Featuring 25 artworks from across Australia which explore the connection between our histories and futures, through contemporary textile practices. Curated by Dr Carol McGregor. This touring exhibition has been made possible through funding from the NSW Government, and the Australian Government’s Visions of Australia and Regional Arts Fund programs.
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.
Partners in life and art, Will and Garrett Huxley’s sequined wonderland pays homage to their queer artist forebears. Their first collective survey, now showing at Fremantle Arts Centre, unfurls a decade of photography, music recordings, costume, film and performance.
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.
