Emmaline Zanelli, who generally works with photography, has been creating a performance and video piece with her Nonna (grandmother), who used to work at an old car manufacturer making interior seating. Together, the pair have visited the old worksite, re-enacting the movements of labour and use of machinery. It speaks to the action of work, generational memory and shared family history.
It’s also one of ten artworks featured in ACE Open’s 2020 South Australian Artist Survey If the future is to be worth anything, where the Adelaide-based contemporary art gallery invited artists and collectives to create new work, embarking upon unrealised projects. “It’s artist-led,” explains ACE Open artistic director, Patrice Sharkey. “It’s about artists who have something particular they want to achieve, but needed curatorial support, funding, and the institutional backing to be ambitious and to take the work somewhere else.”
This ‘somewhere else’ is wide-ranging in form: literary journals, performance, activism, installation, collaboration, painting, video and sculpture. While fine print, an online art-centred magazine, is creating a text-based and performative work, Kate Bohunnis is crafting a kinetic sculpture looking at body tension and space, and Sundari Carmody is continuing her investigation into sculpture and perception. With many works resonating from personal experience, Aida Azin is undertaking an installation of new paintings that look at her Filipino, Iranian and Australian heritage; Carly Dodd is producing portraits of family and Indigenous community members from South Australia; and Sandra Saunders is melding painting and activism, referencing animal extinction and Australia’s recent bushfires.
In supporting an emerging arts ecology, Sharkey notes how each of the works engage, in some way, with the world: “We’re bringing together these artists and making this statement around new, experimental practice, focussing on the social and political voices that are emanating from South Australia.”
If the future is to be worth anything: 2020 South Australian Artist Survey
ACE Open
12 September–12 December
65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is an extraordinary account of the unique art of this continent, published alongside a landmark exhibition at the Potter Museum of Art. Necessary and urgent, it tells the story of Indigenous Australian art; a new art history unlike anything we’ve seen. For Jane O’Sullivan, it’s a remarkable and must-read book.
In a new series of illustrated postcards available as a free gift with purchase only at the Art Guide Bookstore, Oslo Davis takes on classic and contemporary art terms and genres and reimagines what they could be referring to.
With so much to choose from, we’ve rounded up the major summer exhibitions in each capital city, open all summer long. Spanning Yayoi Kusama, Magritte, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, and many more.
In her latest exhibition at Plimsoll Gallery, Janine Combes uses her background as a jewellery maker to create a body of work inspired by abandoned towns once marked for settlement in Tasmania.
The growing cultural interest in art books reflects the enduring power of the printed word. Jane O’Sullivan takes a closer look.
Ahead of the National Gallery of Victoria’s major retrospective on singular Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, we invited four artists to respond to the influence of Kusama on their own practice—and meditate on what her work means to them.
