Michael Fitzgerald in conversation with Isobel Parker Philip, Daniel Mudie Cunningham, Clothilde Bullen & Anna Davis
As the second of three planned curatoriums exploring the notion of ‘the national’ in Australian contemporary art, curators Isobel Parker Philip (Art Gallery of New South Wales, AGNSW...
Isobel Parker Philip
A snapshot of the contemporary moment; a transcript of what felt pressing and critical at the time. Is that what The National: New Australian Art is? This series of three biennial exhibitions ha...
Daniel Mudie Cunningham
What I prefer, about postcards, is that one does not know what is in front or what is in back, here or there, near or far, the Plato or the Socrates, recto or verso. Nor what is the most importa...
Susie Anderson in conversation with Clothilde Bullen & Anna Davis
Around the same time I was invited by Anna Davis and Clothilde Bullen to conduct an interview, I picked up a book of poems called False Claims of Colonial Thieves (2018). A collaboration between...
Patrick Pound
When art wants to rub up against the world, there’s always a choice to be made of how to go about depicting the problem and making trouble for it. Artists often set to thinking through mak...
Vanessa Berry
The box is surprisingly heavy when I lift it onto the table in front of me. It has been closed a long time and the tape that seals it is brittle and yellow with age. Printed on the side is an il...
Ali Gumillya Baker
Ali Gumillya Baker presents a call to action to undo past wrongs, to question how our stories are told and to understand their impact on future generations. These are traumas that are deeply roo...
Helen Hughes
The historiography of Australian art has, from the very first attempts, been vexed by the notion of ‘Australia’. Like a parasite, this name, which is a metonym for a powerful ideolog...
Anneke Jaspers and Wayne Tunnicliffe, Art Gallery of New South Wales , Lisa Havilah and Nina Miall, Carriageworks, Blair French, Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia
The National: New Australian Art is grounded in an ethos of collaboration: between institutions and curators, with artists and writers. As the many participants in this landmark ne...
Anneke Jaspers, Art Gallery of New South Wales
In his last body of work, Home Décor (after M. Preston) (2012–13), the late, great conceptual painter Gordon Bennett looked back to an earlier moment in Australian...
Nina Miall, Carriageworks
In 1900, a year before Federation, the Australian surveyor and anthropologist R.H. Mathews, a contentious figure in this newly emerging field on account of his lack of academic credentials, publ...
Blair French, Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia
The artists exhibiting in The National 2017: New Australian Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), while employing a diversity of media and with a si...
Sunil Badami
Like many words, ‘national’ is at once too immense, too diffuse, too complicated and contradictory, and somewhat inadequate. Where d...
Daniel Browning
The nation is a contested site, just as Australia may be a foreign country. It is possible to speak of multiple nations within the Australian state, abutting each other, and ...