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Saturday 26 June 2010 to 17 July 2010
This reminds me of some place explores the shifting currents of ideas about identity and belonging, traditional forms and change. The artists approach these themes through interrelated and reciprocal works that combine the traditional and modern, local and international, content and form.
Naeem Rana’s lyrical series of large format photomedia works, titled Ashyana (Home), illuminate displacement and attachment to life in two places—home in Pakistan and a new Australian home and life. Naeem Rana states: It is like talking two languages and listening and understanding both of them with the understanding of the same and the other language while speaking one.
Urdu calligraphy is an identifying feature in Naeem Rana’s work that tends to be bold and conceptually political. Ashyana (Home) unites word and image: calligraphy, learnt from Rana’s father and passed down through the generations of his family with the exquisite beauty of textile patterns and Australian plants. Here, poetics makes manifest the unique beauty of each place while serving to unite.
Nusra Latif Qureshi also layers tradition with cultural inquiry. Qureshi’s hallmark interests are themes of propaganda and manipulation, subjectivity versus objective narrative history. A starting point for her spare collage-style paintings is often the wide spectrum of contact between the arrogance and pomp of colonial history and Muslim courtly culture. Here, however, velvety photographic works explore the complex moral narratives of two classic Hindi films Abhimaan (‘Trust’, 1973) and Kabhi Kabhi (‘Sometimes’, 1976.)
Qureshi’s digital montage of film stills and painting capture in a few sequential images complex drama about romantic ruins and archetypes of female desire in popular cinema. In Abhimaan the heroine, a great singer, lives out a tragic stereotype. In the other, a poet denounces poetry as just misleading words and statements. In both case studies, women are caught between tradition and the role of the new professional (artist, performer, doctor and the like.) Quereshi shows how memory and imagination are permeated by themes of loss and longing.
Nusra Qureshi and Naeem Rana trained at the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore and completed post-graduate studies at the Victorian College of Arts in Melbourne, a city now their home. Their work is buttressed by major museum exhibitions, shows in university art museums and biennials, for example, Nusra Qureshi participated in the 2006 Asia Pacific Triennale and 2009 Venice Biennale. Significant exhibition catalogues include: Contemporary Miniature Paintings from Pakistan (Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, 2004); Karkhana: A Contemporary Collaboration, at Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (2005); Beyond the Page: Contemporary Art from Pakistan, Manchester Art Gallery and Asia House, London (2006) and ‘Reinventing miniature’ in Innovation through Tradition: Contemporary Art from Iran and Pakistan (British Museum, 2009). |
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Exhibition Dates: 13 March 2010 to 24 April 2010
Conversation with Big Fag and Friends at 2pm Saturday 13 March
Art Month Sydney 2010: www.artmonthsydney.com.au
Hurry-Hurry is a selection of recent work by artists who embrace unfashionable forms of overtly politicised art - poster making, pamphleteering, performance and other activities flippantly considered marginal to dominant modes of contemporary cultural production. All are committed to inserting local issues—mining by multinationals, corruption in democracies, human rights—into a global context. Most are from Sydney, like Big Fag press but the networks and collaborative pathways encompass Taring padi group in Yogyakarta, Breakdown Press in Melbourne and Culture Kitchen in Canberra.
Taring padi in Bahasa Indonesia refers to the sharp tip or "teeth" of the rice and is a metaphor for people power. This loose group of socially committed artists are renowned for precise linocut posters dealing with complex issues by word and/or image as well as murals, a newsletter and street performances. Here are posters opposing a proposed gold mine and cement works and the Pemilu series made in the lead-up to the November 2009 National Election. Culture Kitchen, a spin-off group, comprise some Taring Padi members in collaboration with Canberra and East Timor artists who produced the large scale lino-print reconciling the three countries after East Timor’s scaring battle for post-colonial Independence.
Chips Mackinolty is a grandmaster of the game, a pioneer of the classic Tin Sheds high-key screenprints (by Earthworks and Lucifoil, 1971-1983). The magnificent print, Close the Gap (2009), features a portrait of health-worker Miliwanga Sandy (Rembarrnga language group. Domicile Wugularr) and re-constructs Mackinolty’s classic image Walyaji Wankarunyayirni (Land is life), 1982, a standard-bearer for the land rights and outstations movement. This work aims to get money to the Sunrise Workforce Development Trust designed to train Aboriginal people for the Comprehensive Primary Health Care sector in the NT.
In these footsteps walk a new generation of co-operatives: Big Fag, lovingly named after their massive rescued Swiss printing press (Diego Bonetto, Lucas Ihlein and Mickie Quick), Breakdown Press (Tom Civil) and Blood and Thunder Press (Mickie Quick) and their friends and fellow-travellers Deborah Kelly, Ruark Lewis and Hana Schimada. The selection from the Big Fag Archive includes prints from the Mapping Sydney project (exhibited at Dablab UTS in 2009) by artists, writers and academics Kate Sweetapple, Jane Shadboldt, Katrina Schlunke, Naomi Stead and Trina Day.
A big welcome to the ‘hood to Big Fag, successfully moved to the former Cleansing Depot, Riley Street in Woolloomooloo!
[Big Fag on the move - see http://www.flickr.com/photos/poisontofu/sets/72157623589594128/]
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8 May to 12 June 2010
Mulkun Wirrpanda is a renowned Yolgnu artist from Blue Mud Bay in NE Arnhem Land and Fiona MacDonald is a balanda (non-Yolgnu) artist from Sydney. Their fine and thoughtful works come together to confer on the resonance of symbolic actions on the shoreline and the ensuing miscommunication, misdeeds and corrections. Visual art is talk in many modes, especially metaphors and ironies. These are ‘true stories’ about cultural encounters and how words and images can be ‘honeyed’ in a good or bad way.
Mulkun Wirrpanda paints in order to educate about law, cultural values, consciousness and just title over land. She shows the seasonal cycles on her of Dhuwa moiety clan estates on the vast plains of her Dhuruputjpi homeland, from freshwater cleansing the salt flood plains to the sun’s first rays touching the waters. The balancing series is the diamond pattern of her mother’s country and the honey story cycle. Mulkun is the only remaining member of this clan. Mulkun Wirrpanda’s work is part of the breathtaking Yolgnu installation of Larrakitj (memorial poles) at the MCA as part of the 2010 Biennale of Sydney.
Fiona MacDonald’s series ‘Drawing the line between Native and Stranger’ (2009), charts the shoreline where two vastly different civilizations met at Botany Bay, white Australia’s foundational site. In 1770, the Endeavour dropped anchor alongside local people fishing in bark canoes along a stretch of sand they called Kundall. The locality still wears the consequences of this extraordinary encounter and the ensuing contest for justice, ownership and management.
In this context, there is a resonance between the two sets of works in the 2008 High Court of Australia’s Blue Mud Bay judgment, a landmark decision for Indigenous People. It gives Mulkun Wirrpanda and other traditional owners of the region exclusive custodial rights over much of the intertidal coastline.
The title reference to ‘honeyed words’ comes from Justice Michael Kirby’s contribution to the Blue Mud Bay judgment: “Although the National Apology was afforded on behalf of the Government of the Commonwealth, with support of the Opposition and other political parties, and reflects an unusual and virtually unprecedented parliamentary initiative, it does not, as such, have normative legal operation. … Yet it is not legally irrelevant to the task presently in hand. …. It is an element of the social context in which such laws are to be understood and applied, where that is relevant. Honeyed words, empty of any practical consequences, reflect neither the language, the purpose nor the spirit of the National Apology.” (In Northern Territory of Australia v Arnhem Land Aboriginal Land Trust [2008] HCA 29 (30 July 2008.))
An overwhelming majority Australians view Prime Minister Rudd’s broad National Apology to all Aborigines and the Stolen Generations for their "profound grief, suffering and loss" as the high point of his first term in office. The National Apology promised a new start and ways of sharing the country and a way to conclude the unfinished business of reconciliation. Three years on, the exhibition platform considers Rudd's strong statements in the Apology as "honeyed words." The evidence is mounting that the ideological and politically opportunist NT Intervention is failing and lacks strong grassroots support and evidence of results.
Presented with thanks in association with Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre Yirrkala, Australia. http://www.yirrkala.com/
Thanks also to Howard Morphy for guidance.
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Exhibition dates: 13 to 27 February
Danish Ahmed’s small, spare paintings with their refined compositions and rich colours link and rework classical traditions. Like many of his peers in Pakistan’s vibrant contemporary art scene, Ahmed combines historical layers, such as labour intensive Mughal miniatures and Islamic architecture to Western abstraction and contemporary issues. In particular, he contemplates religious and cultural identity and schisms between east and west.
Painted over the past two and a half years in Sydney, the works customize an Eastern conceptual framework and personal symbols of devotion to an unfamiliar capitalist environment. In this alien context painting has a dual function: reconnecting to place, language and familiar gestures and as an interface with modernity. Here, like devotion, painting is a reverie.
Temporarily in exile from a disintegrating country with proud classical traditions, Ahmed subverts metropolitan modernism to claim a unique voice. Most motifs and works appear in pairs, like an open book, representing this double action, uniting and separating. This follows the symbolic division of space in Eastern architecture where emptiness reflects divine presence.
Danish Ahmed expands this minimalist schema to symbolic or metaphoric ends. For example the image of the inward tree against a deep blue lapis lazuli ground is a quotation (from the Holy Qur'an), Eden or point of beginning, sacred grove or garden. Other motifs, such as the book or frayed edges of a prayer mat against an orange ground, suggest the point where heaven and earth meet but also resonate with everyday activity and rhythms. In this way the artist links solitude and common humanity.
Danish Ahmed studied Arts at University of Karachi and Fine Art at Karachi School of Art. He teaches at the Textile Institute of Pakistan (since 1999) and previously at Karachi School of Art. In Sydney he taught at College of Fine Arts UNSW while undertaking a Masters in Fine Art.
More contemporary artists are in Salima Hashmi’s exhibition Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art from Pakistan, currently at the Asia Society New York, an investigation of preconceived notions about the nation and its culture.
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Barrupu Yunupingu: Fire
Mulkun Wirrpanda: Water & Honey
Curated by Andrew Blake with Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Art Centre
Exhibition: 3 December to 30 January 2010
January viewing by appointment
Mulkun Wirrpanda
Mulkun Wirrpanda (b. 1945) resides at her clan estate Dhuruputjpi near Blue Mud Bay in northeastern Arnhem Land and has profound knowledge for the Dhudi-Djapu clan of the Yolgnu people of the sea. She is a leader and innovator, one of the early painters of works without figurative imagery within the miny'tji, the sacred clan designs until recently restricted to ceremonial use.
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