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.
For La Trobe University’s Biannual Façade Commission, artist Roberta Joy Rich brings the dark corners of archival material into the light. On the glass frontage of the La Trobe Art Institute in Bendigo, Rich has created a work using sound, image and text to explore the South African diaspora.
Material concerns such as housing can determine an artist’s wellbeing and sense of possibility—an idea that is often overlooked by romantic ideas of art making that are out of sync with our current reality. How can artists navigate a society in which reliable shelter is elusive? And can art itself help us reimagine what it means to achieve secure footing in an increasingly volatile world? Jo Higgins investigates.
In an era that is saturated with visual information, photographs that change the way we see the world can feel increasingly elusive. We invited three photographers to choose an image that challenges our assumptions about politics and culture during this historical moment.
