Tag: art

Art’s place in all of this

SoutherlyBlog

by Liam Ferney Held biannually since 1895, the Venice Biennale conquers La Serenissima filling two major venues, the Arsenale and the Giardini, colonising most of the city’s mid-sized galleries and stuffing a stack of palazzi and scuole with exhibits from across the globe. At the centre of it all is a curated show sprawling across the major venues. This year the reigns were handed to world renowned Okwui Enzwezor, a Nigerian curator who splits his time between New York and Munich, for All the World’s Futures. And those futures, in Enzwezor’s telling, don’t seem particularly bright. Some days I’d definitely…

… read more

The Art of Movement

SoutherlyBlog

Visual artist Abdullah M I Sayed and writer Felicity Castagna reflect on art, writing and exercise. Felicity Castagna One of the hardest aspects of writing, for me, has been learning how to sit still. In many ways my other job, as a teacher, suits me much better. When I teach, I move constantly around classrooms and lecture halls on the excuse that the students in some far corner of a room might need my help, but really it’s just because I find it hard to think without moving. Numerous studies have suggested that movement is integral to creative practice: It…

… read more

Who Gives a Shit? On motherhood and the arts

SoutherlyBlog1 Comment on Who Gives a Shit? On motherhood and the arts

by Felicity Castagna I went into labour with my first child while I was hunched over the final manuscript for my last book. I was thirty pages away from completing all the edits that needed to be done before it was sent to the printer the following week. It was my husband who convinced me I was in labour. I wasn’t really sure despite the feeling of my entire body contracting every few minutes. I had a manuscript before me and a deadline and how could this baby be arriving two weeks early, so inconveniently, before I had finished? A…

… read more

Mycelial Dreamings at Cementa15

SoutherlyBlog

by Anna Gibbs Photo credit: Nell Schofield Cementa15 is the second iteration of a biannual arts festival held in Kandos, NSW, a ‘postindustrial’ town out back beyond the Blue Mountains. Originally established as housing for the workers at Australian Cement, Kandos was abandoned by the company – though not by its residents – when the former closed around 2012. The town is also home away from home to  Sydney art writer Ann Finegan, who runs Kandos Projects, a shopfront in the main street, as an artist residency, and home to artists Alex Wisser, Christine Macmillan, co-directors (with Finegan) of the…

… read more

On not being born to write

SoutherlyBlog5 Comments on On not being born to write

by Maria Takolander Despite a lifetime of being exposed to American culture, the US remains resiliently strange to me. There are its female child beauty pageants and self-heroising gun culture, its confessional TV and fenceless houses, its rhetoric of moral superiority and the unambiguous immorality of many of its actions. Perhaps my response is related to my Finnish background. The US is, in some ways, the antithesis of introspective, socially responsible Finland—although Finland certainly possesses its own quantum of strangeness. However, being descended from Finns is hardly necessary to an appreciation of the bizarre spectacle of itself that the US…

… read more