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THE EARTH ISSUE

by Grace Partridge | May 23, 2017 | ANTHROPOCENE

THE EARTH ISSUE

IMAGE CREDIT: ZAN WIMBERLEY

Our friends at the Earth Issue featured our latest exhibition Anthropocene. Check it out here.

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Recent ministerial restructures mean that, for the first time since the existence of a cultural portfolio, there is no government department with the word “arts” in its title. The Federal Government has removed it from the political agenda, even though Arts and culture is a $111.7bn industry according to the government’s own figures. It employs more people than mining, IT or essential services. It’s also among the fastest-growing. Policies that propel the arts propel the entire economy, with flow-on effects in education and health as well as infrastructure and urban and regional development. The places where we make and experience art are the heart and soul of every place, every town, every city – and every home. At a time where social cohesion needed to redress the most perilous problems of our times, we need to invest strategically in the creative thinking that will create our future. Making the arts invisible is retrograde, dangerous, and so disappointingly unimaginative. Let’s get truly creative about the contemporary Australian culture – and the future Australia we want for our children.
Words via @nava_visualarts and image by Sam Durant.

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regram @m_i_s_o_ ✨ Announced yesterday ~ Stanislava will present a newly commissioned work for the Sydney Opera House entitled ‘The Red Carpet’ which will debut on March 8, 2020 - as a part of the All About Women festival, curated in collaboration with @weareantidote 🥳#allaboutwomen

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#antidoteloves ~ Abdulnasser Gharem. A self-taught artist and officer in the Saudi Arabian army, Gharem was at home in Khamis Mushait when the images of the World Trade Center collapsing were matched with the news that eventually followed: Two of the hijackers were Gharem’s friends from high school. “I was shocked, how could this be? I thought: ‘We grew up in the same city, in the same environment, we had the same knowledge — it could have been me.’ But we’d taken very different paths." Gharem spent 23 years in the army, eventually being promoted to lieutenant colonel. Military life was ordered and unforgiving; the looser, messier intellectual process of making art helped to balance that rigidity and allowed his brain to unfurl. Of his practice, Gharem unpacks the many dichotomies and tries to “say what the people couldn’t say in my country. It’s hard because the media in all Arab countries has been controlled by the government. So I think the role of the artist is to bring these issues, through the artworks, to the people.” Pictured: ‘The Capitol Dome’ - an installation which appears to depict the U.S. Capitol building tilting on its side to reveal an interior decorated in Islamic style. ✨

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#antidoteloves ~ Tabita Rezaire ✨ What is the role of technology in the politics of liberation? Has technology become just another layer of oppression, or can it contribute to the struggles of emancipation - and if so, how? Tabita Rezaire's practice expands the meanings of technology and creates space-times for receiving spiritual technologies as scientific knowledge. In her cross-dimensional works, Rezaire tackles the pervasive matrix of coloniality and its effects on identity, technology, sexuality, spirituality, and the production of knowledge. Images from ‘Exotic Trade’, 2017 at @goodman_gallery

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#antidoteloves ~ Jiang Pengyi’s (蒋鹏奕) photography responds to China’s changing social, political, and physical landscapes. Born in Hunan Province, the artist is interested in the passage of time and its effect on society; he is particularly interested in the transformation of Beijing’s urban landscape and the possibilities for how it will look several decades from now. His art-making process often involves time-lapse photography and the gradual destruction of his material, as he seeks to eliminate proof of the artist’s hand. Pictured: Foresight No.23, 2018.

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#antidoteloves ~ ‘Floral arrangement’ by Nathan Beard. Exhibited as part of ‘White Gilt’ at @coolchangecontemporary, the works in the exhibition unpacked the cultural associations and idiosyncrasies of various hand gestures in traditional Thai culture; filtered through the cultural anxieties and self-consciousness of the artist’s ThaiAustralian heritage. The exhibition takes the symbolism and associations of the wai as its main source of inspiration. The wai is a prayer-like gesture where your hands are clasped in front of you, and as a customary greeting in Thailand has its roots in the 12th Century as a way of indicating that you weren’t armed. Complicating the work is a tangle of personal associations between the artist and the wai, namely a sense of cultural inauthenticity which has been harboured through its ritualised performance in social and familial contexts. Credit to Chris Kershaw Photography and the artist ✨

© ANTIDOTE 2019. Site by NOMAD.