Speakeasy: A question of independence

Andrew Fuhrmann

New works in Darebin Arts’ Speakeasy program prompt Andrew Fuhrmann to wonder if the notion of independent performance has become obsolete in an era of increasing institutionalisation.

Editorial 18 October 2017

This week we look forward to the Wired Open Day Festival with its art and agriculture synthesis, including Cat Jones’ participatory, diet-changing edible insect installation (image above), and we complete our extensive coverage of a thrilling 2017 OzAsia Festival.

Experimenta: Make Sense: The art of perceptual play

Lisa Gye

Lisa Gye applauds Experimenta: Make Sense for keeping Australia’s rich media arts legacy alive and showcasing artists who, in their play with ideas and perception, help us make sense of what is an increasingly fragile and chaotic world.

Totally Huge Festival: A time for new music

Keith Gallasch

Perth’s Totally Huge New Music Festival features artists from Japan, the US and Australia performing visually striking works, introducing an algorithmic album generator and placing the audience inside a percussion work for 100 musicians.

Soft Centre: a niche utopia

Gail Priest

Gail Priest welcomes Soft Centre, an experimental electronic music festival of scale in Sydney’s west, featuring an impressive selection of Australian and international artists and with an emphasis on cross-disciplinary collaboration and multi-sensory stimulation.

OzAsia Festival: The cultural deep-end

Ben Brooker

Ben Brooker embraces performances by Hot Brown Honey, Joelistics & James Mangohig, Darlane Littay & Tian Rotteveel and Aakash Odedra that reveal the complexities of cultural heritage and exchange.

OzAsia: The End: Almost human

Keith Gallasch

Keith Gallasch is moved by Keiichiro Shibuya’s spectacular multi-screen opera in which a virtual pop star faces mortality, her vivid world glitching and a naked skull-faced doppelganger confronting her with the smell of death.

Andrée Greenwell’s Cinéaste: reflections & refractions

Keith Gallasch

Cinéaste Vol. 1 is a fascinating assemblage that allows composer Greenwell to lovingly reflect on the idiom of film scoring and to inventively refract her own compositions, yielding aural gems: riffs, ostinatos, hooks and soundscapes, the stuff of movies actual and imagined.

Sky Blue Mythic: Angela Goh’s fantastical myth-making

Keith Gallasch

More essay than review, Keith Gallasch’s response to Angela Goh’s Sky Blue Mythic explores the relationship between experiencing a powerfully disconcerting work, reviewing it and engaging with the artist’s account of it.

Narcifixion: Watching the narcissists

Keith Gallasch

Anton’s vigorously propulsive, grimly funny dance work, Narcifixion, about screen-bred narcissism provokes Keith Gallasch, watching a finely streamed performance, to appreciate the logic of its structure and respond to its account of a complex condition.

Rakini Devi’s nightwork: the performer as visual artist

Keith Gallasch

The exhibition Inhabiting Erasures powerfully attests to a passion to arrest the wrongs done to women, conjures a magical otherworld of female strength and beauty and exquisitely reveals painting to be the foundation of Devi’s practice.

Excellent everyday Kathak: Raghav Handa’s TWO

Keith Gallasch

With amusing conversation and exquisite partnering dancer Raghav Handa and tabla player Maharshi Raval reveal much about collaboration, Kathak dance and the testing of boundaries.

Album review: Offspring Bites 3: En Masse

Keith Gallasch

From Ensemble Offspring potent works by Alex Pozniak (dramatically assaying weight in music), Holly Harrison (a witty take on instrumental and other distortions) and Thomas Meadowcroft (a gently vibrating meditation that opens out to a pulsing expansive vision).

Editorial Thursday 27 August 2020

Keith Gallasch & Virginia Baxter

The highly successful 2019 exhibition In Response: Dialogues with RealTime, which celebrated the interplay between RealTime and the artists Martin del Amo, Vicki Van Hout and Branch Nebula, is now exhibited online. We also interview instigator and co-curator Dr Erin Brannigan about her motivation for mounting this innovative exhibition. In another bold archival venture, Madeleine Hodge and Sarah Rodigari have created Timely Readings, a visual mapping of live art in Australia.