Lecture | Things Fall Apart – Putting the world back together one document at a time – Robyn Sloggett | University of Melbourne

Faculty of Arts Dean’s Lecture: ‘Things Fall Apart’ – Putting the world back together one document at a time The world as we know it swirls around us as objects, ideas and aspirations. How we make sense of it is dependent on what we have access to, what we can imagine and how we are enabled to think, learn and do. The loss, degradation, or inauthenticity of cultural material threatens the security of our knowledge and the construction of identity, and community that is unable to access its cultural, historic and scientific records is impeded in its ability to construct relevant and effective cultural futures. Conversely, a well-secured cultural record assists a community to tell its stories, understand its past, and cement its identity into the future. Taking Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel as the point of departure, in this lecture…

Seminar | Engaging with landscape and heritage through playful methods – Phil Jones | Deakin Cultural Heritage Seminar Series

Engaging with landscape and heritage through playful methods – Phil Jones (University of Birmingham) Visiting a heritage landscape is very different to learning about the same site second-hand through text and images. An embodied, multisensory, engagement enhances emotional and affectual connections to the histories that such sites bear witness to. This paper discusses a series of methodological tools that can be used to examine the embodied connection between people and place, uncovering both tangible and intangible histories. Three approaches in particular are reflected upon: the use of smartphones to crowdsource materials gathered in-place; arts-based urban transects; and biosensing as a tool for examining the emotional unconscious. The potentials and limitations of each are discussed, with an emphasis on methodological triangulation, combining novel and more conventional techniques to gain rounded insights into how people understand landscape and heritage. Phil Jones is…

News | Tapestry Design Prize for Architects 2018

Hosted by the Australian Tapestry Workshop (ATW) the Tapestry Design Prize for Architects (TDPA) is the only international tapestry award for architects. The TDPA invites architects from around the world to design a tapestry for a hypothetical site. Boullée’s mooted building that inspired the Pharos Wing, MONA, has been announced as the TDPA 2018 hypothetical site on Tuesday 20 March 2018.   MONA was designed by Fender Katsalidis Architects to house David Walsh’s extraordinary collection of old and new art.  ‘MONA is both visionary and breath-taking; David Walsh’s brief for the TDPA 2018 will challenge architects creatively and their understanding of the intersection between tapestry and space’, says Antonia Syme, Director, Australian Tapestry Workshop. Entries are now open and close Friday 15 June. Finalists will be announced in July with the winners announced Thursday 16 August 2018, with an exhibition…

Call for Papers | Comité international d’histoire de l’art (CIHA) Colloquium in New Delhi November 2018

Comité international d’histoire de l’art (CIHA) | Colloquium in New Delhi – 28th-30th november 2018 Website: http://cihaindia2018.in/ Deadline: 7 May 2021 ART, DESIGN & SOCIETY Art and design are intrinsic to all forms with aesthetic value. In the modern world, the dichotomy between art and design was created by the socio-political and economic changes that were brought about by the industrial revolution and colonization. This has led to the paradoxical paradigm wherein the utilitarian designs of the past are perceived as art in the present and are displayed in museum spaces. In countries like India, art institutions are products of colonialism which aimed at instilling western values leading to the collapse of traditional structures of art creation, dissemination and consumption. The living traditions of indigenous, popular and ritual art which formed the major corpus of artistic production in societies worldwide…

Colony: Australia 1770-1861 and Colony: Frontier Wars Exhibition Opening Programs Saturday 17th March | NGV Australia

For the opening weekend of Colony: Australia 1770-1861 and Colony: Frontier Wars the NGV is hosting a series of talks and performances on Saturday 17th March. See the website: https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/program-series/colony-opening-weekend/ COLONY: AUSTRALIA 1770–1861 Drawing from public and private collections across the country, Colony: Australia 1770–1861 brings together the most important examples of art and design produced during this period and surveys the key settlements and development of life and culture in the colonies. Importantly, the exhibition acknowledges the impact of European settlement on Indigenous communities. COLONY: FRONTIER WARS Colony: Frontier Wars explores the period of colonisation in Australia from 1788 onwards and its often devastating effects on First Peoples. The period, that was to many the discovery of a ‘wondrous’ southern continent, was to others an invasion of homelands occupied for many millennia. This powerful exhibition reveals some of what…

Writing & Concepts | Working the Room: Some notes on Exhibition-Making – John Meade | Collingwood Arts Precinct

John Meade presents: “Working the Room: Some notes on Exhibition-Making” Sat 17 March 3:00pm @ Collingwood Arts Precinct 35 Johnston Street, Collingwood VIC 30066 Website WRITING & CONCEPTS JOHN MEADE is a Melbourne based artist who graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, in 1994. His recent solo exhibitions include, Set Pieces (2016) and Autumn 2014, both at Sutton Gallery Melbourne. Through 2010/2011, a NETS survey exhibition curated by Zara Stanhope, Objects to Live By: The Art of John Meade, toured six regional and city public galleries throughout Australia. Other solo exhibitions include, The Desultory Arabesque (2012), Show Business (2009) and Aftermath (2005), all at Sutton Gallery Melbourne; Incident in the Museum 2 (2004), at the Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, and Propulsion (2001), at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney and the…

Opening Event for Bundoora Homestead Art Centre’s two new exhibitions – We and Accession.

IMAGES: L-R Briony Galligan | Nothing incarnadine (detail) | 2016 | teak hands made in collaboration with Lejar Budiharjo from Carving Arts Studio in Jogja Calling | 4A Centre for Contemporary Art, Sydney | Photo: Courtesy of artist. Claire McArdle | The Missing Parrot | 2016 | hand carved second hand hammers | Darebin Art Collection.

Exhibition Opening Join us at the opening and hear from leading art critic, art historian and curator Sasha Grishin AM FAHA. The exhibition opening will include a Welcome to Country and Smoking Ceremony. WHEN: Saturday 17 March | 2-4pm COST: Free | includes refreshments BOOKINGS: not required, all welcome Website: http://www.bundoorahomestead.com/whats-on/ We We explores emerging contemporary artists with studios in the Darebin municipality. These artists have diverse practices that critically engage with installation, site, sound, video, performance, text, photography, painting and sculpture. They have studios in Northcote and Preston at Artery Cooperative, Beaconsfield Parade Studios, Arts Project Australia and Gertrude Contemporary. Featuring: Julian Aubrey Smith, Beth Caird, Georgina Criddle, Saskia Doherty, Briony Galligan, Jethro Harcourt, Rosie Isaac, Warren O’Brien and Lucreccia Quintanilla. Curated by Renee Cosgrave. Accession Accession presents recent acquisitions to the Darebin Art Collection representative of a cross-section of Australian contemporary…

Visiting Fellowship at ANU’s Humanities Research Centre for 2019

Applications for the 2019 Humanities Research Centre Visiting Fellowship Program – on the theme of ‘Crisis!’ – are now open. 2019 Theme – Crisis! Mobilised as a defining characteristic of the contemporary condition, ‘crisis’ often functions as a way to mark out a critical ‘moment of truth’ or rupture. Alternatively, it is offered as a tool with which to understand the category of ‘history’, or to differentiate the past from a conflicted present. For some, crisis has become a state of ordinary ambivalence, a constant and unresolvable feature of the status quo. Forming a background to these debates is the escalating chorus of ‘crisis’ texts in popular and academic contexts alike. In this growth industry – richly illustrated by images of violent protest and reform, by news of corruption, incompetence, and injustice, and by consecutive environmental disasters – the urgency…

Lecture | Skin Deep: Reading Emotion on Early Modern Bodies – Prof Evelyn Welch

This lecture will explore the ways emotion was understood on the body’s surface and how this was represented both materially and visually in early modern Europe. Based on traditional medical theories, early modern skin was often described as a ‘fishing net’, something that held the body in place and offered a decorative surface but had no function of its own. At the same time, the body’s surface also told you about its interior wellbeing. Learning to read the body meant both examining the exterior and sampling the interior’s waste products ranging from urine to hair and tears. This approach was as true of animals as it was of people. Manuals described how to read faces and skin, and argued for and against blushing. You could also predict astrological futures by reading the lines on foreheads as well as on hands…

Call for Papers and Performances – The Magic Lantern in Australia and the World: An Interdisciplinary Conference | Canberra, September 2018

DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS: 30 MARCH 2021 4-6 September 2018 | ANU School of Art & Design, Canberra Contact: elisa.decourcy@anu.edu.au Affect / Animation / Aparatuses & Technology /  Cinema / Digital Humanities /Entertainment / Evangelism / Exploration / Globalisation & Trade / Heritage Studies Media Archaeology / Performance & Reenactment / Photography / Illusion, Optics & Phantasmagoria / Science Communication / Missionary Histories From its development in the colonial period, to its echoes in today’s multimedia spaces, the magic lantern, along with its thousands of photographic and hand-painted slides, has had a pervasive and lasting impact on visual culture. Historians are just discovering its powerful presence in entertainment, education, science, religion, politics and advertising. Galleries, libraries and archives are uncovering untouched caches of slides in their collections. And artists and performers are rekindling the ‘magic’ of the technology. The Australian Research…