Art & review: an enduring loop

Keith Gallasch & Virginia Baxter

In a catalogue essay for the exhibition In Response: Dialogues with RealTime, Virginia and Keith delineate their vision of the complex interplay between artist, artwork and writer in the making of a review as it unfolds in real time.

The RealTime team

This new section features a joint biography for Managing Editors Keith and Virginia, seen here with RealTime staff in 2014. More entries will be added as we complete the archive.

Multiversing The Rocks

Keith Gallasch

Looking for an adventure that takes you deep into Sydney’s The Rocks as both an actual and virtual space? The City of Forking Paths is a “physical cinema” work originally commissioned from Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller by the City of Sydney for the 2014 Biennale of Sydney. It’s up and running again.

Sydney Chamber Opera, La Passion De Simone: spiritual turbulence

Keith Gallasch

Deploying installation, video art and evocations of durational performance art, Sydney Chamber Opera stages Kaija Saariaho’s La Passion de Simone with a daring representation of the philosopher mystic Simone Weil.

THE LOOP: Waiting for DAU

A New York Times report on a massive cinematic installation by Russian film director Ilya Khrzhanovsky inspired by the life of Nobel Prize winning theoretical physicist Lev Landau grabbed our attention. With 13 feature-length films, performance and much else, it’s about to open in Paris, police permit pending.

Editorial 5 December 2018

Welcome to a bumper holiday edition of RealTime featuring extensive reviews of two critically important festivals, OzAsia (image above Yui Kawaguchi) and Climate Century; treasurable reflections on writing for RealTime by Richard Murphet and Gail Priest; and a look at how Australia’s Indigenous dance scene is set to change as new companies emerge.

OzAsia 2018 performance: More than cultural diplomacy

Ben Brooker

Deeply engaged by five works in a bracing festival, Ben Brooker writes of their evocations of “displacement, the unsettling of body and being by the effects of colonisation, technology and environmental disruption.”

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.