Artlink goes to London
Artlnk’s major international event for 2011 is a London forum to explore issues of contemporary Indigenous art, history and identity being held at October Gallery in Bloomsbury, the heart of London’s cultural and museum district, and a stone’s throw from the British Museum.
Curators from this well-known centre for the showing and debating of art from non-European centres have joined with Artlink and the Dutch cultural producers Framer Framed to shape a set of questions around the tensions of Indigenous success in being accepted as creators of dynamic contemporary art while at the same time making crucial links with cultural origins and postcolonial issues.
This free event is an opportunity for UK art lovers to engage with these issues and meet contemporary Indigenous artists, and members of the Artlink team, Executive Editor Stephanie Britton, co-editors of Artlink Indigenous Daniel Browning and Stephanie Radok. At the forum and the launch afterwards they will be able to purchase copies of this exciting publication.
It coincides with the major exhibition at October Gallery, CURRENTS, featuring new art from Aeoteroa New Zealand. It is also a vital ingredient in the 2011 Festival of London which this year is themed on Oceania and is also part of the ORIGINS festival in London launching on the same night.
3.00 pm: forum of artists’ lectures and panel discussion
INDIGENOUS ART NOW
Artists and editors from Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands will share opinions in a series of presentations and lively moderated debates across three sessions.
Daniel Browning and high profile contemporary Australian artists Vernon Ah Kee, Fiona Foley and Christian Thompson are giving formal presentations, and Respondents are Stephanie Radok, Dr Daniel Rycroft of the University of East Anglia, Dr Georges Petitjean of the Aboriginal Art Museum in Utrecht (AAMU) and Natasha McKinney, Curator of Oceania at the British Museum.
Fiona Foley will speak on ‘public art that bites back’, Vernon Ah Kee on ‘some inconvenient truths’ and Christian Thompson gives a performance dealing with identity and disguise. Daniel Browning, ABC Radio National broadcaster will moderate the debate.
6.30 pm: launch Artlink Indigenous, Beauty and Terror (vol 31 no2)
Guest Speaker to launch this publication is Dr Anthony Gardner an Australian scholar and writer currently on a Fellowship at the Courtauld Institute in London. He will be introduced by Stephanie Britton AM and October Gallery Director Chili Hawes.
Artlink Indigenous is a new enterprise, a three year project to bring out an annual issue each June, in response to international demand for a magazine that records and critiques developments in Indigenous art in Australia
Artlink wishes to acknowledge the tireless work of October’s staff Jo Walsh and Mariska ter Horst, the Framer Framed producers Cas Bool and Barbara Capel based in Amsterdam, and Artlink Editors Stephanie Radok and Daniel Browning and all who have contributed to bringing this event to fruition. We also acknowledge the generous assistance of QIAMEA (Queensland Indigenous Art Marketing and Export Agency), Copyright Agency Ltd, Arts Queensland and the Australian High Commission in London.