In our new world of hibernating and social distancing, galleries are full to bursting with virtual exhibition tours, podcasts, interviews with artists and curators, videos, and more. Stay tuned, each week one of the Art Guide editors will bring you a selection of online art highlights.
Indigenous artists shine in Revealed
Fremantle Art Centre’s exhibition Revealed has launched online, with the catalogue available here.
This annual program showcases Western Australia’s best emerging Indigenous artists, drawing together independent and metro-based artists alongside practitioners from remote and regional arts centres.
As always, Revealed features a wealth of stories and a rich array of practices. Blown glass, ceramic and traditional wood-carving accompany drawing, painting, printmaking, textile design, animation, photography and sculpture. Works are for sale, with 100% of revenue going to artists and communities.
Bus Radio live
Tune into Bus Radio, now streaming live.
Brought to you by the Bus Projects team, this online radio station sees scores of different artists, musicians and curators getting on board to host shows and assemble music mixes.
Whether your musical taste runs to the politically-inclined Days of Our Lives, the upbeat Dissemination is a Lens, or the experimental Terrestrial Sounds, you’ll find it here.
There is also a spread of arts talk shows to tempt every listener: Gertrude Talks brings a lively series of discussions, while two contemporary art conservators unpack the hidden narratives of materials in Taking Care. There’s the razor-sharp Queer(y)ing Creative Practice and the poetic recollections of Departed Acts Radio.
And why not end the day with the esoteric delights of Unwind—a weekly bedtime reading followed by an hour of ambient music.
Biennale of Sydney: lectures, playlists and gardening
The Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN has been rolling out a range of public programs online—and it’s too hard to pick just one! Here are three of the Biennale highlights this week.
To coincide with the 250th anniversary of Captain Cook’s landing, NIRIN curator Brook Andrew hosted a panel discussion with academic Marcia Langton and Biennale of Sydney artists Emily Karaka, Karla Dickens and Nicholas Galanin, titled ‘Indigenous life before and beyond Captain Cook: reflections on self-governance.’
This playlist by Ripple Effect Band, an all-women rock group from Maningrida in the Northern Territory, features a host of Indigenous musicians from across the nation. Baker Boy, Yothu Yindi, Thelma Plum and Ripple Effect Band’s own tracks are just a few of the stellar voices you can hear, many singing in language as well as English.
Finally, with the physical exhibitions temporarily closed, the Biennale of Sydney website includes weekly learning resources about the artists and artworks of NIRIN, accessible to adults and children alike. Tony Albert’s beautiful work on Cockatoo Island, Healing Land, Remembering Country, is revealed here via video tour. Bonus: if you have kids learning from home (or are craving a hands-on activity yourself), this resource includes a method for making seed paper from recycled materials and your own fruit or vegies.
Robot wrangling with Reclining StickMan
Lacking control in your life due to COVID restrictions? Control a nine-metre robot instead! Stelarc’s Reclining StickMan is now streaming live from the Art Gallery of South Australia, where it’s part of Adelaide Biennial: Monster Theatres.
Perhaps best known for having an ear implanted on to his forearm, Stelarc has an ongoing fascination with prosthetics and bio-engineering. Reclining StickMan can be operated in person—with the artist inhabiting the robot and controlling its movements from within—or programmed remotely, from the comfort of your living room. Click the dots to choreograph the robot and see it move in real-time.
You can also visit the other works in Monster Theatres via a virtual tour.
Arts Project studio artists find Silver Linings
Finally, Silver Linings is an online group exhibition by Arts Project studio artists. These lush, joyful and resonant works serve as a reminder that hard times will pass and that there is colour to be found everywhere. With new exhibitions from the Arts Project stockroom going online every week, check back to the website for more.
In a new collaborative exhibition at PS Art Space, in partnership with Cool Change Contemporary, five artists with process-lead practices contemplate material ethics through actively engaging in slowness and reuse.
Isaac Julien’s 2022 video work Once Again…(Statues Never Die) exposes the unseen emotional registers inherent to the struggle for colonial repatriation by mapping the places where poetics and politics intersect.
A new exhibition at the Australian National Capital Artists Inc (ANCA) asks 12 artists—including Dan Powers, S.A.Adair, Emma Beer and Lisa Sammut—to explore scale: from the miniature to the monumental.
Melbourne Art Fair has announced its 2025 line up, with 60 galleries and Indigenous art centres slated to feature alongside some major international commissions and public programs.
Stepping into Sarah Contos’s sprawling home studio in Kyle Bay, in southern Sydney, feels like a step inside the artist’s inventive and inquisitive brain—apt given that Contos’s upcoming show at UNSW Galleries, Eye Lash Horizon, explores aspects of what makes us human.
Melbourne-born figurative artist and ceramicist Rob McHaffie takes a global view of human idiosyncrasy. His biggest exhibition to date, now showing at Bendigo Art Gallery, covers over a decade of his painting practice.
