Innovation
As I explain in Innovation: in a word (p2), the ‘i’ word gets more use than usual on our pages. This is an edition full of innovators and reflections on innovation, whether in cultural exchange, arts festival programming, sound art, interactive and network art, documentary, experimental and Indigenous filmmaking, or the work of bold young performance makers like My Darling Patricia and Stuck Pigs Squealing Theatre and established artists like Michael Kantor and Lucy Guerin.
University arts threatened
As part of the federal government’s rabid anti-union campaign (any union will do, blue collar, white collar, and now student unions), Brendan Nelson, Minister for Education, has introduced a bill in parliament to prevent universities from collecting fees to support student services. This will jeopardise legal, employment and advocacy services, childcare, sport and especially the performing and visual arts. Many artists, including the 800 who signed a protest placed in the country’s major newspapers, acknowledge just how important university arts life, outside formal courses, has been for their broader education and, often, their arts careers and for the community in general. Protests are escalating.
Australia & Germany
This edition features the Australian-German connection in interviews with Dr Roland Goll, Director the Goethe-Institut Sydney, and Gitte Weise, the Sydney-based gallery director who now has a gallery in Berlin where she promotes Australian artists. Goll frankly addresses the not inconsiderable challenges of the cross-cultural relationship and how to improve it with benefits to the arts. Weise’s work parallels the Australia Council’s long term commitment to promoting Australian work in Germany. As well, Adam Jasper reports on a frisky new venture in Berlin with German artists selling idiosnyncratic, bargain multiples in-store and online.
Indigenous artists
Indigenous arts figure strongly in this edition. Theatre director Wesley Enoch reflects on his own work as writer and director in the broader context of Aboriginal art and performance. Lisa Stefanoff describes 25 years of successful Indigenous media production and broadcasting at CAAMA (Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association), based in Alice Springs. CAAMA’s birthday will be celebrated with screenings of their films at the Sydney Film Festival. Rachel O’Reilly visits Leah King-Smith’s latest exhibition in Brisbane and Sarah Jane Norman reviews Screenwest-ABC-FTI’s Deadly Yarns series of short films by emerging Indigenous filmmakers.
Farewell Dan Edwards
RealTime Assistant Editor and OnScreen Editor is leaving RealTime to work as Managing Editor of the Publications Unit of the Australian Film Commission. He’s been a hard-working and integral member of our tiny editorial team. He responded to the brief to build OnScreen’s coverage of documentary film with enthusiasm and increasing authority, introduced new writers to our pages and significantly increased the supplement’s explorations of Indigenous and Asian film. Although seriously sorry to see him going, we wish him well in his new venture, and we hope that he keeps writing. KG
RealTime issue #67 June-July 2005 pg. 3
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