Unpenning Words: Releasing Literature from Within - Dreaming Inside-Voices from Junee Correctional Centre

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Transforming the rhetoric: making images as practice led research

The role of photography as documentary practice plays an elementary role in visual culture and - through its story telling qualities - it is evocative of emotions. Photographic imagery helps the individual as well as the body politic to learn and to internalise global events. Over the past eight years, following the events of 9/11 in 2001, western society has undergone significant political, legal and social changes. Images of terror circulated the world almost instantaneously and circulating still. Artists and scholars have addressed the notion of fear as a result of the existing imagery as part of a rhetoric of terror after terrorist attacks such as the 9/11 events in the USA, or the bombings in Madrid, London and Bali, by investigating the question what is the current climate in which we work and live? The underlying common notion for this practice led research is that language (spoken, written, imaged or performed) can be formative and informative. These considerations lead to a number of questions: If the scholar has a `specific public role in society\u27, as Edward Said insisted (Wallen, Closed Encounters: Literary Politics and Public Culture, University of Minnesota Press 1998: 215), how can s/he creatively connect with issues that affect society? Is s/he, to say it with Said, endowed `with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public\u27? (1998: 215). I will discuss the photographic work of the artists Mary Rosengren, Juilee Pryor, Mehmet Adil, Brogan Bunt among others, who were part of an exhibition called Tactics against Fear Creativity as Catharsis in 2007 at the FCA Long Gallery, University of Wollongong.The idea behind this exhibition was to provide alternative readings to popular culture and a public language of fracture, hostility and threat by exploring tactics of fear in visual culture from a personal perspective grounded in institutional spac

The art of others: Nolde, Preston & views of Indigenous Art

The emergence of Australian Aboriginal art in post-colonial Australia reflects a history of cultural separation between European and Aboriginal art. Up to late 20th Century—Aboriginal culture was \u27invisible\u27 within the wider \u27nation-building\u27 identity. The definition, role and status of Aboriginal art has changed dramatically in Australia over the past thirty years, but in Europe no similar shift into a postcolonial ideology is evident

Tactics Against Fear - Creativity as Catharsis Exhibition

Over the past six years, following the events of 9/11 in 2001, western society has undergone significant political, legal and social changes. The notion of terror - in action, word and image, has institutionalized fear on several levels: the emotional, the social and the political. Fear, it seems, justifies varying degrees of administrative arbitrariness, which as long as there is a commonly acknowledged denominator like terrorism, public opinion (when informed by fear rather than knowledge) can be swayed to overlook politicised abuse of the law. The protection of law from arbitrariness and from fear that makes arbitrariness possible, then, is a pressing issue in the current climate we live in. The idea behind this exhibition, Tactics against Fear –Creativity as Catharsis 2007 is to provide alternative readings to popular culture and a public language of fracture, hostility and threat by exploring tactics of fear from a personal perspective grounded in institutional space. The artworks invite to experience an audio, visual, textual, tactile, and performative response from the specific vantage point of the Faculty of Creative Arts (FCA) at the University of Wollongong. Here, 19 FCA staff and FCA postgraduate students - writers, journalists, composers, musicians, poets, graphic designers and visual artists respond to the current climate of the rhetoric of fear around the ‘war on terror’ through interdisciplinary collaboration. Artists and scholars have addressed the notion of fear as a result of the existing rhetoric of terror after terrorist attacks such as the 9/11 events in the USA, or the bombings in Madrid, London and Bali, by investigating the question what is the current climate in which we work and live? These considerations lead to a number of questions: If the scholar has a ‘specific public role in society’, as Edward Said insisted (Wallen Closed Encounters: Literary Politics and Public Culture, University of Minnesota Press 1998: 215), how can s/he creatively connect with issues that affect society? Is s/he, to say it with Said, endowed ‘with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public’? (1998: 215). The art works, coming from a creative rather than from a scientific, legal or historical speaking position, explore today’s popular visual culture from various angles. However, the underlying common notion is that language – spoken, written, imaged or performed – can be formative in the development of fear. In that sense, the exhibition investigates tactics of fear as a result of the current rhetoric of terror in the realm of visual culture

On the Reception of Aboriginal Art in German Arts Space. Art Historical and Anthroplogical Perspectives

The reading of art is located in deeply entrenched ideas of culture and contextualised by specific historical frameworks. This book addresses the question of how Australian Aboriginal art is displayed in the institutional spaces of art galleries and museums in Germany. It argues that there is an underlying current in Germany that divides the representation of art into European and \u27Other.\u27 In German culture, institutional representation of art is hierarchical; the art museum at the top enhances the self-reflexive notion of culture, while the ethnological museum provides the context against which European, specifically German, identity and culture are pitched. German art history and ethnology have led to a binary reading of art that has largely inhibited the exhibition of Aboriginal art as contemporary art. However, Aboriginal art that is contextualised as ethnographic and not as contemporary continues a Modernist attitude on cultural exchange, emphasising an essential difference. This essentialising of art overlooks the globalised situation that evokes regional cultural inflections based on postcolonial expressions of hybridity and fragmentation

A Tale of the Stinging Nettle

A Tale of the Stinging Nettle - Wall installation – knitted merino wool and bamboo yarn – concertina book 2009 Friederike Krishnabhakdi-Vasilakis Coming out of my research on the hierarchically perceived relationship between oral and written dissemination of knowledge in Western society and how this determines the reception of Aboriginal art, I explore aspects of the fairy tale and knitting as social experience, where the rigidities of oral and literary knowing dissolve. The fairy tale is a mapping device of the unconscious; of origin and place. Fairy tales travel across time and space and adopt various forms across cultures, embodying displacement and placement at the same time. Before folklorists such as Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm wrote them down – fairy tales were passed on orally. Through the merging of the tactile (knitting), optical (photography), and cognitive (book) the memorising and discursive properties of these transformative media and their interrelationship come to the fore. Stinging Nettle is central in Anderson’s fairy tale and I use its materiality as meaning-making medium through the organic dye for wool and bamboo yarn. Printing is instrumental to discourse – however other such instrumental processes often precede the printing process. Internal narratives of the photograph and the external of the written text are juxtaposed with the hand-made garment. I employ knitting as social process - during which stories are told and retold - and as ReSearch of memory. Making of the garment becomes a thought process in itself and a frame for the social act of passing on knowledge wrapped in stories.https://ro.uow.edu.au/ditto/1007/thumbnail.jp

Footprints on the Edge

This collaborative essay, which sits at the nexus of creative writing, nature writing and animal studies, seeks to explore the question of how we might live ethically and joyfully in the context of anthropogenic climate change. Engaging with the fields of creative non-fiction, philosophy, memoir and literature review, the essay asks how we might address this question together, as writers, thinkers, artists, and living beings alongside many others, both human and more-than-human. The authors explore their relationship with the ocean, animals and each other, combining walking and writing as part of the same process. Here, walking serves as a pivotal immersive writing process as well as a creative tool. Alongside sharing ways of thinking, the essay argues the importance of acknowledging oneself as a writer situated in a particular place and time. ¶

Room for knowledge: e-learning as a multi-directional experience in the virtual museum of the Pacific

While the museum profession has long engaged with issues of education and access in managing and displaying its collections, modes of cultural representation in museums are being challenged in the twenty-first century by social and technological changes, particularly by the global extent of digital information and the development of social media using internet and web-based technologies.The Virtual Museum of the Pacific (VMP) is a social media platform for a Digital Ecosystem which is designed to enable a variety of user communities to engage with the Pacific Collection of the Australian Museum. While museums worldwide increasingly have a virtual presence, the VMP facilitates the development of culturally relevant folksonomies and provides user groups with invidualised ontological relationships for object discovery and annotation. Each user community may create its own specific annotations and may, in turn, be influenced by the annotations of other user communities. The aim is to facilitate on-line community interaction using social-media technologies to extend the annotation of objects to suit the stakeholder\u27s own needs. The success of the system depends on leveraging the diffusion of language and encouraging a conversation between on-line communities. This will enable the development of new visual presences and the creation of cultural knowledge via the contribution of creator communities.In this paper, we outline a preliminary evaluation of the potential impact of this Digital Ecosystem on modes of knowledge creation and cultural representation for museums. We define the scope for the social tagging component of the information model and discuss how users might interact with objects in terms of their knowledge base as well as contribute to ongoing taxonomic definitions. Given its capacity to facilitate multi-directional E-learning using new technology, we demonstrate that the Virtual Museum of the Pacific is a significant model for online community interaction and learning in the contemporary museum environment