News 2024
15.12.2024 - 20.04.2025 Exhibition 'Nothing Too Beautiful for the Gods'
At the Fondation Opale in the town of Lens, Switzerland, French curator Jean-Hubert Martin provides through his choice of about 60 artworks insights into the interwoven influences of the spiritual and the artistic. Art has always been a powerful means of expressing faith and the quest for transcendence, through sculptures, paintings, altars, songs, dances and rituals. In three parts, this exhibition reveals how these practices continue to nourish contemporary art, for which the boundaries between disciplines and cultures are increasingly blurred. The exhibition deals with the role of the sacred in our societies, reflecting on the link between art, spirituality and culture. Visual expressions from Indigenous cultures, often ignored in the context of contemporary art, reveal their current relevance.
31.10.2024 Discovering Art in Frankfurt: Discovery Art Fair vs. Weltkulturen Museum
Frankfurt hosted on October 31st both the opening of the Discovery Art Fair at the Messegelände and the opening of the exhibition 'Country bin pull 'em!' at the Weltkulturenmuseum. The former is a commercial contemporary art fair 'to present young, fresh art ... for (new) collectors and art lovers', whereas the latter shows contemporary artworks from a remote Australian region (the Kimberley, in northwest Australia) together with photos and sketches brought back to Frankfurt by the Frobenius Expedition 85 years ago, detailing rock art of the Kimberley. On the one hand, this showed an extraordinary contrast of themes by urban artists (from Frankfurt or indeed from Tokyo) with those portrayed by artists from a very remote region of Australia. On the other hand, both sets of artists were responding to themes present in their everyday lives. For the artists of the Country of the Woddordda, Ngarinyin and Wunambal people, that includes saving their heritage. For a review of the shows and further links, see this page.
27.06.2024 Book Launch and Video: 'Double Nation: A History of Australian Art'
Professor Ian McLean discussed his recent book 'Double Nation: A History of Australian Art (2023)', and presented concepts from it during a roundtable discussion with other experts Helen Hughes and Tristen Harwood. The 70-minutes video is available here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS1iEKz-QDE courtesy of D'Lan Contemporary Art gallery.
16.06.2024 - 10.11.2024 Exhibition 'ARTIST ACTIVIST ARCHIVIST: BERNHARD LÜTHI INVITES'
On 16th June 2024, in the Fondation Opale in the town of Lens, Switzerland, the Swiss-born Bernhard Lüthi opened the exhibition with a speech reflecting on nearly 60 years of artistic activities and 50 years of his radical support for Indigenous art. The exhibition highlights artworks/artists associated with Lüthi's career, including curating the Australian contributions to 'Magiciens de la Terre', organising the first, largest, and artist-led exhibition of contemporary Indigenous Australian art in Germany, 'Aratjara', at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in 1993, and numerous other activities. For a review of the exhibition and further links, see this page.
16.06.2024 Roundtable: 'Pioneering Visions - The Curators who brought Aboriginal Art to Europe'
On 16th June 2024, in the Fondation Opale in the town of Lens, Switzerland, the exhibition 'ARTIST ACTIVIST ARCHIVIST' was accompanied by a special roundtable of discussions between curators Bernhard Lüthi, Jean-Hubert Martin, Ulrich Krempel and Lindsay Frost discussed in English the challenges faced by major exhibitions of Aboriginal art in Europe at their beginnings in the 1980s, through to the issues inherent in showing contemporary Aboriginal art today, its appreciation and recognition in the art world and among the general public… and what this says about our society. For further information see this link.
20.02.2024 - 24.11.2024 Biennale di Venezia, Australian Pavillion wins Golden Lion Award with 'Kith and Kin' by Archie Moore
The Jury of the 60th Biennale awarded Australia the prize for the best Pavillion on the grounds that "This installation stands out for its strong aesthetic, its lyricism and its invocation of a shared loss of an occluded past. With his inventory of thousands of names, Moore also offers a glimmer of the possibility of recovery." Archie Moore himself, and several Indigenous curators, provide 15-20 minute discourses on his artwork here: https://www.kithandkin.me/discourse. For a review and further links, see this page.
20.02.2024 - 24.11.2024 'Stranieri Ovunque - Foreigners Everywhere': 60th Biennale di Venezia
The 60th Biennale celebrates a truly global vision of contemporary art, not only through various international Pavillions but with its systematic method of presenting each and every artwork - no matter the media or the theme or the creed or race of the artist - selfevidently as equally worthy of contemplation. In this, it is the culmination of an evolution begun in 1989 with the famous single exhibition 'Magiciens de la Terre' in Paris.
16.02.2024 - 18.08.2024 Exhibition 'The Beauty of Diversity' at the Albertina Modern art museum, Vienna
The Albertina museum has a collection of over 1.2 million artworks, over 60,000 of which are contemporary art. The exhibition 'The Beauty of Diversity' deliberately pushes the boundaries of that collection by highlighting works from women and LGBTQIA+ artists, people of color, aboriginal artistic stances, and autodidacts. It refocuses appreciation and analysis on an aesthetics of the diverse that upends the ideality of classicist stylistic and formal paradigma. In particular three synthetic acrylic paint on canvas artworks from the collection, by two Indigenous Australian women artists (Emily Kame Kngwarreye and Nyunmiti Burton), are shown juxtaposed with works by two women European artists Soli Kiani and Elena Koneff. Furthermore, a series of photo-montage artworks by the Australian artist Tracey Moffatt cunningly exposes gender stereotypes using exerpts from well-known movies. For a review of the exhibition and further links, see this page.
