course, includes the friends with whom his art appears. All too often some friend or acquaintance is shown taking one of his ideas and developing it far beyond what he achieved, leaving him searching desperately for a new idea to keep his practice ahead, original and profitable.  

The Picasso century is, of course, the twentieth century. For the twenty-first century, it has a slightly mournful nostalgia that no doubt appeals to the general public, and the abundant educational materials offer a great deal in this regard. University theorists will be as satisfied as the Sunday painters. This is definitely one of the great exhibitions to have appeared in a public institution in Australia, though for a show of this importance, it is odd that the plinths often used to separate the public from the works are sometimes so heavily lit that the glare makes looking difficult. 

Still, it should not be forgotten that the exhibition is historical and, like all history, is written from the point of view of those who still dominate the battles for power in global western culture. History is constantly being challenged and rewritten; Picasso is no exception. However, the heroic times of modernist painting are, for the foreseeable future, over or at least should be. By showing how the supposed heroism is actually built from a fragmented series of personal relationships and disasters, the tragedy of war, famine and other upheavals, simply reinforces the need to find a better way, a better art.  

Tom Loveday, Naarm/Melbourne 

Curated by Didier Ottinger, and developed for the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) by the Centre Pompidou and the Musée national Picasso-Paris, ‘The Picasso Century’ continues at the NGV International in Naarm/Melbourne until 9 October 2022. 

An intimate togetherness: Angela Goh and Su Yu Hsin’s ‘Paeonia Drive’

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Early this month, the eleventh-floor rehearsal room at the newly opened Taipei Performing Arts Centre was adorned with a fixed sunset. A neon-orange vinyl curtain hung in the pink dance studio, in front of undulating windows reaching from floor to ceiling – obscuring an already obscured view, and basking the space in a generous warm light. This was the backdrop for Paeonia Drive, a newly staged performance by Angela Goh and Su Yu Hsin, showcasing their four-year-long, ongoing collaborative research project.

In this 2022 iteration, the 60-minute performance was framed by an installation of objects and devices that sought to reflect, simulate, broadcast, fracture and even manipulate: movable partition panels were transformed into mirrors, diagonally lined along the right wall; cameras were set up in all corners and a monitor streamed their views; two screens played a video of the artists’ 3D-scanned self-portraits, and an iPhone camera was synced to another TV to cast its observations. These set-ups fragmented the space while expanding it all at once, creating an uncanny closed-circuit environment of multitudes with inescapable reflections – all who arrived at Paeonia Drive belonged to it, becoming part of the work.

‘The relationship between seeing and being seen, of object and subject, changes [in the performance],’ says Su, a Taiwanese Berlin-based artist and filmmaker. ‘The presence of cameras shifts [these] conditions,’ she adds, suggesting the piece’s panopticon-like experience.

Goh and Su moved vigilantly with the props, using them in their elegantly captivating choreography to constantly alter the spatial arrangement as they navigated a surrounding mobile audience. Without any seating or a defined stage, the mobility of viewers created an unpredictable dynamic that required both participant and performer to continually adjust their positions to one another.

Goh, an Australian Warrang/Sydney-based dancer and choreographer explains: ‘People have time to situate themselves [within] the space, and [their movements] are activated throughout the performance … They exist inside the work by interaction and by their own exploration of [their] image.’ 

Surveillance and digital anxiety are topics that Paeonia Drive speculates on, revealed through the metaphor of a garden that is also hinted at by its title: while the role of the gardener entails care and maintenance, the act of gardening involves patterning, containing and control. The artists, both donned in large hats and sunglasses, spoke to this during a scene where they read the subtitles of a slightly sinister computer-animated video piece, proclaiming a ‘gardener’s vision of war’ and the ‘slippery nature of abstraction’.

However, despite the ominous narration and theme – or because of the imposed frameworks in the physical space – the tender moments when Goh and Su touched and moved in unison, witnessed and made room for by the audience, revealed an intimate togetherness. In the context of a rehearsal studio, the performance was ultimately about that, as Goh reflects: ‘Providing a space to question how we behave is also to rehearse [the] possibilities and processes of being together.’

Annette An-Jen Liu, Taipei 

Research for Paeonia Drive began in 2018, as part of Asia Discovers Asia Meeting for Contemporary Performance (ADAM), an initiative curated by River Lin and launched by the Taipei Performing Arts Centre (TPAC). The project is co-produced by Arts House (Naarm/Melbourne) and Campbelltown Arts Centre (Warrang/Sydney), premiering as part of ‘BLEED 2022’, a biennial event organised by the two Australian organisations along with TPAC and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei. Launched in late August this year, ‘BLEED 2022’ continues across the three cities until 25 September, with online and in-person programs.

This is the place: Luke Brennan’s ‘Pangs’ at Al Fresco

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There is something magical about being inside the ruins of the Yale-Columbia Refractor. The late winter sun seems to shine a little more subtly, illuminating the peeling wall paint across the heavy crumbling concrete structure. It feels mere years short of dystopian.

‘I was on Mount Stromlo for work a few years back and I ended up here,’ Director of Al Fresco, Oscar Capezio, remembers. ‘I saw this space, and I thought: “This is the place.” ’

And those words – this is the place – capture the premise of Al Fresco, as an experimental outdoor fine arts project. Capezio has a talent for placemaking, and Al Fresco is no different: ‘Without boundaries, beyond financial imperatives, open and exposed to the elements’, it forces audiences to interact with art in a completely fresh way.

Al Fresco’s inaugural exhibition, ‘Pangs’, is a solo presentation by Warrang/Sydney-based painter Luke Brennan. Brennan’s work draws on the organic and the biomorphic, using materials such as soft wax with acrylic paint to disrupt the preconceptions of art historical authority. Capezio describes the word ‘pang’ as: ‘Anxiety arriving at speed – sharply felt but unexpected.’ Brennan’s exhibition can be understood as a manifesto of degradation; of place, mind and body.

First, there is the degradation of place: striking and quintessential. It is within the deteriorating concrete walls of the Yale-Columbia Refractor that Al Fresco takes place. In 2003, the 26-inch refracting telescope fell victim to Kamberri/Canberra’s vicious bushfires, with the battered shell of the dome providing a stark reminder of the catastrophe. The setting’s sense of dark spectacle allows for the erosive and corporeal nature of Brennan’s work to be realised in its truest form.

The pangs that drive Brennan’s practice also signify a degradation of the mind. Brennan is relieved that his works are out of his studio and on display. The four large canvases included in ‘Pangs’ are the largest works the artist has produced, and according to the exhibition text, have haunted him for the past 12 months like an affliction.

The accumulated surfaces of Brennan’s paintings evoke those of a decaying body. Organic forms reminiscent of tumours and scars protrude from the surface of the canvas, periodically stretched and unstretched by Brennan. This process causes his thickly applied layers of wax and paint to bend, flake and crack. Repeated cycles of creation and reduction obliterate any trace of the artist, and all evidence of process, and yet they produce an intimate stripped-down exposé of the artist’s psyche.

Brennan’s work is poetic in a way that it shouldn’t be. The artist challenges taught systems of artmaking, yet the final result is something so complex and violent that it also seems somehow mechanical and calculated.

Brennan has created this body of work specifically for his exhibition at Al Fresco; the canvases both stand out and fit in with their dilapidated environment. Every piece of the puzzle fits seamlessly into a narrative of disrupting institutional authority. Gone are the hierarchies that position audiences to stare blankly at coloured surfaces confined to a white cube. Al Fresco is a space in which audience, artwork, artist and exhibition are experienced simultaneously.

This – in all its naked, painfully beautiful yet abject glory – is the place.

Zeta Xu, Kamberri/Canberra

Curated by Oscar Capezio, ‘Pangs’ was exhibited as part of Al Fresco’s inaugural winter program for two weekends in August 2022. Al Fresco’s forthcoming spring 2022 exhibition presents a collection of artworks that look towards the heavens, to consider what is ‘out-there’.

Tonal dissonance and painting local: ‘Light + Shade’ at the Art Gallery of Ballarat

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The Art Gallery of Ballarat’s latest revisionist project focusing on their permanent collection is the authoritative and comprehensive ‘Light + Shade: Max Meldrum and his followers’. The exhibits are substantially drawn from the gallery’s own holdings, reflecting its hitherto uncelebrated collection in depth of the work of Meldrum and complemented by a few pertinent loans from private collections. Some works were acquired as contemporary art when newly painted, often via acquisitive awards, and others were gifted or bequeathed by supporters of the gallery. Although there is no catalogue, a clear intentionality and backstory is proclaimed by the wall texts and was further elaborated in June this year when Director Louise Tegart together with John and Peter Perry, authors of several books and catalogues on Meldrum and his associates, spoke at a symposium. A central proposition of the exhibition has been to curatorially focus on other tonal artists beyond the ongoing intense attention paid to Clarice Beckett. The second is to draw public attention to Meldrum’s close professional relationship to Ballarat, especially in the 1920s. Both of these goals have been convincingly delivered.  

Meldrum was invited to Ballarat on at least two occasions in the 1920s to present lectures on his controversial theories, and was even celebrated at a civic banquet in his honour attended by the mayor. He was hailed in the press as a world-famous artist whose presence in the city enhanced its cultural standing, although the School of Mines rejected his commissioned 1923 portrait of ‘Mica’ Smith for being too radical. The portrait soon found a willing home at the gallery. Both pupils and patrons resided in the Ballarat region. Notable among these were the local Rowe family who sponsored one of Meldrum’s lecture trips and offered long-term accommodation to both Meldrum and Beckett at different times to paint landscapes at the family property ‘Naringal’, south-west of Ballarat. Maud Rowe was both a friend of Beckett and herself a pupil of Meldrum. Like Beckett, she died relatively young, a year after her friend, and in 1937 bequeathed a notable collection of tonal paintings, including the first Becketts to enter Australian public collections, to the Ballarat, Castlemaine and Geelong galleries. Other paintings by Beckett, Meldrum and fellow artists collected by the Rowe family were destroyed in a fire at ‘Naringal’ in the 1940s. 

Actually, the whole tonal movement was closely linked to Central Victoria as many members of Meldrum’s circle had lived and worked there. Beckett spent parts of her youth in Ballarat, attended the city’s Queen’s College, received her first art training with Ballarat artist Eva Hopkins and later moved to Bendigo with her family. John Farmer came from a Ballarat-based family of miners. Alice Bale was more directly associated with Castlemaine, where she was a vigorous force in cultural and civic life for decades. Amalie Colquhoun (nee Feild) taught for a number of years in the 1920s at the School of Mines before she moved to Melbourne. Not only was she sponsored by her employer to undertake advanced studies at East Sydney Technical College and establish pottery classes in Ballarat, she also designed stained-glass windows for some of the many substantial churches in Ballarat, both indications of her high professional standing in the city’s community. Colquhoun was one of the first of many students to make the two or more hours commute by train from Ballarat to Meldrum’s classes in Melbourne from the 1920s to the 1950s, and with possibly the highest profile. Works from a number of Meldrum’s pupils from the Ballarat district, most of whom did not expand their activities beyond their immediate community, provided some unfamiliar inclusions in ‘Light + Shade’.  

Irene Hewett was the most intriguing of these local artists. Little is known about her, although she is recorded as having exhibited paintings in Ballarat as early as 1913 before she studied with Meldrum. Yet her striking landscape Black Hill, Ballarat (c. 1930s), which she herself presented to the gallery in 1937, resonates at a national level, especially in light of pressing concerns about the impact and sustainability of the mining sector, through the unusual choice to depict a landscape that is blasted and degraded by decades of such activity. This view is dissonant with the golden and prosperous pastoral vistas which are the most familiar trope of Australian interwar painting. Tonal painting’s stark contrasts of light and dark and the aggressive splintering of expected shapes emphasise the bleak and damaged condition of the land and strange eroded profiles of the hill. A greater contrast to the serene, nurturing and mystic approach of Beckett’s landscapes cannot be imagined. Hewett’s Black Hill is also a reminder that Meldrum was not necessarily a conservative thinker. He was an atheist and anti-Nazi defender of free speech and human rights in the 1930s, and such relatively non-conventional thought was shared around his associates.  

Juliette Peers, Ballarat 

Curated by Louise Tegart, ‘Light + Shade: Max Meldrum and his followers’ is at the Art Gallery of Ballarat until 16 October 2022. This is an excerpt from a longer review that will be appearing in the forthcoming Summer 2022–23 quarterly edition.

Ecological variations, harmonic contemplation and songlines: ‘Hadley’s Art Prize 2022’

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‘Hadley’s Art Prize 2022’ celebrates the immense breadth of contemporary representations of the Australian landscape, bringing to the fore a multiplicity of voices that reflect on our cultural connection to the environment. Currently the most lucrative landscape award in Australia, it carries the same AU$100,000 prize money as the Archibald. Now in its fifth iteration, this year’s prize features 35 finalists selected from over 500 entrants, with the highest proportion of female finalists to date and the first female award recipient. Encompassing painting, photography and works on paper, the finalists broach the theme through an array of frameworks interrogating ideas such as connection to Country, secret or lost landscapes, the nature/culture nexus and environmental concerns.  

Senior Pitjantjatjara artist Tuppy Ngintja Goodwin from Mimili in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands in South Australia won the 2022 prize with her painting Antara (2020). Her evocative work illustrates the Witchetty Grub (Maku) Tjukurpa from the Antara storyline, taught to her as a young girl. Goodwin depicts the three deep rock holes her community visits as part of this important ceremony. ‘This Tjukurpa holds so much for our women, for our people [and] is vital to the Maku life cycle and the continued prosperity,’ she told Art Monthly Australasia. Her intricate white dotting represents the Maku and is framed by a vibrant background that undulates with a cyclical energy. The broad sweeping brushstrokes in green, brown and yellow are symbolic of the verdant landscape and trees belonging to the Maku. Goodwin says she uses such bright hues in her artwork ‘because they are beautiful and powerful colours, just like this important Tjukurpa’. Goodwin’s expressive and layered palette echoes the vitality of the land, reflecting on the collective role of community as caretakers preserving the storylines of their Ancestors.  

This year’s judges, Mary Knights, Wayne Tunnicliffe and Judy Watson (Waanyi), assessed the creativity, narrative and skill of the entries. Dexterity and expert command of technique can be witnessed in kanamaluka/Launceston artist Melissa Smith’s honourably mentioned intaglio collagraph print this hush – Lake Sorell (2022). Utilising both new and traditional printmaking processes, Smith poetically captures the passages of sound moving across this expansive body of water. Her delicate lines follow the patterns of gentle gusts of wind and swirling eddies as a quiet harmonic contemplation of the ever-changing environment.  

Catherine Woo’s mixed-media painting on aluminium, A moment in the day (2022), speaks to light phenomena and transient moments. Awarded this year’s packing prize, her glimmering work evokes the scintillation of shifting light glinting against salt lakes or rippling water. Using the unconventional material of mica, Woo has built up delicate tonal layers of shimmering pigment reminiscent of iridescent nacre within a mollusc shell or oscillating light flickering between tree branches. It is in many ways a meditation on impermanence and the continual flux found within nature. The nipaluna/Hobart-based artist reflects on the cultural significance of this environmental wonder, which in Southeast Asia ‘is thought to embody a life force and creative energy, elusive and protean’ (according to her catalogue entry). Her evanescent painting is at once both a microcosmic and macrocosmic representation of the power of natural forces.   

This year’s finalists include the early-career artists Harrison Bowe and Kate Lewis who both evocatively capture the sweeping wilderness experienced while bushwalking across lutruwita/Tasmania’s rugged terrain. Bowe lyrically depicts the sublime power of the Frankland Range in Beyond the Citadel. In Lewis’s Arduous Fantasy (also 2022), she reveals the vast ecological variation she witnessed hiking the Overland Track in 2021, traversing lush rainforests, alpine mountains and fields of vibrant button grass and pandanus trees. The physical act of immersion within the landscape occurs again in Bungambrawatha/Albury artist Nat Ward’s energetic painting Chocolate lily buds on Nail Can hill (2022), a vivid compilation of bush wattle, eucalyptus and chocolate lilies.  

The works of art created by this year’s finalists show the expansive variety of individual and collective connections to Australia’s natural environment, with the winning work reminding us of a deeper caretaking that can take place through the poetic preservation of Ancestral storylines through the depicted landscape. 

Rebecca Blake, nipaluna/Hobart 

Curated by Amy Jackett, ‘Hadley’s Art Prize 2022’ is being exhibited at Hadley’s Orient Hotel, nipaluna/Hobart, until 21 August 2022.  

Ritual and ecstasy: Jeremy Shaw’s ‘Phase Shifting Index’

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Trying to distil the visual language of euphoria into a single artwork is no simple task. If we conceive of euphoria (not the series) and nirvana (not the band) as profoundly sensuous, it follows that employing written language to communicate such phenomena might prove insufficient.

Driven by a kaleidoscope of coruscating imagery and a fractured temporal character, Berlin-based Canadian artist Jeremy Shaw’s Phase Shifting Index (2020), recently unveiled at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), explores how transcendental and revelatory states can allow for a kind of unrestricted agency to bloom, pithily sustain itself and then wilt, all within a few sultry moments. Commissioned and presented by a consortium of institutions including MONA, nipaluna/Hobart, Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Swiss Institute, New York, and the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, the work is now enjoying its Australian premiere.

Phase Shifting Index offers a rich spatial experience and explores Shaw’s ongoing fascination with altered cognisance and parallel realities, as well as the practices that trace such experiences. An immersive video installation in spirit, it can also be approached as a dance, experimental sound and quasi-archival artwork. Although the term ‘immersive’ has perhaps become overused in the wider context of contemporary art, it feels wholly appropriate when engaging with Shaw’s work.

Phase Shifting Index incorporates a seven-channel video installation and employs a raft of anachronistic media, such as 16mm film and Hi8 video tape, to present what appears, at first glance, to be found historical footage. Shaw presents a series of codified vignettes, in which fabricated subcultural groups engage in various forms of corporeal practice, including dance, physical therapy and other rites of movement. Phase Shifting Index excavates various points in pop-cultural history and provides ‘documentation’ snatched from recent memory, and includes frenetic grunge-era mosh pits, shimmering 1980s disco music videos and what could be a pensive Yvonne Rainer dance workshop.

These potent visual motifs oscillate steadily before morphing, or phasing, into something resembling synchronicity, at which point Phase Shifting Index starts to emanate a heady sense of euphoria and intoxication. As Shaw’s work proceeds towards climax, assorted bodies collude in opulent and harmonious throngs and the audience is met with a further encounter, a shared trip. Reaching its crescendo of dramatic action, Phase Shifting Index vibrates with a charged yet serene spiritual ferment. Typified by Shaw’s signature approach to datamosh visuals, the pulsating strobe-lit exhibition begins to respire deeply with choreographic contemporaneity. Following this moment of serenity, Phase Shifting Index begins to immediately burst, with torn pixels colliding across screens and disintegrating into a liquescent installation of psychedelia, before quickly fading into itself. There is a moment of pause, albeit devoid of resolution, before the cycle begins once again.

Yarran Gatsby, nipaluna/Hobart

Curated by Jarrod Rawlins, ‘Phase Shifting Index’ is currently on view at the Museum of Old and New Art alongside ‘Exodust – Crying Country’, a collaborative project by Fiona Hall and A. J. King (curated by Jane Clark and Jarrod Rawlins), and ‘Within an utterance’ by Robert Andrew (curated by Emma Pike). All exhibitions are on display until 17 October 2022.

Illuminating a medium’s expressive potential

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‘Clay Dynasty’ at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney provides insights and inspiration into the world of Australian ceramics. Its large-scale display invites the viewer to spend extended time contemplating a wide range of ceramic styles, techniques and preoccupations. Showcasing the work of 160 artists from the 1960s until the present day, the exhibition features over 400 works from the museum’s collection, including 70 commissions. It ranges from functional work that responds to the British and Japanese traditions of Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada, through to investigations of sculptural form, politics, satire and intertextuality. 

The exhibition facilitates winding exploration through a diverse and interlinked field of ceramics in a large open space. A floor plan is provided in the exhibition guide, with a numbered route that is specified as optional. The route encompasses some temporal, stylistic and technique-based clusters, while the open layout allows for spontaneous exploration of links between various works. There would also be rich scope for an exhibition catalogue, to complement the viewer’s journey and stimulate further reflection on related contexts.   

Ceramics’ expressive potential is illuminated in the show. Evocations of natural elements can be found in many functional pieces including the vessels and plates of Janet Mansfield, Milton Moon and Peter Rushforth. Traditional Indigenous stories are conveyed in various works from the incised rounded forms of Thancoupie (Thainakuith) to the painted platters of Yaritji Heffernan (Pitjantjatjara). Gwyn Hanssen Pigott’s still-life groups of functional works create a serene presence. Subtle text on the vessel of Louise Boscacci conveys the issue of extinct and threatened species.

Playful engagement with social and cultural references and ideas is prevalent. Funk-inspired ceramics from the 1970s such as Margaret Dodd’s blue FJ Holden and Joan Grounds’s postal parcels refer to political contexts. Gerry Wedd’s large urns fuse colourful imagery with text; Stephen Bird’s figures, Toby jugs and platters are embedded with satire; and Jenny Orchard provokes curiosity with imaginary hybridised sculptural creatures. Recent pandemic lockdowns have prompted various works including Vipoo Srivilasa’s humorous self-portrait embellished with significant features ranging from cats to amulets.  

For those seeking to gain insight into, or revisit, Australian ceramic history and contemporary practice, or pursue inspiration about the possibilities of the medium in general, ‘Clay Dynasty’ provides significant breadth and depth under one roof. The viewer can become immersed in a vast ceramic field and take a meandering journey through its variety and interconnections. 

Julia Jones, Sydney 

Curated by Eva Czernis-Ryl, ‘Clay Dynasty’ is on display at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, until 29 January 2023. 

Arresting and nuanced: ‘Other Possible Worlds: Contemporary Art from Thailand’

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A black-feathered rooster hangs by its pink neck, its distressed gaze reciprocated by the family of chickens looking up at it. Next to them, a woman brandishes a knife, while the baby strapped to her back grasps the head of an already decapitated bird like a toy rattle. The vertically divided composition brings together primal need and individual vulnerability, executed in layered expressive brushwork that imparts a vibrational intensity into the painting.

This is Busui Ajaw’s Panatipata Weramani (Do not kill) (2022), part of an arresting series of paintings representing the Five Precepts in Buddhism: no killing, no stealing, no sexual misconduct, no false speech and no intoxicants. Ajaw, a member of the nomadic Akha ethnic group from the highlands of Southeast Asia, fled as a child to Thailand with her family to escape violence in her home village in Myanmar. The self-taught artist’s works are part of ‘Other Possible Worlds: Contemporary Art from Thailand’, an exhibition taking place jointly across two Sydney venues: 16albermarle Project Space and Delmar Gallery. Curated by Haisang Javanalikhikara of Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, and 16albermarle’s John Cruthers, the exhibition includes 12 artists born between the 1960s and the 1990s, representing early- and mid-career practices across a breadth of media and conceptual preoccupations.

Javanalikhikara and Cruthers have made an astute and varied selection which explores universally relatable themes while introducing Sydney audiences to some social and political nuances of their Southeast Asian neighbour. Som Supaparinya’s Paradise of the blind (2016/22) speaks to issues of censorship via an installation of bullet casings, shredded paper and books banned in Thailand and other parts of the Asia-Pacific; while Tada Hengsapkul’s photographic work They Said They Didn’t Use Live Rounds (2014) documents evidence of a violent 2010 crackdown in Bangkok which was denied by authorities.

Impressive material investigations are another key aspect of the exhibition, from the textured and intricate paper-cut relief sculptures of Kusofiyah Nibuesa, to the mind-bending embroideries of (Mariem) Thidarat Chantachua, to Imhathai Suwatthanasilp’s sculptures made from human hair (which gallery-goers might remember from the recent 23rd Biennale of Sydney).

16albermarle’s focus is the introduction of current art from Southeast Asia to Australian audiences, and past projects have focused on Indonesia and Myanmar, in collaboration with curators and art spaces from those countries. ‘Other Possible Worlds’ continues this ambition, expanding its footprint to a second venue in the form of Delmar Gallery at Trinity Grammar School, and emphasising the educational role that such exhibitions can play for audiences of all kinds.

‘Other Possible Worlds’ is a dynamic, affective and nuanced snapshot of contemporary life from the perspectives of these Thai artists.

Chloé Wolifson, Sydney

Curated by Haisang Javanalikhikara and John Cruthers, ‘Other Possible Worlds: Contemporary Art from Thailand’ is on display at 16albermarle Project Space and Delmar Gallery, both in Sydney, until 31 July.   

Picturing a shared legal history: Helen Grace and Julie Ewington’s ‘Justice for Violet and Bruce’

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In early June, Wagga Wagga Art Gallery welcomed artist Helen Grace and curator Julie Ewington, both based in Warrang/Sydney, into their New Media Project Lab to present the exhibition ‘Justice for Violet and Bruce’.

In 1976, Violet Roberts and her son Bruce were convicted of murdering Eric Roberts, Violet’s husband and Bruce’s father who had been the long-term perpetrator of domestic violence against them. Details of the abuse endured by Violet and Bruce were omitted from their trial. At the time, the New South Wales (NSW) Crimes Act 1900 stated that a defence of provocation could only be argued if the killing had occurred during an attack from the abuser.

There was mass public outcry following Victoria and Bruce’s imprisonment, spearheaded by ‘Women Behind Bars’, an activist group based in Warrang/Sydney. Between May and October of 1980, the group staged vigils, marches and launched a petition in a campaign that drew widespread attention to the Roberts’ case and advocated for their release. Spurred on by an increased understanding of domestic violence within the community, the work of ‘Women Behind Bars’ successfully galvanised public support for the Roberts’ cause.

‘Justice for Violet and Bruce’ focuses on Grace’s photographic archive from 1980 in which she documented the grassroots campaign to free Violet and Bruce. The artist’s photographs, which are being shown for the first time, are exhibited alongside street posters and a campaign banner on loan from the National Museum of Australia. As part of their residency project, Ewington and Grace invited curators based in regional areas to attend a workshop at the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery. The visitors were granted access to Grace’s extensive archive in order to explore different selections and layouts for the exhibition. Participants encountered photographs of women being dragged away by police, activists sporting 1980s mullet hairstyles carrying the petition through the streets, and women scrawling posters and signs on the ground amid the chaos.

In what Grace refers to as her ‘activist existence’, these feminist campaigns and protests became part of her everyday life. Forty years later, through an intimate digitisation process, the artist, realised that in her mission to document the ordinary, she had in fact captured the extraordinary. Today, Grace’s evocative photographs possess the same resonance they did in 1980, with the artist saying recently: ‘I was struck by how all the issues I was concerned with are still very current — concerns that are at least for me, over 40 years old and still relevant. We haven’t made enough progress.’

After years of campaigning, Violet and Bruce were released from jail on 15 October 1980. Their case changed the NSW Crimes Act 1900 to recognise the impact and effects of domestic violence.

Ashleigh Adams, Wagga Wagga

Presented by the New Media Project Lab, ‘Helen Grace and Julie Ewington: Justice for Violet and Bruce’ is currently on display at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery until 17 July 2022.   

Portrait of the artist as a young man: Helmut Newton at the Jewish Museum of Australia

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There is the saying that shoes maketh the man, and walking around the exhibition ‘Helmut Newton: In Focus’ it quickly becomes apparent that, while Newton’s photographic gaze is insistently heterosexual and male, the shoes worn by his subjects are more often than not female, though not necessarily downtrodden. These shoes are frequently stilettoed, sometimes strapped or buckled, and in one case sprouting a bouquet of feathers. They are, of course, the platforms for an army of Amazonian beauties as they act out a variety of power plays – standing, crouched or arrayed on beds – their heels often weaponised and ‘pointed’ at their masters or slaves, signifiers of submission or sexual domination depending on your point of view. 

But there was one particular shoe I kept coming back to in the show. This was almost shockingly disembodied and, like most of Newton’s photographs, shot in black-and-white. The focus was not just on the alarming curves of the Walter Steiger pump in question, photographed in Monte Carlo in 1983, and caught from behind so you could read the size imprinted on its pale leather soul (39), but also on the fleshy bulge of the wearer’s ankle, and the way the shoe’s pointy collar dug into the black stocking, suggesting a violent rupture or tear. 

For me, the shoe sums up the uncomfortable allure of the German-Australian photographer (1920–2004), the son of a Jewish button manufacturer in Berlin, who escaped Nazi persecution during the war to find refuge, first in the rag trade or schmatte businesses of Melbourne’s Flinders Lane during the 1940s and 1950s, and, later, within the smoke and mirrors of high-end fashion photography, from Vogue to Vanity Fair. Here, elegance is mixed with cruelty and steeped in sexuality while extracting outrage in an unexpected way: surely Newton would have known the offence given to women who had struggled to buy stockings during the war? As an image, however, it is unquestionably riveting. 

But the shoe does not stand alone, and what makes ‘Helmut Newton: In Focus’ so compelling is the surprising context it gives to an artistic oeuvre so seemingly preconceived. Here the curatorial choices are telling: no impeccable white-cube spaces or imposing wall texts. Instead, what we get is something grittier, more disorienting and claustrophobic: dark grey walls lit by elliptical neon sculptures and even lumps of cement on the floor, as well as soundscapes from the 1920s/30s and 1970s/80s (the artist’s seminal decades, first personally then professionally). The hang is cluttered and, while loosely chronological, confusing at first in the way it mixes documentation and ephemera with new large-scale and vintage prints from lenders such as the Helmut Newton Foundation and State Library of New South Wales. 

What we also get, in a raw unpolished sense, is a measure of the man himself. In ways made clear by the show, Melbourne made him an artist, as did his Jewishness, but also his secular self as he forged what would be lifelong collaborations with Condé Nast, and with his personal and creative partner – the Melbourne actress June Brunell who would become Alice Springs (1923–2021). It was in this city and in this community that Helmut Neustädter became Helmut Newton, while still shooting shoe catalogues for Myer, yet it was his chutzpah and cosmopolitanism, and a cool exacting eye inherited from pre-war Berlin, that took him to the world and held our attention so audaciously. 

Michael Fitzgerald, Melbourne 

Curated by Eleni Papavasileiou (with Cathy Pryor), and designed by Anna Tregloan, ‘Helmut Newton: In Focus’ is currently on display at the Jewish Museum of Australia, Melbourne, until 29 January 2023.   

Hope by way of melancholia: Gay Hawkes’s ‘The House of Longing’

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As a device for confronting painful and elegiac subject matter, humour can inform postures of resilience and allow for hope to take root. Be it furniture design, painting, dolewave or jazz piano, creative toil informed by a comic sensibility can often provide for the amelioration and navigation of pain.   

Currently on display at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG), ‘The House of Longing’ is an exhibition celebrating the multifaceted practice of lutruwita/Tasmania-based artist Gay Hawkes. It is the most recent in an exhibition series highlighting living lutruwita/Tasmania-based practices and was preceded by presentations from David Keeling, Julie Gough (Trawlwoolway), Patrick Hall and Philip Wolfhagen.   

Bordering on a retrospective in its depth and scope, ‘The House of Longing’ collates a vast multitude of work drawn from across Hawkes’s storied career. It is fragmented into two distinct sections, before and after the 2013 bushfires which devastated much of the Turrakana/Tasman Peninsula, including Hawkes’s Dunalley house and boatshed studio, along with an assortment of precious tools and an irreplaceable collection of her life’s work.   

The exhibition highlights Hawkes’s attuned practice of blending approaches to furniture, sculpture, collage, education and painting with remarkable consideration. Throughout her career, Hawkes has skilfully collapsed the oft-reductive distinctions between these approaches. Much of the wisdom embodied in ‘The House of Longing’ resides in the value that Hawkes affords the interdependence of form, material and narrative.   

Almost a form of collage, Hawkes’s anthropomorphic furniture and nativity-like sculptural works are dotted with pop-cultural references and absurdist narrative inventions including Princess Diana embodying a missile, Elle Macpherson as a chook and Collingwood Football Club’s premiership victory in 1990. In Collingwood Premiership Cupboard (1991), Hawkes lovingly lampoons the religious fanaticism and pious reverence of Melbourne’s AFL community for their game. The work is indicative of how themes imbued with melancholia and religiosity are met with gentle irreverence, joviality and a persistent sense of humour, the importance of which becomes clearer as the exhibition progresses.    

Central to ‘The House of Longing’ is a video work by celebrated local filmmaker Roger Scholes, who sadly passed away in June this year. Among his many other achievements, Scholes is renowned for being the only Tasmanian to have won a critics’ prize at the Venice Film Festival, for The Tale of Ruby Rose in 1987. Taken shortly before the Dunalley fires, Scholes’s video documents Hawkes working alongside a group of young children in her boatshed studio which she dubbed ‘the Dunalley Children’s Chair Factory’. As a teacher, Hawkes taught her students to build objects and toys from found and recycled materials. In addition to illustrating her generosity of spirit as an artist and teacher, Scholes’s video can also be seen to anchor the primary gallery spaces, providing visitors with a precious moment of stillness and quiet contemplation in the midst of Hawkes’s elaborate exhibition, which also includes a number of absorbing paintings to emerge from residencies in Armenia and Georgia.  

Of the many lessons found in ‘The House of Longing’, what resonates most strongly is the crucial role of showing humour in the face of loss and hardship, wherever possible. Its ability to provide levity and reaffirm resilience is a deeply valuable tool that informs much of what we do and who we are.  

Yarran Gatsby, nipaluna/Hobart  

Curated by Jane Stewart and Peter Hughes, ‘Gay Hawkes: The House of Longing’ is currently on display at TMAG, nipaluna/Hobart, until 28 August 2022.   

‘Get Up! Stand Up! Show Up!’: How NIAF is showing Sydney the way

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‘It is a place where art and stories are exchanged, where buyers can meet remote artists. Best of all, it is where you can buy art that is being sold ethically.’ Writer Christopher Raja was here discussing twenty-five years of the ‘Desert Mob’ exhibition and marketplace at Alice Springs’s Araluen Arts Centre in 2015, but this pursuit of a meaningful and sustainable platform for First Nations culture has become the aspiring template for all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art fairs across the country. 

‘Desert Mob’ has spawned a variety of marketplaces in the decades since, each inflected with their own particular sense of character and place: for instance, the Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair, established in 2007, has more recently introduced fashion parades; while the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair, begun in 2009, this year extends to a night of stand-up comedy. The newest offspring is the National Indigenous Art Fair (NIAF) which, since 2018, has been presenting a more intimate taste of First Nations culture (showcasing the work of around 30 art centres and collectives compared to over 70 in Darwin), but on prime Sydney real estate.  

Held at the Overseas Passenger Terminal in the Rocks on the eve of this year’s NAIDOC Week, NIAF is also the first physical Indigenous fair since a series of lockdowns closed off Australia’s remote art centres in 2020. Embracing NAIDOC’s theme of ‘Get Up! Stand Up! Show Up!’, this year’s edition of NIAF imparts the art experience with holistic public programming that includes a communal weaving circle and culinary demonstrations from Indigenous chef Matt Atkins (Malyangapa and Barkindji Wiimpitja) and outfit Mirritya Mundya (Ngarrigu). 

‘We might be a tiny organisation sitting in La Perouse,’ says Peter Cooley, the Bidjigal CEO of First Hand Solutions that runs the fair along with the local Blak Markets, ‘but our reach goes right across the most remote communities in Australia. For some, the art centre is the only opportunity economically and for employment in those communities, and it is an absolute pleasure for us to be able to support those guys and bring them to Sydney – the biggest market in Australia.’ 

Cooley was speaking at the launch of ‘Heart in Art’, a NIAF satellite exhibition at the harbourside Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf that mixes classic desert painting from the APY Art Centre Collective with extraordinary pandanus weavings and stringybark works from Bula’bula Arts at Ramingining, showing how the best Aboriginal art can easily upstage any Sydney water view. ‘I hope it goes on for a while,’ said Cooley of First Hand’s art project, ‘and it just gets bigger and bigger.’ 

Michael Fitzgerald, Sydney  

The National Indigenous Art Fair is at the Overseas Passenger Terminal, Sydney, from 2–3 July 2022; ‘Heart in Art’ is on display at Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf until 10 July. 

Inhabiting the edges: Daniel Crooks’s 'Boundary Conditions'

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Try watching Boundary Conditions in the rain. Daniel Crooks’s large-scale video commission for Sydney Living Museums (SLM), which floats on a 7 by 9-metre LED screen in front of the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Hyde Park Barracks, almost reaching Francis Greenway’s 1819 clock, offers a richly textured visual and aural experience that is only enhanced by the elements. Indeed, fluidity is the artwork’s masterstroke. The Hastings, New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based artist’s gliding motion-control camera ushers viewers through a slow moving montage of footage filmed at SLM’s various heritage sites across Sydney. Much of Boundary Conditions was, in fact, filmed during Sydney’s torrential rains earlier this year. ‘Driving from the Parramatta Female Factory to Rose Seidler House,’ recalls Crooks, ‘the rain was so heavy the car was going 20 kilometres [an hour], which didn’t bode very well for our external shots, but we got there. There are some pockets of sun.’ 

The artist’s decision to shoot closer and tighter has borne fruit. Fishbone ferns are seen sprouting from masonry, moss glistens between brickwork, and sandstone walls weep. At Rose Seidler House, a giant monstera plant threatens to turn the modernist lounge room into a greenhouse. This sense of nature taking over Sydney’s heritage sites is for the most part a poetic interpretation. In footage elsewhere, the heavily draped interiors of Vaucluse House and the handwritten paper files of the State Archives remain thankfully dry. However, rendered in Crooks’s signature ‘time-slice’ style, which digitally knits together footage in a seamless, scrolling mise en scène, what is inside becomes outside (and vice versa), and what is distant becomes staggeringly close-up in a constantly shifting game of perception, dissolving between surface and depth. 

Watching Boundary Conditions also reminded me of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film Rope, a murder thriller that takes place in real time, stitched together in 10-minute segments to appear as one long take. Like Hitchcock, Crooks revels in the artistry of presenting a sustained bravura moment, even if Boundary Conditions contains no murder scene as such. Though perhaps it points to a different sort of crime – that of omission: how so much of Sydney’s architectural past hasn’t been so immaculately preserved or documented. 

Michael Fitzgerald, Sydney 

The third in a series of annual art commissions by Sydney Living Museums, Daniel Crooks’s Boundary Conditions is currently being screened at Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney, until 31 July 2022. 

States of rapture: Albert Yonathan Setyawan’s ‘Speaking in Tongues’

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Monumentality is often associated with grand structures occupying a space. Sometimes this effect can be achieved with small delicate forms arranged precisely to command dedicated attention. Indonesian artist Albert Yonathan Setyawan’s solo exhibition ‘Speaking in Tongues’ at Taipei’s Mind Set Art Centre exemplifies this through 11 large-scale ceramic installations.    

The most impressive is Infinitude (2022), a 17-metre-long wall installation made up of 2552 palm-sized terracotta pieces. Each has been slip-cast from a tear-shaped mould, with the design of an eye and flames above it. Installed with lighting that creates multiple soft shadows under each piece, the ensemble resembles a mesmerising scene of suspended rain. The varying shades of deep red from different clays prevent the repetition from being monotonous, and encourages a prolonged gaze across the meticulous arrangement to observe such subtle differences between each ceramic.  

Perfectly calculated to fill up and reach the ends of the gallery’s longest wall, Infinitude is elegant and captivating, and the most straightforward presentation of Setyawan’s practice in the exhibition. Showcased here and elsewhere is the artist’s ongoing fascination with symmetry, visual order and totem symbols while, at the same time, exploring the reproduction and sculptural quality of clay. Setyawan describes his laborious and repetitive process as one that inspires spiritual contemplation.   

This extends into Setyawan’s other installations, where the works all share a meditative quality. The patterns, layouts and spacings between individual pieces are deliberate and clear; there are seven rows and columns of perfectly organised circles of leaf-like terracotta in Aeviternum (2022), in which smaller leaf configurations are sandwiched in-between to make up the square wall work. A hypnotising pattern is present within each installation, where the focal point is not singular but, rather, dispersed and scattered across the consistent repetition of uniform terracotta pieces.  

Geometric configurations have become entwined in Setyawan’s visual language, with the artist having previously created works informed by the mandala and ideas of the labyrinth. Capturing Silence (2019), the only floor installation in the exhibition, is connected to these themes. Inspired by Antony Gormley’s massive Field (1989–2003), it consists of 480 clay standing figures that fill a corner of the gallery space. Capturing Silence also quite literally presents the notion of the collective through ‘strength in numbers’. 

The title of his exhibition, ‘Speaking in Tongues’, has a biblical source, but Setyawan emphasises the linguistic aspect of this expression – one of deciphering and interpreting symbols. It is also a term that suggests a state of dissociation or incomprehension. However, more pertinent to Setyawan’s practice are the states of trance, of rapture and of enthralling moments that come with it – common experiences in viewing his work.   

Annette An-Jen Liu, Taipei  

Curated by Ruoh Ling Keong, ‘Albert Yonathan Setyawan: Speaking in Tongues’ is on view at Mind Set Art Centre, Taipei, until 14 July 2022.  

‘Land Abounds’: Considering the breadth and blind spots of art history

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The apricot-pink tower of Retford Park peeks through the foliage as visitors approach the Italianate mansion’s former dairy, now home to the Southern Highlands regional gallery Ngununggula. Built in 1887 by Sydney’s Hordern family of department-store fame, and then the country home of arts patron James Fairfax of the newspaper dynasty from 1964 until his death in 2017, when it was left to the National Trust, Retford Park in Bowral perfectly encapsulates everything the rural enclave an hour-and-a-half’s drive from Sydney has aspired to, with a forest of oaks, spectacular topiary, and art-laden walls within which speak richly of Europe. In fact, Fairfax famously had his dining room painted with murals by Donald Friend in the late 1960s, and over the years gifted a collection of Old Masters paintings to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, including works by Canaletto, Rubens and Tiepolo.   

By contrast, the old dairy sits within a meadow of wildflowers, with the only ‘introduced’ element being its Tonkin Zulaikha Greer (TZG)-designed modern annex bearing the gallery’s striking metal sign: NGUNUNGGULA, meaning ‘belonging’ in the local Gundungurra language. Opened in October last year, following a high-profile fundraising campaign led by local artist Ben Quilty and subsequent AU$7.6 million restoration by TZG, the gallery launched with an eclectic program of exhibitions by Megan Cope (Quandamooka), Tamara Dean, curator Djon Mundine (Wehbal) and John Olsen. However, it is with the current season of ‘Land Abounds’, and in particular with new works by artist brothers Abdul Abdullah (born 1986) and Abdul-Rahman Abdullah (born 1977), that Ngununggula really achieves the stated aims of Director Megan Monte to ‘encourage thought and discourse’ and ‘reframe pervasive cultural perspectives’. 

Passing the low audio rumble and high jinks of Tracey Moffatt and Gary Hillberg’s video montage Doomed (2007), audiences are confronted by the fallen figure of a chestnut mare collapsed on the concrete floor. Whittled life-size from Indonesian jelutong timber, Dead Horse is the latest in Abdul-Rahman Abdullah’s series of animal sculptures that switch the spotlight onto the human world that breeds such creatures as pets, playthings or working animals. With the Southern Highlands known for its equestrian hobby farms and Anglophile horse culture, it is perhaps no coincidence that the artist, a seventh-generation Australian Muslim, offers up this animal, with its historical roots spanning North America and West Asia, as a more complex cultural symbol. 

But a bigger provocation lies behind this equine figure. Abdul Abdullah’s Legacy assets (also 2022) is a 10-metre painting of neighbouring Berrima, with a bird’s-eye view taking in the Wingecarribee River as it weaves through a pastoral patchwork of green. What is written in white capitals across the land isn’t quite as pretty: WHAT WOULD OUR PUBLIC COLLECTIONS LOOK LIKE IF WE DIVESTED THEM OF SEX PESTS AND PAEDOPHILES? It is a question, but a loaded one, and freighted with the recent noise of the #MeToo movement and call-out culture. 

The words hover like birds over the earth, but to experience the work in the flesh is to have the wind knocked out of you, evoking a feeling that is visceral and cerebral as the message hits home. It is not surprising to learn the painting was the product of both historical curiosity and rage as the artist delved into the archive of Australia’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century landscape painters. ‘As I absorbed official and unofficial biographies, memoirs, and diaries I became more and more frustrated with the personalities described,’ he wrote on Instagram. ‘The projection of genius on deeply flawed individuals was used to justify and obfuscate abhorrent behaviour … I asked myself why would we continue to lionise, celebrate and uplift these practices and what contribution to the visual discourse was so essential that we owe these legacies anything?’  

Most powerful is what Abdul Abdullah leaves unsaid, naming no names, but encouraging audiences to do their own historical research, to start their own artistic reckoning. The question he asks is a difficult one to answer in the nuanced way it deserves, especially considering the breadth and blind spots of art history, but it is an important one, at this point in time, to ponder.  

Michael Fitzgerald, Bowral 

‘Land Abounds’ is on display at Ngununggula, Bowral, until 24 July 2022.  

The call for slow art in a fast world: ‘Radical Slowness’ at the Lock-Up

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Speed is a reality of modern life. Indeed, much of our early fascination with it came from its potential to usher in a kind of newness; of unfamiliar sights and sounds, changing fashions and ever-advancing technologies. Today, however, nothing could be more monotonous than speed. For curators Anna May Kirk and Tai Mitsuji, the idea that urgency has become part of our everyday encounter – with the world of ‘next-day delivery, instant messaging and one-click purchasing’ fulfilling its promise of speed and every expectation – is something to be contested. Speed is the status quo and, so the thinking goes, no act can be more radical than slowness.  

Seen recently at Newcastle’s historic police station-turned-gallery space the Lock-Up, ‘Radical Slowness’ presented six artists who challenge our fleeting experience of time by giving it an enduring form. With time treated as a material in and of itself and no longer invisible, in each of their works it was able to take on a tangible shape and substance. In Emma Fielden’s ‘Of a Second’  series (2022), ten drawings plot the actions that take place in a second: the blink of an eye; the travel of light; the lifespan of a muon; the firing of a neuron in the brain; the snap of a finger. Time is quantified in each of the drawings which present these respective measurements in microscopic hard-to-read detail. 

The act of looking became immensely focused. The First Second (2019) by Worimi  artist Dean Cross distorts our idea of temporality by presenting us with footage of an alarm clock flickering between midnight and 12.01 a.m., between night and day, in an endless loop. The video is accompanied by a slow stretched-out version of the wartime tribute, the last post, calling on the retrospective power of memory and its ability to weave in and out of experience in a way that clock-time can only dream of.  

As the exhibition’s curators explained in the room sheet, the process of reflection – of slow focused attention – offers the potential to reclaim the very spaces of ‘thought and conscious decision-making’ we have lost in a world constantly bombarding us with new information. Akil Ahamat is explicit in this plea as he animates himself to appear in the audiovisual installation  Dawn of a day too dark to call tomorrow (2021). His call to a passing snail (‘How can I get your attention without leading to some kind of urgency?’) seems meant for the viewer, but also touches on questions of curatorial practice. The majority of works in the exhibition inhabited not merely their own rooms, but their own cells in a way that made full use of the jail complex and its literal and historic spaces for introspection, with the surrounding walls, permanently etched with the names and dates of people who have come and gone, constantly invoking the past.  

‘Radical Slowness’ encouraged us to simply pause. The curators’ distilled vision challenged our present-day experience of time with so little room to reflect, reminding us that it is in the power of a single moment that we  can  reflect and carry into our everyday lives a slowness that is truly radical. 

Maria Karageorge, Newcastle  

Curated by Anna May Kirk and Tai Mitsuji, ‘Radical Slowness’ was on display at the Lock-Up in Newcastle from 27 March until 15 May 2022.