Bios and Abstracts

A - L :: M - Z

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Resistance or compliance? The politics of contemporary Maori art in Aotearoa New Zealand
Maori artists are, arguably, at the forefront of contemporary art practice in Aotearoa New Zealand. Contemporary Maori art is regularly featured, in superbly curated and designed exhibitions, complete with glossy catalogues, in art galleries throughout the country and overseas. In a buoyant art market, dealers are show-casing the works of both high-profile and emerging Maori artists to eager, mainly Pakeha collectors. Fine arts and art history students are studying a history of the contemporary Maori art movement constructed by mainly Maori scholars.

The current interest in and recognition of Maori art have been hard-won. Just over fifty years ago Maori artists began, tentatively, to engage with the art establishment of the dominant culture. For much of the time since, their art has been marginalised and denigrated.

In recent years, however, Maori art has been co-opted by the dominant culture to serve a nationalist agenda. But many Maori artists have preferred to maintain the distinct identity for their art that had initially been thrust upon it. Recognition of Maori cultural specificity had been enshrined by the British Crown in the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 but had largely been denied in practice. Following the enactment of empowering Treaty of Waitangi legislation in 1975, Maori artists became political agents and activists for separatism. In their hands art was wielded as a potent weapon in the resurgence of Maori nationalism and culture. Even so, public art institutions, dealers and collectors seemed able to accommodate even the most assertive Maori artistic statements about justice, politics and cultural survival, however threatening and unsettling these messages might be to the dominant culture. The present situation in Aotearoa New Zealand abounds in ironies and paradoxes.

Margo Neale
Margo Neale is an Indigenous Australian who has worked across art galleries, museums and universities and has held positions as art curator, author and editor for leading institutions in Australian and the Pacific. She has recently been appointed as Director of Indigenous programs: Gallery of the First Australians at the National Museum of Australia, a testament to her contribution to art, contact history and the place of Indigenous history in the nation's story. She was co-editor of the Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture which was published in 2000 and was awarded the Power/Australian and News Zealand Art Association award with high commendation by the Australian Cultural History Association. As an academic, she has held several visiting fellowships at the Art History Department (UQ), the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research and the Humanities Research Centre (ANU). Over the past 10 years she has curated several major indigenous exhibitions including the first national touring exhibition for SOCOG for the Sydney Olympics, and the first national solo exhibition of an urban Aboriginal artist, Lin Onus. She was chair of the Australia and Pacific Panel for the Asia-Pacific Triennials and a member of the National Advisory Board, and is a major contributor to the field of Indigenous art, culture and history.

Chaitanya Sambrani
Chaitanya Sambrani was born in Pune, India and studied Economics and Art Criticism at the Faculty of Fine Art, M. S. University, Baroda, obtaining a Master of Art (Fine Art) degree in 1995. He taught art history and theory at the Raheja Institute for Architecture, University of Bombay from 1995 to 1998, simultaneously working as a freelance art critic and curator. He was Curator, India, for the Asialink exchange-residency-exhibition project Fire and Life (involving ten artists from India and Australia, 1996-97), and theorist and curator for the artist-initiated Open Circle International Artists Workshop (Bombay, 2000)

He is currently in the process of completing his Ph D in art history at the Australian National University, Canberra (dissertation title Nation Tradition Modernism: Indian Art in the 20th Century). Since 1999, he has taught in the Art Theory Workshop, School of Art, ANU, specialising in modern and contemporary art from India, Indonesia and Japan.

Chaitanya's current curatorial projects include Edge of Desire: Recent art from India, a major travelling exhibition jointly organised by the Art Gallery of Western Australia and the Asia Society New York. The exhibition tour will commence in Perth, September 2004 and travel to venues in Australia and North America over 2004-06, including at the Asia Society and Museum, New York, during February-May 2005. He is also co-curating (with Geeta Kapur) a 40-year survey of Indian art 1963-2003. Titled In the Theatre of the Metropolis, the exhibition organised by Gallery Chemould, Bombay will open at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Bombay in December 2003.

He has published widely on contemporary Indian art, contributing book chapters, exhibition catalogues and reviews to publications in India, Australia, Singapore and the Netherlands. He has also presented seminar papers and lectures at several conferences and institutions in India and Australia.

Contested Terrain: Experiments with activist art in India
In what ways does public visuality impact on culturally specific apprehensions of what constitutes the human? Consequently, does public visuality play a role in hierarchised notions of humanity, and engender a differentiated scale of rights commensurate with these hierarchies? How have contemporary artists in India responded to the challenges posed by questions of public visuality and the persistence of human rights abuse? What are the achievements of such practice, and how do we evaluate these against the fraught terrain of social and political relations in contemporary India?

This paper considers the work of two "documentarists" (photographer Raghu Rai and filmmaker Anand Patwardhan), alongside projects by two "artists" (Nalini Malani and Rummana Hussain). Through a consideration of their individual projects, the paper presents reflections on the broader questions of visuality and human rights.

Adam Shoemaker
Adam Shoemaker is Professor and Dean of Arts at the Australian National University in Canberra.  He came to Australia from Canada in the 1980s and has had a succession of public, international and academic positions since that time, including three years spent with the Delegation of the Commission of the European Communities. 

He has worked in the Privy Council Office in Ottawa, in Nice, Toulouse, Antwerp and Brussels, as well as in Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra.

He has written or edited seven books dealing in whole or part with Indigenous cultures and race relations, including Paperbark (1990), Black Words, White Page (1992), Mudrooroo: A Critical Study (1993), A Sea Change: Australian Writing and Photography (1998), David Unaipons Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines (2001) and - most recently - the French-language work Les Aborigènes dAustralie, published by Gallimard in November 2002.

Barbara Stafford
1. I will be speaking on rhetorical/philosophical mode of analogy as providing a logic of reconciliation. As the oldest method for connecting anything to anything else in the universe, it bears looking at again today as we try to bring polar positions into a dialogue with one another.

2. I will be speaking on analogy as a binding method, one that goes back to the presocratics, and is given a name and a definitive shape by Plato. I'm going to be looking at this fluid process of "putting something in the middle" as a visual logic for reconciling extreme positions. I close with a consideration of Leibniz whose metaphysics and utopian political theory offers, I believe, an important model not only for the communal aspirations of the Internet but for bringing divided or polar interests into compossible conjunction.

Dr Caroline Turner
Dr Caroline Turner is Deputy Director of the Humanities Research Centre. Prior to taking up this appointment in January 2000 she spent 20 years as a senior art museum professional. As Deputy Director of the Queensland Art Gallery she organised and curated over 60 international exhibitions, including Matisse which toured Australia in 1995. In the mid-1980s Dr Turner also began working in the area of contemporary Asian and Pacific art, organising the first exhibition of contemporary Japanese art for an Australian museum in 1989. Co-founder and Project Director for nearly ten years for the Asia-Pacific Triennial Project which, over three exhibitions in 1993, 1996 and 1999, attracted audiences of 60,000, 120,000, and 155,000, Turner was also the scholarly editor of the three major catalogues and the book Tradition and Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacific, University of Queensland Press, 1993 and has written extensively on contemporary Asian art as well as lecturing on this subject internationally. The Australian Government appointed her to the Australia-China Council in the 1980s and the Australia-Indonesia Institute in the 1990's. She is a recipient of an Australian Research Council Grant (2001) for the project The Other Within:  Minorities in Asia-Pacific Museums. Currently she is a member of several ANU Steering committees and Boards -  National Institute for the Humanities and National Institute for Asia and the Pacific; Board of the Institute Institute of the Arts; Coombs Creative Arts Fellowship committee; and School of Art Gallery Advisory Board.

Jen Webb
Jen Webb's work as a cultural theorist has focused on individual and national identity, particularly the representational and axiological aspects of being. She has demonstrated her knowledge of postcolonial and neomarxist theoretical perspectives through her numerous teaching and research publications. Her research and publication include the 2001 project Resistance and Reconciliation: Writing in the Commonwealth and a major analysis and critique of globalisation from a neomarxist theoretical perspective. She was part of a team which produced the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art and has published several articles which develop her interest in this aspect of art and social politics.

Her research has focused on the field of creative production, and the ethical questions that confront individuals and organisations in the contemporary world, including questions of cultural 'marking' (gender, race, sexuality, heritage) and politico-economic action. Jen is also a creative writer through which she has focused on the identity of creative practitioners in a world that is often hostile or indifferent to the work and concerns of creative writers. She is currently completing a Doctor of Creative Arts award at UTS focusing on questions of embodied identity. Through her works as both researcher and creative writer Jen can claim a deep understanding of and identification with the position of creative practitioners who have a concern for social justice, and who have elected to pursue this through creative rather than political action.

"'In Dreams Begin Responsibilities': artists and activists"
An old proverb, quoted by the poet WB Yeats, insists that 'In Dreams Begin Responsibilities'. This lovely if somewhat demanding line reflects at once the poetry of Yeats, the psychology of Freud, and the lyrical prose of American writer Delmore Schwartz. All three have focused attention on the work of creativity in its social and aesthetic senses, and all three have offered the possibility that the dream world that is the space of art may afford the possibility of refracting the 'state of things', so that those 'things' are seen differently, different stories told, and different truths posited. Set against this hopeful perspective is Theodor Adorno's famous (and most misquoted) line, that 'To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric' - something routinely cited in discussions about what art can do, and what artists ought to do, about the state of the world. I want in this paper to read across these two perspectives that artistic practice is necessarily social and ethical practice, or that in the face of the barbarism of the twentieth century, it's too late for that sort of ethics - and in the process explore some ways of viewing the work of art in the twenty-first century.

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