South 1, The Gathering: Melbourne (2004)

Image Credit: © Christian Capurro 2004

Sun 10 am ANTARCTICA

Zara Stanhope (Australia)

Senior curator at Heide Museum of Modern Art

Jenni Mitchell (Australia)

Melbourne-based painter, photographer & writer, recipient of the Humanities Fellowship from the Australian Antarctic Division, completing a Masters of Visual Arts (MVA) Monash University

Searching for ‘extraordinary’ landscape material to paint and photograph has taken Jenni Mitchell into some unusual places. Most of her search has been in the desert regions of Australia and particularly around the Lake Eyre Basin where she has made numerous trips to visit the Lake throughout its changing moods from dry salt to flood.

The desert and the sea have been parallels as is her current focus with the extraordinary landscape of Antarctica where comparisons are being drawn between the salt crust of Lake Eyre and the icescape of Antarctica.

She has held numerous exhibitions of her work throughout Australia and has work in public and private collections. She holds workshops and has been artist-in-residence for Bundanon and the Writers Cottage in Tasmania and Varuna Writers Centre in the Blue Mountains, NSW.

Recently she has returned from Casey Station Antarctica as a recipient of the Humanities Fellowship from the Australian Antarctic Division.  The book ‘To the Ice: Images from the Antarctic’ has been produced from this journey.

Her work is represented by Dickerson Gallery in Melbourne and Solander Gallery in Canberra.

Jenni Mitchell was born in Eltham, Victoria, where she continues to live and work from her studio.

Further information can be viewed at:  www.jennimitchell.com.au

Talk

Through my many field trips to Lake Eyre I began to draw comparisons with the Antarctic. The connection is the salt; the sea, the lake, the whiteness of the dry Lake surface and the Antarctic ice sheet.

I will show images demonstrating the parallel and paradoxical moods of these sublime landscapes that conjure romantic metaphor of endless space and loneliness and completeness, simultaneously.

Antarctic Impression

Antarctica has changed my perceptions and the way I put paint on canvas. I am applying layers of glaze to represent the ‘veil’ that exists between the viewer and the elusive Antarctic; the poetic transience that appears fleetingly in the imagination.

I have found the ultimate subject material in the sublime of the Southern Ocean, the ice cliffs, and pristine whiteness of the Antarctic landscape.

Antarctica presents completeness and the ultimate challenge to find an adequate visual and written language to express the grandeur and fragility of the white continent. The largest canvas cannot portray the hugeness of the subject nor the breadth of the changes in light and atmosphere. My short voyage to Casey has created restlessness within me and a desire to return; I have only begun to glimpse the possibilities of Antarctica.

David McLeod (New Zealand)

Dunedin-based jeweller with keen interest in mixed media, his work explores narrative ideas using materials as cultural signifiers or as references to a locality or event

b.1954

Dip Fine and Applied Arts, School of Art Dunedin 1973.

M.A. Monash University, Melbourne 1998.

My practice has always centred on the 3 dimensional arts, with much of my career as a sculptor, with several large scale public commissions. During much of the last 30 years have taught in tertiary diploma and degree programs, 3 years ago I stepped back from any major role in education and now work from Shed workspace in Dunedin with three other designers and jewellery makers.

Having spent much of my career carving and working with natural materials, my current work utilises metal in conjunction with stones, shell, and bone. The majority of my work explores narrative ideas using materials as cultural signifiers or as references to a locality or event.

Recent work involved participation in the Haven project, referencing the life of Pakeha  Maori, Frederick Edward Maning  and a solo exhibition Yours/Mine /Ours/Theirs, examining  materials and ownership. My current exhibition project examines bio security from historical and cultural viewpoints.

Talk

A presentation on Campbell islands, Auckland Island and the Snares group.

These island are scattered over 750 km south of NZ , they are now uninhabited with the last permanent weather station on Campbell island closed. Some of the first to visit these islands were Mariners and astronomers to observe the transit of Venus,

The islands are rich in natural and human history, they are home to numerous species of albatross, shearwaters and other tube nose birds, as well as significant populations of seals, Hooker sea lions, sea elephants and several species of penguin, southern Right whales inhabit the waters around and calf in the northern waters of the Auckland islands.

This rich population of sea mammals brought the European whalers and sealers to these islands, clippers and other sailing vessels used the southern latitudes which led to the inevitable wrecks, the establishment of castaway depots and introduction of goats and pigs. Sheep farming was set up on Campbell island and cattle and rabbits on Enderby Is. Watch stations were established during the world wars and significant observation of the natural world was undertaken in these periods.

These islands are all reserves with limited visits allowed and continue to be cleared of introduced pests, plants and animals to protect their unique flora and fauna.

Fiona Davies (Australia)

Anglo-Celtic Australian visual artist who has exhibited at the Antarctic Gallery, Christchurch

Fiona Davies is an Anglo-Celtic Australian visual artist educated at U.W.S. and Monash she is currently undertaking a MFA at Monash by post.. Much of her work addresses the issues of history, who is included, who is excluded and whose stories are told and in whose voice.

A recent exhibition in the Antarctic Gallery and adjacent visitor Lounge of the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch was of objects, an installation objects form the museum's collection and a sound piece under the overall title of Safe Return Doubtful.

Talk

Davies will look primarily at issues of history and museum practice around the telling of the stories of the exploration of the Antarctic up to the end of the Heroic period in the early nineteenth century. In particular she will look at the practice of the Canterbury Museum where she installed a series of works in 2003 with the overall title of Safe Retrun Doubtful. In the context that many Pacific cultures contain in their myths and stories tales of travel to where the sea turns to 'porridge' and rocks float in the sea she will looking at whose story is told, who is included and who is excluded and using where possible the words and images of some of the participants in these expeditions to look at elements of those experiences.

Finally one work in particular from that exhbition will be extracted to examine in detail. The Ross Sea ice barrier, a 200 mile long ice face, is a consistent player in the approaches to the Antarctic from Australia and NZ. During the research for this exhbition she became interested in this idea of the barrier in the paths of migration, exploration, travel and communication.

Moyra Elliott (New Zealand)

freelance curator, writer, researcher based in Auckland

Background in ceramics but moved sideways into writing, curation, research, catalogue production etc, which is increasingly cross-media but always object based. Former Director Fletcher Challenge Ceramics Award 1990-96, then curator, Dowse Art Museum, Wellington. Recent tasks have included curation of emergent ceramists exhibition, the Ceramic Still Life (Aus & NZ artists), Dame Lucie Rie.

Researched and wrote history of TeTuhi gallery in 2003, currently co-researching a history of the Anglo-Oriental tradition within NZ ceramics, history of contemporary jewellery in NZ  and an individual survey show. A member of the International Academy of Ceramics and a Trustee for Objectspace, Auckland

Talk

Each year, the NZ Antarctic Institute awards two fellowships under its Artists to Antarctica programme, which promotes Antarctica New Zealand and NZ's presence in Antarctica. It also signals that artists as well as scientists have roles to play there. As scientists study the continent, and set about defining and interpreting it, so do artists.

The purpose of sending artists to the highest, driest, windiest, most inhospitable continent, with its heroic tropes and allure, is worthy of some scrutiny.

I shall discuss the work from three NZ women artists in response to observing in, and reflecting on, the place and the human presence there. While all use different media, their work, nevertheless, interlaces and challenges much of the received visual lexicon of the Southern Continent.

Sun 12 pm THE SOUTH AT LARGE

Alison Carroll (Australia)

curator and Director of the Arts Program, Asialink, University of Melbourne

Alison Carroll is Director of the Arts Program at Asialink, University of Melbourne. Curator of many exhibitions, writer and administrator, she has been involved with many international art events, especially, in recent years, those in and involving 'Asia'.

Rhana Devenport (Australia)

Sydney-based curator, writer, consultant and co-curator with the 2006 Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Rhana Devenport is a Sydney-based curator, writer and consultant. She is currently a co-curator with the 2006 Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, and consultant to the Australian Centre of Asia-Pacific Art, both with the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane. She was Senior Project Officer and co-curator with the Asia-Pacific Triennial from 1994-2004, and has worked closely on all aspects of the project since its inception in 1993. Her most recent projects include her role as facilitator of the inclusion of Australian artists in the 8th Bienal De la Habana in 2003, Visual Arts Consultant with the Sydney Festival 2004, Guest Curator for the Nam June Paik exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and Guest Editor for Object magazine, (issues 43 and 44). Rhana is a frequent speaker at Australian forums and has presented papers at contemporary art symposia in Tokyo, Fukuoka, Guangzhou, London, Vancouver and Havana.

Talk

Surprisingly, the Havana Biennale and Brisbane’s Asia-Pacific Triennial—both located in the South—share similar sensibilities and intentions. Both are committed to the art of nearby worlds, for Havana it is a complex geo-ideological focus on the art of South America, Asia and Africa; for Brisbane it’s a geo-cultural engagement with Asia and the Pacific. Both projects were founded at politically and economically-charged moments-in-time when cultural initiatives were understood as one facet of multi-dimensional and future-oriented trans-national relationships. Today the framings that fuelled these beginnings have long been eroded, yet both projects continue hot and strong, and persist in offering critically significant recurring sites for the discussion of ideas, and for the exposure of urgent and localised forms of cultural production to new audiences. What is the place for projects of this nature in a world that boasts ever-increasing spatial mobility amidst the spectre of globalisation?

Amanda Rodrigues Alves (Brazil)

artist whose practice encompasses political and social activism, member of MICO, Brazil and participating artist at the Biennale of Sydney 2004 (On emotion and reason)

Amanda Rodrigues Alves was born in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1976 and currently lives and work between São Paulo and Cape Town, South Africa. She studied History at the University of São Paulo and completed a Bachelor of Arts degree at Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (FAAP) and a Diploma in Art Education at the Centro Universitário of Fine Arts, both in São Paulo. She was a founder member of the collaborative group MICO, a collective of artists, architects, geographers and political scientists responsible for a series of critical interventions in the São Paulo urban landscape between 2000-2003. MICO’s work was featured in an exhibition called Panorama at the Museum of Modern Art in Sao Paulo in 2001/2002. Amanda has worked on a number of projects for the Institute for Contemporary Art in Cape Town, including exhibitions by Steve McQueen, Angela Ferreira and David Goldblatt. She has produced a new work in collaboration with Thomas Mulcaire for the 2004 Sydney Biennale.

Talk

In 2000, Brazil saw a few ‘celebrations’ of 500 years since it’s “discovery” by the Portuguese. One of these events was the exhibition Brazil + 500: exhibition of rediscovery. A group of artists and art educators who were being trained as guides for the exhibition, together with friends (that were not necessarily artists, but geographers, architects, etc) got together to discuss not only how this exhibition was approaching the idea of 500 years but also how the country itself was dealing with the celebrations. In particular we discussed and looked at how the exhibition seemed to perpetrate the same pattern of relationship between the government and the people, or, as was the case in former times, that of mother country and colony.

From these discussions the group decided to make a protest during the opening of the exhibition and to put up banners around town which would cover the exhibition’s own billboards. Out of this context the group MICO was born and from then on we started a series of urban interventions where we tried to create a dialogue with the city of São Paulo. My intention is to talk about the work MICO has produced and it’s consequences, and to also comment on the experience of collective practice from a personal perspective and as a wider tendency amongst artists working in urban centers in Brazil.

John Mateer (Australia/South Africa)

art critic and poet with a special interest in South Africa and Southeast Asia

art critic and poet with a special interest in south africa and southeast asia. his most recent publications are Domenico de Clario and the Middle Ages (catalogue essay), Empires, Ruins and Networks (essay-review in the June issue of Art Monthly Australia) and Semar's Cave:

an Indonesian Journal (non-fiction book, Fremantle Arts Centre Press).

Talk

The relationship between the international art scene and local or regional discourses appears to have been brought to the fore in recent years with the exponential increase of bienales. the internationalism of the bienale circuit may, however, represent the opposite of what it suggests. in the promotion of an internationally legible set of artists the conditions that gave rise to their originality are constantly in the process of being negated. this process of negation is the predicament which artists are constantly required to resist, yet it is this negation of origins that enables the exciting dynamic of the contemporary in international art. if we are to elucidate a confrontation with this kind of negation, we will not only have to reconsider the role of the international in art practice but also the structure of those institutions that facilitate the promotion of contemporary art. for those artists keen to pursue interactions in the south, this will mean an imaginative reconfiguring of socio-political relations and a recovering of historical connections.

Fiona Hall (Australia)

Adelaide-based artist with wide experience exhibiting in major international arts events

Sun 2 pm    SOUTH-SOUTH

Will Matthysen (Australia/South Africa)

South African born but Melbourne-based clock maker

My Interest in this project stems from spending my formative years in South Africa before studying, travelling and working my through Europe and S.E. Asia, and finally migrating to Australia in 1986. Having left South Africa in 1977 while in my early 20’s, I am one of many of my generation to have left during that period.

While my initial training and employment was in architecture and urban design, since the early 90’s I have been a self-employed craftsperson working mainly in wood, but also including other materials such as steel, brass and glass. This has lead me to explore the medium in relation to the mechanical clock, the mechanism and the cabinet, an object in which I have had a long standing interest and have produced over 100 pieces to date. They are in collections throughout Australia and the world, have been exhibited and included in publications.

More recently, I have been invited to run master class programs on clocks and automata at the Australian School of Fine Furniture in Launceston. I work from my home based workshop and studio in Warrandyte, Victoria.

Talk

My talk will essentially cover my journey from South Africa to Europe, S.E Asia and finally Australia, and how these memories and experiences inform and relate to my work. I will touch on the early experimental pieces made in South Africa in the 70’s, and how I am picking up this thread 27 years later in Australia.

I will talk about the making process and on attitudes to materials, and refer to the divergent approaches of western and indigenous cultures, and on notions of appropriation and improvisation across cultures. There are significant lessons to be learned by white societies driven by consumption and waste in this regard.

I will also refer to meaning and context, the relationship of the object to the user. In my more recent work I have attempted to allow the user to interact and engage with the work, the clock and cabinet becomes a temporal and spatial framework for the user to include objects of personal significance.

It is only since the 17th century that clocks have become largely scientific instruments concerned purely with timekeeping. Yet numerous examples exist of pieces that are representational and have acquired broader associations. As such my work can be seen as a contemporary interpretation and reworking of a long line of precedents.

Greg Streak (South Africa)

founder of Pulse, which promotes social inclusivity through art and member of the RAIN artist network

Greg Streak is an artist, writer and curator living in Durban, South Africa. He received his MFA (Masters in Fine Art) from the Art School at the Durban Institute of Technology (DIT). He attended the prestigious Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (art academy) in the Netherlands between 1997-1998. He is the founder of PULSE, an artist run initiative that is linked to the RAIN network. This network is made up of a matrix of artist run initiatives in other developing countries, with the central hub being in the centre at the Rijksakademie in Holland. PULS E has run 4 major projects since its inception in 2000, and Streak has participated in numerous conferences, artist workshops and curatorial endeavours in different parts of the World. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally and written for numerous publications. He currently teaches video / sculpture part-time at the DIT, and free-lances in filming and editing as well as creative project management.

Talk

The Struggle, as a term in recent South African History is particularly loaded. It has come to mean the decades of relentless uprising from the grassroots upward of the majority; masses of marginalised people of colour fighting against the previously dominant white minority apartheid regime. For the purposes of this forum, the paper will focus more on struggle, with regards to its more generalised quotidian reference; on basic day-to-day struggles in South Africa.

The paper will focus partly on some of the contradictions of the ruling ANC party, the more macro-global political shenanigans of the United States and the political game playing and positioning within the art world, as a backdrop to some of the reasons behind the initiation of the PULSE project HIV(E). The focus of the paper will however be on the project HIV(E) itself; a contemporary art project with a social conscience. HIV(E)  looked to address the issue of social conscience coupled with artistic integrity in a way that both were adequately addressed and inter-related. How to make functional contributions to Gozololo, an HIV/AIDS centre in the township of kwamashu, and at the same time allowing the interventions to resonate with the artists’ idiosyncratic stamp?

John Wolseley (Australia/England)

artist whose works are produced in collaboration with the landscape

John Wolseley was born in England and settled in Australia in 1976. His work over the last twenty years has been a search to discover how we dwell and move within landscape ¬ a kind of meditation on how land is a dynamic system of which we are all a part. A Monograph: 'Land Marks' by Sasha Grishin was published in 1998 by Craftsman house. John Wolseley is represented in Sydney by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery and in Melbourne by Australian Galleries.  His most recent work is currently on display at the National Gallery of Victoria in the exhibition 2004 Australian Culture Now.

Talk

It has been pointed out that if the historical centres of science had been in the South rather than the North, the way in which we understand the world would have been very different. In the words of Scientist David Given, Œbiologically and geographically there are many differences, sufficient to call into question the assumption that what is typical of the North, what works in the North  must be the same in the South.¹  I would like to argue that it is only when we understand  and respect the physical matrix in which we live,  that cultures are able to fully connect with place.  At a time when many natural systems are on the verge of collapse it is important to re-connect with the fabric of the world. My exhibition ' Tasmania to

Patagonia: Tracing the southern continents 'was the result of several years documenting the moving apart of the Gondwana super-continent; and traced the extraordinary correspondences between Australia and South America

Jasleen Dhamija (India)

specialist in living cultural traditions and international craft development

Talk

Colonialism had a important fall out which effected all our lives.  It isolated the different cultures and even went further by creating divisions within the culture.  If we wanted to learn about a neighboring culture, we had to go through the perceptions of the colonizers. They colonized our minds and we began to look at our own cultures through their perceptions.  Gandhi’s fight against the colonizers was not only for political and economic freedom, but also freedom from cultural and intellectual domination. Gandhi effectively reached out to people cutting across regionalism, caste, class, ethnicity and religion by creating the livery of freedom of Khadi, the handspun handwoven cotton dress and the Gandhi topi, cloth cap.  This was a stroke of genius, which wiped away all differences and external symbols dividing the people. 

Today we face a number of challenges because of the domination of the market forces and the domination of the industrialised nations at multiple levels.  We have to use our natural resources, our skills, our strengths, our traditional heritage and our cultural strengths, so as to build our economies and our socio-cultural structures. It is necessary that we of the developing world, work together to meet these challenges.  We need to develop a strategy of sharing technical know how, developing strategy for marketing without competing with each other, cultural traditions.  We may consider the development of a volunteer service of youth, to work in different countries, to share technical know-how and come closer together.

Sun 4 pm    PLENARY

Greg Lehman (Australia)

writer

Greg Lehman is descended from the Trawulwuy nation from the north east of Tasmania.

Until recently, he was the Assistant Director of Riawunna, Centre for Aboriginal Education at the University of Tasmania.  Greg is currently working as a writer.  His concerns are for the relationships between traditional and contemporary indigenous mythologies, identity, land and history.  He is currently undertaking Doctoral studies at Monash University on Indigenous knowledge of weather and climate.  Greg's poetry and other works are published in a range of local literary journals as well as international texts on indigenous identity, culture and land management.

Talk

The South Project offers a challenge to the incongruous placement of Australia as a part of the cultural and social hemisphere that is known as 'south'.  To the Indigenous eye, mainstream Australia is a non-conformity. A non-conformity with the culture of respect that is due to land - and to its original people. A positive reflection of this challenge will be apparent through the ability of The South Project to articulate powerfully and directly with the drivers of the Australian non-conformity - economic rationalism and cultural imperialism; to speak with an irrestistable voice of traditional knowledge; and to carry along with it every expression of humanity - including that of coloniser.

Elizabeth Rankin (New Zealand/South Africa)

Auckland-based writer and art historian

Llilian Llanes (Cuba)

writer, curator of Havana Biennale from 1984 until 1999; founder of the Wifredo Lam Centre, Cuba and director from 1984 until 1999