Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 72 i Artist Profile

Monica Rani Rudhar is representative of a new generation of Australian artists who embrace a multidisciplinary approach, weaving narrative and questions of identity throughout their practice as they fluidly traverse different mediums. Her work sits alongside notable contemporaries such as Claudia Nicholson, Salote Tawale and J.D. Reforma who, like Rudhar, have all come of age through the Parramatta Artists Studios program. These artists, hailing from this hotbed of creativity in Western Sydney, are conceptually and ethno-geographically immersed in intersecting cultures and ideas. For Rudhar, the experience of being a second-generation Australian of mixed Romanian and Indian parentage lies at the heart of her work. It also communicates a sense of distance from inherited histories, coupled with a feeling of not quite belonging to an imagined Australian mainstream. In the Museum…

For the past thirty-eight years, the artist Ana Pollak has been profoundly captivated by the majestic realm of Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury River in New South Wales. This ongoing fascination has led to Pollak’s exploration of the river’s inner ecology. Having lived on Dangar Island (Guring-gai Country) for the duration, she knows well what it means to stay in one place for a long stretch of time. She has watched closely the forever changing aspects of the way light skips and bounces and leaps across the water. “You need that time to really get to know a place. The river is wide where we are, at the estuary… a constant play of light, constantly changing… it’s a new experience almost every day,” she says. Knowing Pollak’s place of production enhances our…

Imet Bruce when I was twenty-one and creating my puppet theatre at the Yellow House in Potts Point, Sydney. Bruce told me if I wanted to be an artist I needed to be a showman and promptly took over my styling giving me a black and green satin coat with beautifully embroidered dragons. I drove a St George Cab to get the money to fund my art. Once, when giving Goold a lift he told me his road map to life was Joris-Karl Huysmans’s 1884 novel, Against Nature, where an aesthetic, dandy creates an alternative world of art to escape the ugliness and conformity he despised. Bruce’s description was so real it was like he was telling it from his own memories. Then he said, “That is what the Yellow…

Through a complex and nuanced investigation of movement and time, the photographic work of still and moving image artist Sam Contis seductively unfolds across distinct landscapes. These populated terrains, as fragments, offer portals into worlds as different kinds of relationships to land, imbued with purpose and an experience of place. The images unpack the role that photography plays in picturing human and animal relationships in these sites of presence, denoted through action, labour and passage through the landscape. Moving Landscape, at the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA), is comprised of eighty-five works in the three series Cross Country, 2019–21; Overpass, 2020–22 and Deep Springs, 2017. This is a generous and perceptive curation of Contis’s work by Princeton University and AGWA Senior Research Fellow, Anna Arabindan-Kesson. Arabinan-Kesson has highlighted the…

For nearly seventy years Salvatore Zofrea has investigated the foundations of drawing, printmaking and painting, understanding the fundamentals of each medium to push the potential of representation. In his latest work, he embraces the intersection of colour and music to articulate his connection with nature. The result is a symphony of heightened emotion, expressed through colour and form that celebrates transcendent beauty and spirituality within the Australian landscape. As an Italian immigrant, who came to Australia as a young boy, Zofrea’s understanding and connection with the Australian landscape has been a lifelong journey. His paintings, drawings and prints chart the artist’s time spent in the bush between his home and studio in Kurrajong, on the lower rise of the Blue Mountains, and his studio in Seaforth, Sydney. Known for his…

Before you read any further, I know you’re already thinking of in Pursuit of Venus [infected], Lisa Reihana’s magnificent 2015–17 panoramic video work—and I don’t blame you. It has been exhibited at over twenty major institutions internationally, from Tallinn to Cape Town, and was a standout at the 2017 Venice Biennale. A defining work of art, in Pursuit of Venus [infected] reimagines Joseph Dufour’s panoramic wallpaper Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (1804–05), transforming its flattened, static depiction of Pacific peoples into living, breathing figures through meticulously integrated live-action performance and digital animation. The work stands as a testament to Reihana’s deep commitment to fore-grounding First Nations' experiences through her masterful use of emerging technologies. But to consider her practice solely through the lens of this single work would be…

The last time I visited James Geurts’s studio, he directed me to a former balloon factory in North Melbourne. It was packed full of neon artworks, lightboxes, wiring, wooden struts, camera equipment and milk crates full of tools. In a small space in the centre of it all he had carefully arranged a bottle of wine, two glasses and a selection of cheese and olives. We spoke long into the summer’s evening of the many projects, most on a vast scale, that he has completed around the world. Two years later, he directs me to his new studio at 500 Bourke Street. We meet outside the front doors, and he leads me through what appears to be a corporate office building to a suite of rooms that back on to…

Solstice was painted by Lesley Dumbrell in Melbourne in 1974. Acquired by the AGNSW in 2019 as it sought work by important and under-represented female artists, its public appearance turned out to be a portent of something greater. In 2024, the same gallery presented Thrum, an exhibition of paintings and works on paper surveying Dumbrell’s sixty-year career, accompanied by a thoroughly researched monograph. For an artist whose career once flourished at the apex of the visual arts in Australia, it was an unexpected homecoming. “I live in Bangkok,” she says, still somewhat incredulous that a mission of curators showed up at her home, intent on realising the exhibition. “They came to Bangkok and wanted to look at everything. I just couldn’t believe they were doing it. I would never have…

My multidisciplinary practice crosses photography and installation. The mobile studio and pinhole cameras that I create are integral to my practice. I’ve previously made a camera from a two-tonne truck, a water tank and multiple found objects. The enigmatic and haunting images I capture with these cameras have glowing shadows from the soft and reversed effects of the black and white negative. For my current body of work, I have returned to using the camera I created from a 1950s caravan during my masters of fine arts studies at Sydney College of the Arts. The caravan I have customised has three functions; it is a camera obscura, a pinhole camera and a mobile darkroom. Each has a different creative potential. Latin for “dark chamber or dark room,” a camera obscura…

Visiting Venice in late June, once the champagne flutes have emptied and the holders of “professional” badges have flown home, offers a different kind of clarity. The pavilions are left to their truest audience—and the blistering heat. As a punishing wave of high temperatures settles over the lagoon, climate change shifts from conceptual backdrop to visceral reality. On the weekend of my visit, electricity was partially down in La Serenissima, yet the city was preparing for one of the world’s richest men and his bride to arrive, along with 200 A-listers in their private jets. Meanwhile, a handful of visitors drifted through the Giardini della Biennale in a slow, sun-dazed procession, and the 2025 Architecture Biennale’s rhetoric took on a searing immediacy. Curator Carlo Ratti, a professor at Massachusetts Institute…

The hoary old question, “Is it Monet or Manet?” is well answered by the current exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. There are some great Édouard Manets (although strictly speaking he was not an impressionist), and a myriad of stunning Claude Monets. Other luminaries in over 100 paintings and prints include Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Mary Cassatt, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and impressionism’s precursors, notably Eugène Boudin. Divided into ten thematic sections, the curatorial brief (according to the NGV’s online publicity) is to place “emphasis on the thoughts and observations of the artists themselves.” And, to this effect, texts proliferate but do not dominate. But French Impressionism does not need to take recourse to artists’ intentions. The works, dare I say…

Susan Jacobsen’s practice of forty years has, until recently, been a deeply personal and private affair. She describes her lengthy engagement with visual art as “quietly passionate” and “a silent privilege.” The modesty of these words contrasts the visual language of her work which communicates a bold immediacy and physicality. For many years her work lived in cupboards and was seen by a select few. Her quiet practice has operated in tandem with the dedicated priorities of motherhood and her previous role as a much-loved secondary school art teacher. Maintaining her own studio practice provided a wealth of experiential knowledge that she shared with her students. Jacobsen works between painting, drawing, sculpture and ceramics but these disciplines do not operate in isolation; they dance and interweave creating long-form symbiotic dialogues…

Museums and galleries often attempt to decolonise their collections and embrace diversity, equity and accessibility by ditching the elevated status of the artist. Yet artist narratives still reign supreme as we are encouraged to judge the work through the creator’s biography. Suzanne Cotter, the Museum of Contemporary Art director, is quoted as saying, “if you are a white male artist, you are not so interesting…. It doesn’t mean to say you’re not a great artist.” In other words, the work is at best a secondary consideration. After all, many great artists were horrid people and yet, as W.H. Auden mused in “The Memory of W.B. Yeats,” 1939, “Time… will pardon Paul Claudel, Pardon him for writing well.” In his 2016 article, “Our favourite paedophile: Why is Donald Friend still celebrated?,”…

Tamara Henderson likes to keep the lights low in her exhibitions and installations. It helps to slow down perception to induce contemplation and focus following the Trātaka practice of staring at a single object, such as a candle, and trying not to blink. “Light illuminates; it embodies the flow of natural energies important to humans and planetary existence,” Henderson says. “Up to that point I had led a relatively nomadic life, some would say ‘itinerant.’ I would go from Istanbul to Newfoundland and Vancouver, then back to London… I didn’t know anymore where I really wanted to be…. So, here we were, trapped in a Canberra suburb. We had the garden, and a shed. I started putting my energy into learning about seed propagation and [she laughs]… root disturbance.” It’s…

At his Leichhardt studio, Mason Kimber shows me a cache of photographs taken of a Perth nightclub, owned by his father, in the 1980s and 1990s. The club had many names and many looks—including a Bat Cave and a Shark Bar—all designed from his father’s outsized imagination. Kimber remembers being taken to the club by his father during daylight hours, seeing the days-before and mornings-after of a place only known to its patrons in the darkness. An image of a ladder on a clad, textured wall revives Kimber’s childhood memory of climbing to reach the club’s DJ booth. Now an artist drawn to the creation of similar surfaces made of modelling compounds and extruded polystyrene—and a DJ himself to boot—it is difficult not to psychoanalyse and read deterministically Kimber’s creative…

In 2012, Dr Michael Brand arrived in Sydney, after a twelve-year hiatus from Australia, to assume the directorship of the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW). This opportunity was created because of the retirement of the cigar-chomping, odd-sock-wearing “hail fellow well met” Englishman, the late Edmund Capon. Capon, who had carefully crafted the persona of the eccentric Englishman, was in fact a serious scholar of Chinese art, who reigned over the AGNSW for an unprecedented thirty-three years. During those three decades he successfully transformed the institution from what was essentially a stuffy private members club to an open and welcoming place; in the contemporary vernacular, he embraced public engagement to grow patronage. So Brand arrived with big shoes to fill, but as he observed in our conversation, “it’s much…

Walking Home: Road to Trachoni Kythreas meditates on Nike Savvas’s personal family history and intergenerational experience in the fallout of Turkey’s 1974 invasion of Northern Cyprus, which displaced 170,000 Greek Cypriots and is still occupied to this day. The invasion resulted in thousands of dead and missing Greek Cypriots, including three of Savvas’s family members. To commemorate fifty years since the invasion, Savvas travelled to Cyprus to video her walk from her mother’s home in Kaimakli, Nicosia, to her father’s home village in Trachoni Kythreas. For me, encountering this exhibition had an uncanny quality to it. Ten years ago, I made a very similar pilgrimage to the village of my grandfather’s family, crossing the United Nations patrolled border at Nicosia that divides Cyprus between north and south, and navigating my…

When I first saw Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro in 2017 at the 64th Sydney Film Festival, James Baldwin’s incendiary and provocative writing on which this film was based reminded me of the thoughts of George Orwell (the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair) and my enthusiasm for Orwell’s books and assorted essays that were filled with his distinctive, clarifying and erudite vision. Baldwin’s words, voiced by Samuel L. Jackson in the film, were used to illustrate how the United States had failed its Black population: “The story of the negro in America is the story of America. It is not a pretty story.” Compared to the enigmatic, deprecating Orwell, Baldwin’s presence in I Am Not Your Negro struck me as urbane and elegant. Perhaps the contrast is…