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My name is Victoria Lynn, I'm the curator of
"Restless: The Adelaide International 2012"
which is an Adelaide Festival Exhibition.
The exhibition includes the work of 18 artists
and it's located across four public galleries in Adelaide.
The Anne and Gordon Samstag Museum of Art
at the University of South Australia
The Australian Experimental Art Foundation
The Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia
and Flinders University City Gallery
which is located in the State Library.
The term "Restless" can invoke many different ideas
it can be a psychological state, an internal state
it can also be a political or a social condition
and "Restless" can also be an aesthetic form.
I'm Lisa Reihana, I come from Auckland in New Zealand
The title of the work is "Pelt"
and it's a series of photographs, I tend to work in series
and there's four images in this particular series
and in each image
there's a central figure, a kind of female entity, a being
and she completely inhabits
her space, this kind of landscape.
Within our own Maori mythology, there's a word that
a lot of other people have heard too, which is the Underworld
but in terms of a Maori philosphical thinking about that
it's an other world, it's something that sits
alongside where you are, it's not necessarily under your feet
or like a heaven and hell thing, but it's something
that sits at the same time, but in another space in time.
Many of the artists are dealing with uncomfortable issues.
They could be the sort of unhinged
destructive forces that are at play today
in Athens in the work of Socratis Socratous for instance.
or the great Nancy Spero
her piece, which is a centre piece at the Samstag Museum
"May Pole", has all these heads suspended in space
and they're the heads of the victims of war.
Located next to the May Pole is
a new wall mural installation by Harsha.
The title is "Extraction" and this
somehow, broadly, I mean it's not just a kind of a
illustrative piece to what I say, but it's more
somehow it visits the idea of extraction
in terms of extracting values, extracting meaning
extracting, you know, sense of world
extracting in sense of materials, because
the inquisitive mind of human is always busy extracting something or other.
So, I love that whole idea of human
extremely busy, looking for answers
looking for meanings, looking for... something.
It's like an internal process, so how to make it
like a grand narration, is what you see here.
with these people somehow falling
into the gallery space from somewhere
and there all into this central motif.
I mean, if you see this mural from far, they look very floral.
They have this petal kind of a form.
Francis Alys lives in Mexico, he's an artist from Belgium
and his video "***" talks about
the ways in which we impinge ourselves
into other people's territories, in this case
he's interacting with a group of dogs in a space
and they really don't want him there as their visitor
and the camera becomes a kind of savage intruder if you like.
And the work of Danae Stratou
is looking at the borders between divided lands
and the impact of the globalising wall on people.
The work is called "The Globalising Wall"
it's a video installation.
I travelled in seven divisions around the world
my idea was to stand on each division
and photograph the one on the other side.
So you have the wall, or this is shown through
the army, the police patrols the walls
but also you have images of children and people
living around these borders.
For me it was quite shocking because, you know, at the beginning
you go to one of these places and if you come from a free place
where you're not used to seeing guns and the army
you face dangerous situations, you face
these guns and army trucks and all that
but what is shocking is that you get used to it
and I think this is what has happened.
The work of Anri Sala is set in a
Buckminster Fuller dome in Berlin
and it's about the breakdown of a relationship
between a man and a woman.
She is constantly asking him to answer her
she says "answer me, answer me"
and he just plays a set of drums again and again
and it shows restlessness from the point of view
of the breakdown of personal relationships
and it also shows restlessness from the point of view
of the breakdown of utopian dreams of
utopian architectural experiments.
Within this show, there's political references
and there's figurative references in this kind of downstairs area
My work sits alongside Nancy Spero's "May Pole"
and there's Harsha's beautiful work with figures
floating on the wall, so there's this sort of sense of
there's a sense of floating and there's a sense of humanity.
I love looking at the video work.
Saskia Olde Walbers, there's a really interesting
kind of connection between her work and
the kind of bird-like figures
that are in the "Pelt" work, so
I think the human brain will immediately draw things together
and make connections and you know
I urge people to come and see the work for themselves
because it's never the same, seeing a print
but when you see the actual objects
then you have a relationship as a viewer
which then can set your mind drifting and dreaming.