Queen Ellyria just wants her sick triplet sons to live, each ruling over a third of the kingdom as their dying father wished. When she finds herself trapped in a deadly bargain with a Dark Spirit, she recruits a band of young mages to help - but a terrible curse takes over. The Dark Spirit befriends her enemies and seduces her friends, and Ellyria soon finds that famine, pestilence, betrayal and bereavement are all in its arsenal. Can Ellyria unite the elvish and mortal sides of her family and in so doing, save the kingdom?
Publication compiling work by artists Lucas Ihlein and Kim Williams, and collaborators, for the 2020 NIRIN Biennale of Sydney. In 2019, we (Kim Williams and Lucas Ihlein) were invited to take part in the NIRIN 2020 Biennale of Sydney. Artistic director Brook Andrew commissioned us to create a project focused on plastic. Andrew's vision involved artists involved at every level of the festival - from publication design, to food, education, and even transport infrastructure - and with our project, an intervention into the Biennale's environmental impact.Our project emerged slowly, over a few years, beginning well before the start of the public exhibition, and continuing throughout the live time of the festival (and beyond). One of the main aspects of the project was a "consultancy" with the Biennale organisation. In the spirit of Barbara Stevini and John Latham's "Artist Placement Group" from the 1970s, the model of artists-as-consultants pushed us into thinking of our role beyond the standard production of content for an exhibition. Rather, we took on the challenge of trying to re-design what a biennale (and what this biennale) could be, both behind the scenes and in the public eye.This publication compiles diverse elements from the project: offset lithographic printmaking, installation art, collaborations with artists including The Sisters of Perpetual Plastix, MC Nannarchy and Rox de Luca, and the creation of a music video with kids. The project was funded by Australia Council for the Arts, Biennale of Sydney, and Detached Cultural Organisation.
The most exciting contemporary visual arts event in the Asia-Pacific region, the 18th Biennale of Sydney, will take place from 27 June - 16 September 2012. This full-colour catalogue provides a comprehensive overview of the exhibition, its artists and the ideas that inform it.
NIRIN NGAAY is a compilation, a collection, a volume, an Artist Book, a Reader, an artwork, a sprawling, excessive heterogenous space of connections. Published as part of the 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020), titled NIRIN, A Wiradjuri word meaning 'edge', this book is a space where ideas, themes, research, and experiments arising out of NIRIN find places on pages. Traversing many disciplines and forms, encompassing new and previously published works, complete works as well as excerpts and fragments and responses, each piece may ask for new modes of reading and seeing. Instead of disorienting, we see many lines darting and weaving across these works, beautiful moments of syncing and overlap, affective and abstract resonances, moments of density, as well as pauses to breathe deeply. Read and see and touch at random or with resolve - we hope that you will appreciate the way these works unfold and twist together, creating movements of meaning between them. 'NGAAY' is a Wiradjuri word meaning 'see.' To really see 'edges', might also be to sense and feel and trace them, they come into view with clarity, hover in the periphery, or drift away like memories.
A dazzlingly original and ambitious book on the history of female self-portraiture by one of today's most well-respected art critics. Her story weaves in and out of time and place. She's Frida Kahlo, Loïs Mailou Jones and Amrita Sher-Gil en route to Mexico City, Paris or Bombay. She's Suzanne Valadon and Gwen John, craving city lights, the sea and solitude; she's Artemisia Gentileschi striding through the streets of Naples and Paula Modersohn-Becker in Worpswede. She's haunting museums in her paint-stained dress, scrutinising how El Greco or Titian or Van Dyck or Cézanne solved the problems that she too is facing. She's railing against her corsets, her chaperones, her husband and her brothers; she's hammering on doors, dreaming in her bedroom, working day and night in her studio. Despite the immense hurdles that have been placed in her way, she sits at her easel, picks up a mirror and paints a self-portrait because, as a subject, she is always available. Until the twentieth century, art history was, in the main, written by white men who tended to write about other white men. The idea that women in the West have always made art was rarely cited as a possibility. Yet they have - and, of course, continue to do so - often against tremendous odds, from laws and religion to the pressures of family and public disapproval. In The Mirror and the Palette, Jennifer Higgie introduces us to a cross-section of women artists who embody the fact that there is more than one way to understand our planet, more than one way to live in it and more than one way to make art about it. Spanning 500 years, biography and cultural history intertwine in a narrative packed with tales of rebellion, adventure, revolution, travel and tragedy enacted by women who turned their back on convention and lived lives of great resilience, creativity and bravery.
Biennials: The Exhibitions we Love to Hate examines one of the most significant recent transitions in the contemporary art world: the proliferation of large-scale international recurrent survey shows of contemporary art, commonly referred to as contemporary biennials. Since the mid-1980s biennials have been instrumental in shaping curating as an autonomous practice. These exhibitions are also said to have provided increased visibility for certain types of new art practices, notably those that are socially and politically committed, research-based and site-specific, and to have undermined some of the more traditional art media, such as painting, drawing or sculpture. They have been responsible for substantially reshaping the contemporary art world and disrupting the existing value chain of the art market, which now relies on biennials as much as it does on major museums' acquisitions and exhibitions. Rafal Niemojewski, Director of the Biennial Foundation, deftly unpicks the critical discussion and controversy surrounding contemporary biennials. Branded by some critics as showcases of neo-liberalism run amok, in which culture has become synonymous with the dollar-generating leisure industry, biennials have also been associated with the production of monumental artworks which are both highly consumable and photogenic (Instagrammable). The exhibitions we love to hate? This engaging publication makes an essential contribution to a fascinating cultural debate.
Before the winds of World War I blew Europe apart, a rowdy and radical group of Australian artists would gather in the salons of Paris and London to embrace new ways of painting and seeing the world. By 1914 twelve of them had shown their works at the Venice International Exhibition, now known as the Venice Biennale. Bundled in with the British, Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Thea Proctor were represented alongside legendary artists Corot, Rodin, Klimt and Renoir. Four decades later Australia sent its first official delegation of artists: Sidney Nolan, Russell Drysdale and William Dobell; the works of Rover Thomas, Howard Arkley, Patricia Piccinini and Shaun Gladwell continued the story of bold Australian art in Venice. With the support of the Australian art community, the Venice Biennale today remains an aspiration and career highlight for contemporary artists and Australia's love affair with the exhibition thrives. Discover the untold stories of the world's most important art event through one hundred years of Australian modern art.
How visual art has been enriched by dance, and dance has been shaped by art, in unprecedented and exciting ways for the past fifty years. Move. Choreographing You explores the interaction between visual art and dance since the 1960s. This beautifully illustrated book, published in connection with a major exhibition, focuses on visual artists and choreographers who create sculptures and installations that direct the movements of audiences—making them dancers and active participants. Move shows that choreography is not merely about the notation of movement on paper or in film but about the ways the body inhabits sculpture and installations. The book documents some of the diverse but interconnected ways that visual art and choreography have come together over the past fifty years. Among the artists whose work helped to forge the art-dance connection are Allan Kaprow, Robert Morris, Lygia Clark, Bruce Nauman, Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Franz West, Mike Kelley, Isaac Julien, and William Forsythe. Artists from a younger generation who helped to bring the worlds of art and dance together are also looked at—Trisha Donnelly, Christian Jankowski, and Tino Sehgal among them. Move also features new commissions by leading international artists and reconstructions of important works from the past as well as an illustrated contextual archive and timeline.
In recent years, artists and curators have often been confronted with the political dilemma of engagement or disengagement. The ideological, economic, or ethically objectionable circumstances of certain biennials and art exhibitions have raised the question of whether to continue and, if so, under what circumstances, with what consequences, and to what ends? From 2013 to 2015, biennials in Istanbul, St. Petersburg, Sydney, and São Paulo demonstrated that curating and art production can't just carry on as if nothing had happened. This reader is the result of Joanna Warsza's course at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in 2015. It examines four recent cases of boycotts, presenting their political, ideological, and economic contexts, timelines, statements, as well as interviews with parties involved. It reflects on how certain biennials became the place where the power of art is renegotiated and why one simply “can't work like this.”
