News 2024
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 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 'Magicienes de la terre', organising the first, largest, and artist-led exhibition of contemporary Indigenous Austalian art in Germany, 'Aratjara', at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in 1993, and numerous other activities. A special roundtable of discussions was hosted and recorded, between Lüthi and three curators of other Australian art exhibitions in Germany. For a review of the exhibition and further links, see this page review_AAA.
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 the prize for the best Pavillion with 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 review_kithandkin.
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 'Magicienes de la terre' in Paris. For a review of the Bienalle and further links regarding Australian art at the Biennale, see this page review_bienalle60.
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 review_diversity.
