Culture

Andrew Upton’s thoughtful and affecting adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull traverses ideas of art, ambition, passion and change.

The Louise Bourgeois exhibition reveals an artist of feral majesty and range.

After his biggest year yet, artist Ash Keating feels he has returned to his first excitement with painting.

My dad worked in central São Paulo for a long time before landing a payment plan for the boxy white Gol that took us to and from Guarujá. My dad used to take the bus into the city, down as far as Avenida Cupecê to catch the first one of the day, ‘do you remember the dictatorship, dad?’, ‘yes, in those days they’d ask for your work permit before they beat you up’. I used to ask about fighting the generals and all he’d say was how his ears used to get so cold. I used to ask about the rallies and the secrets but he’d talk about how his hands would be freezing and hurting and how his fingertips used to go numb, ‘at the rallies?‘, ‘no, on the way to work’. The cold, his ears so terribly cold because he couldn’t wear a hat, ‘you couldn’t wear one because you were a communist?’, ‘no, it wasn’t that’.

When multidisciplinary artist Josipa Draisma was researching the history of migrant women working in Australian factories, she came across Martha Ansara’s 1977 film Me and Daphne – and found her grandmother.

Firebomb explores the lasting impact of a violent campaign in the 1980s against Asian Australians, which has been largely forgotten outside the communities affected.

Hoda Afshar’s first retrospective, at the Art Gallery of NSW, reveals a powerful oeuvre driven by the desire to restore complexity to those who are denied their humanity.

Andrew Savage’s second solo album, Several Songs about Fire is an elegant collection that tackles existential questions with a sweeter tone than his earlier work.

Director Ivo van Hove is a titan of contemporary theatre, winning both critical and popular acclaim with works that bring classic texts into vivid contemporary focus.

It all started with a panther head. Woodrow and Wyatt both worked at small tattoo parlours old enough that they used to cater exclusively to youthful World War II soldiers, who got tattoos to help them cheat death or to tell the story about how they had just cheated death.