First held in 1990 at Araluen Arts Centre in Alice Springs, Desert Mob is the oldest of Australia’s thriving annual program of Aboriginal art fairs. With its 30th anniversary coming up in September 2020, Kate Hennessy looks back on Desert Mob 2019.
In Sam Michelle’s exhibition Play at Martin Browne Contemporary, oil paintings of flora, textiles and vessels become metaphors for childhood creativity—a spirit that adulthood often risks losing.
Kaspar Schmidt Mumm’s practice spans painting, costume and performance,and he uses local waste and rented equipment to create installations that can be made from scratch at each new location. Having been awarded the 2023 Porter Street Commission, his large-scale participatory sculpture ROCKAMORA is now being shown at Adelaide Contemporary Experimental.
Pierre Bonnard is known for his vivid landscapes and interior settings, and this winter the National Gallery of Victoria will host his work within the scenography of renowned Iranian-French architect and designer, India Mahdavi.
Perhaps it’s related to contemporary life, but the spiritual in art feels central at this moment. Now, as part of RISING Festival, the spiritual practices and connections of First Nations artists are taking over a historic Melbourne site.
Victoria’s flagship festival of music, food, art and culture is back, starting 7 June. With 185 events, here’s our recommendations of what to see—from Cate Blanchett as a tiger in a supermarket to First Nations artists connection to the spirit world.
Rembrandt is arguably one of the most influential and revered artists in history. Now, the NGV is putting on the most comprehensive exhibition of his vast oeuvre in more than 25 years.
Jonathan Jones’s National Gallery of Australia exhibition takes cue from a 32,000-year-old grindstone used for Aboriginal breadmaking. In an extremely thoughtful conversation with Timmah Ball, Jones talks about how this long precedes Western food production—but questions if people understand what this truly means.
Before Philippa Cullen’s untimely death, the artist, who was prominent in the early 1970s, envisioned “a new medium in which dance is inseparable with technology, music and lighting”. Fifty years later, her work is at McClelland Sculpture Park+ Gallery.
The Brooklyn-based artist was the editor, model, stylist and photographer on a 2018 project, ‘Indigenous Woman Magazine’, now showing at Cairns Art Gallery.
Congratulations to Ida Sophia who has won the $100,000 Ramsay Art Prize for her performance-based video work, Witness, which is informed by the South Australian artist’s early childhood experience of watching her father’s baptism.
With four decades of propelling dance and choreography into museums and galleries, Shelley Lasica has transformed Australian art. Now, along with seven performers, she’s delivering WHEN I AM NOT THERE at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Have you ever wondered if someone who is no longer alive could create art? In answer to this question, biological artists Guy Ben-Ary, Nathan Thompson and Matt Ringold, in collaboration with the now deceased Alvin Lucier, have extended the experimental composer’s “ideas about the resonance of sound” for their immersive exhibition, Revivification at the Art Gallery of Western Australia.
A quiet power pulses through It’s Always Been Always at Fremantle Arts Centre, where six First Nations women artists reflect on kinship, Country and cultural memory.
Under Sammy Hawker’s gentle guidance, whale song takes shape, ocean water becomes collaborator, salt crystals scatter themselves like stars across analogue film, and ashes murmur secrets onto silver nitrate-soaked paper. Through what she terms “facilitated acts of co-creation,” Hawker gives voice to places, materials, and the more-than-human world.
Community is the foundation of Claire Conroy’s exhibition at Lismore Regional Gallery. As a new arrival to the area, her art practice ties her to fellow artists, while her medium, camera obscura, allows for a deepening of social connections with her sitters as they commit to the shoot.
Blak In-Justice, now showing at Heide Museum of Modern Art, challenges the brutal systems that shape Indigenous incarceration in Australia—while charting the healing power of ancestral knowledge in the process.
In Fairfield City Museum & Gallery’s latest exhibition Within Heaven and Earth, seven artists, including Linda Sok and Tianli Zu, use storytelling as a device to explore personal identity and cultural memory.
