Design and Art Australia Online

Banners at Sydney Trades Hall
Prints at The Cross Art Projects
Chips Mackinolty’s Social Fabric, comprises a splendid installation of banners by the artist in the historic Sydney Trades Hall and prints at The Cross Art Projects.

Apart from a few works in collective shows, this was the first time in over 35 years that Chips had exhibited in Sydney.

In First World Australia we often talk about social cohesion and human rights abuses while ignoring appalling outcomes in Aboriginal health, housing, employment and the injustice of increasing incarceration rates. Prompted by the coercive reconciliation policies of the Howard/Rudd/Gillard/Rudd governments, Social Fabric shows the positive side of the battle over access to media.

A Widening Gap: The Intervention, 10 Years On witnesses a world that is remote from the essential services that the rest of Australia takes for granted. The tenth anniversary of the introduction of “the Intervention” — the Northern Territory National Emergency Response — has come and gone.

The exhibition, La ricchizza di la terra / La ricchezza della terra / The wealth of the land is based on a year in Palermo, and looks at the produce, and the people and language, of the old markets here. It is very much about things so important in Italian cooking: local produce, seasonally available.

Ghost Citizens follow us and infiltrate our daily lives. In a continent full of the ghosts and shadows of colonialism, the historical, social, and physical landscape is pitted. Each story is a ghost story loaded with shadows – a kind of ‘scar’ story. Djon Mundine OA

Hurry-Hurry is a selection of recent work by artists who embrace unfashionable forms of overtly politicised art – poster making, pamphleteering, performance and other activities flippantly considered marginal to dominant modes of contemporary cultural production. All are committed to inserting local issues — mining by multinationals, corruption in democracies, human rights — into a global context.

Curated by Co-Media, National Touring Exhibition
Included work by Portland Community Access Print Workshop, Redback Graphix, TIWI Designs
EAF Annual Report 1988