Kirtika Kain
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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 Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon, now showing at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), Australian-Filipina artist Bhenji Ra explores pangalay—a dance form indigenous to the Tausug and Bajau peoples from the Sulu Archipelago and Sabah in the Philippines.
Shaped by the movement between histories and cultures, the work of Thai-born, Aotearoa-raised artist Sorawit Songsataya draws on mystery and plurality as a means of knowing the world. The artist is now showing at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and Monash University Museum of Art.
Carol Jerrems’ intimate and revealing portraits of women, now showing at the National Portrait Gallery, are a touchstone for a generation of writers and photographers. For Josephine Mead, they also galvanise the power—and limits—of feminist legacy five decades on.
Since the 1980s Pat Brassington’s images have entranced the psyche of contemporary Australian art. With a new solo exhibition at Bett Gallery, Brassington gives a rare interview talking about studying art in her thirties, psychoanalysis, and discovering feminism through a wives’ book club.
For the Auckland-based artist Yona Lee, who has a new commission at the Melbourne Art Fair, function is a source of formal possibility and ordinary material moulds space in extraordinary ways.
