Visual Art

Following the outrage over their “unAustralian” video opus Terror Nullius, artists Dominique and Dan Angeloro reflect on their collective practice as Soda_Jerk. “We always had this idea that we wanted Terror Nullius to be a film somewhere between the arthouse and grindhouse. A piece of art that embraces bad taste or maybe a piece of bad taste that aspires to be art.”

A posthumous retrospective of Mutlu Çerkez’s work, structured by an idiosyncratic dating system of the artist’s devising, challenges concepts of when an artwork begins and ends.

For Geelong’s Ian Ballis, a life sifting through other people’s discards has led to an unlikely creative partnership with Shirin Abedinirad, an Iranian installation artist whose work is part of the Lorne Sculpture Biennale.

At an exhibition of the Rijksmuseum’s Dutch masters, the viewer is captivated by the care and penetration in the work of Vermeer, Rembrandt and Hals.

Since he first started travelling to Utopia, Tim Jennings has been collecting paintings by various artists. His gallery, Mbantua, now has a permanent collection: 30 years’ worth of art from Utopia. ‘I thought it could be very important to see how the artists change over time, evolve over the years. We’ve got about 1000 paintings. In this collection you can see part of the evolvement of the artists.’

The techno-fascism of Nazi Germany and the West’s postwar mass consumerism have been the subject of painter Gerhard Richter’s decades-long career, whether in photorealism or abstraction.

The frame between art, robotics and special effects is breaking down. All three are emerging from the ‘uncanny valley’. Academy Award-winning visual effects expert John Cox, robotics specialist Sam Kingsley and artist Shaun Gladwell discuss what this means.

Two works – a video installation by Mika Rottenberg in Melbourne and a site-specific work in Sydney by Anri Sala – show how incongruous imagery can reveal the absurdity of the forces to which we unthinkingly submit.

As a pioneer of conceptual art, Joseph Kosuth’s reflections on the world’s great thinkers glow with deeper meaning. “It’s not about how, it’s about why,” he says. “So I think – not to be vainglorious about it – I instituted, for very selfish reasons, a view of art as something quite different from the inherited tradition.”

At Sydney Contemporary, the commercial realities of the art fair dissolve as he apprehends the elemental power of Rover (Julama) Thomas’s works.