Issue 62

EDITOR’S NOTE

When an artist wins the Archibald, Australia’s most prestigious portrait prize, they achieve fame well beyond the Australian art world. Blak Douglas (a.k.a. Adam Hill) won last year, with a  towering three-metre-high painting of his friend, Wiradjuri artist Karla Dickens, titled Moby Dickens, 2022. The picture was part climate-change devastation and part art-world dirty business. Blak Douglas is an artist admired among artists, and this deeply politicised painting is from a long history of activist works – paintings, prints, performances, public art – demonstrates his dogged perseverance as he expresses his experiences. As writer and curator Djon Mundine comments in his cover essay on Douglas, “Adam’s self-belief is fresh, consistent, and remains unbounded.”

Nasim Nasr had to leave Iran to be able to choose her experiences. The idea of choice, especially for women in Iran, changed after the 1979 Revolution. Since that Revolution, the articulation of freedom has driven Nasr’s work in an unnatural rhythm. Nasr told writer and curator Talia Smith, “It is a push-pull living experience between past and present, and the more I try to avoid this, it always haunts me, it comes back and into my artwork.”

The escalating civil war meant Khaled Sabsabi and his brother were forced to leave Lebanon in 1976. In 2006, Sabsabi returned to record the immediate aftermath of the Thirty-Three-Day War. He recorded the devastation and produced his brilliant work guerrilla, 2007–18. A three-hundred-page book comprehensively reviewing the last twenty years of Khaled Sabsabi’s life and works will be launched at Campbelltown Arts Centre on 27 May 2023. at 11:00 a.m. You’re invited to this event. 

Olafur Eliasson’s unforgettable exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art have encouraged us to see that we all can make decisions to reverse past irresponsibilities. To experience Eliasson’s new site-specific installation, Under the weather, 2022, writer Hili Perlson travelled to the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence. In Perlson’s essay on Eliasson, she focussed on the artist’s evolving ideas about experiences, “I think an experience is not something that just happens to us, it’s something we choose to do . . . Whether or not we accept it [experiences], we are always influenced by our own history or legacy, and the local circumstances in which we live.” These and other thoughts around experiences and choices resonate throughout this issue of Artist Profile.

The Artist Profile team also congratulates artist Archie Moore and curator Ellie Buttrose on their appointment by the Australia Council for the Arts to exhibit at the Australia Pavilion for the 60th Venice Biennale. We look forward to the choices made by artist and curator. 

As I write this, I worry about the future of print. The distance of digital is changing the way young and old relate to words and culture. The price of production rises, but as one of the owners and as editor of Artist Profile I love the feel of the paper, the shine and depth of the printed image, it’s like the difference between digital and a vinyl record. A magazine or book is somehow more contemplative than an online look. The pressures on us are not just cost, they are cultural. I’d be pleased to hear your ideas about this.

I thank you for your support of Artist Profile.

Kon Gouriotis
Editor

CONTENTS

ISSUE

Paved Paradise: The Paradox of Art Vandalism by Anna Johnson

COVER FEATURE

Blak Douglas by Djon Mundine

PROFILES

Laurence Edwards by Stephanie Berlangieri
Lucy Guerin by Erin McFadyen
Blak Douglas by Djon Mundine
Mel Douglas by Elli Walsh
Olafur Eliasson by Hili Perlson
Nasim Nasr by Talia Smith
Claudia Kogachi by Pippa Mott
Caroline Rothwell by Andy Butler
Aaron Fell-Fracasso by Bridget Macleod
Peter Tyndall by Peter Hill

INSIGHT