Newell Harry

Newell Harry with project participant at tapa meeting, October 2010, photograph: Pedro de Almeida

NEWELL HARRY is a Sydney based artist who works in a variety of mediums including drawing, sculpture, photo-media, neon and installation and has exhibited widely for over a decade. His works explore themes and issues relating to identity, language, colonialism, culture, and globalisation. Harry has worked with communities in Port Vila, Cape Town and Sydney, in a series of projects, producing celebrated works made of tapa and pandanus gift mats. Harry has exhibited since the mid-1990s with solo and group exhibitions at Campbelltown Arts Centre; Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery; MOP Projects; University of NSW; Hazlehurst Regional Gallery & Arts Centre; and the National Trust S. H. Ervin Gallery. Awards and residencies include Cité des Arts Internationale, Moya Drying Studio, Paris, Art Gallery of NSW Trust (2007); Australia Council Visual Arts Board New Work Grant (2006); Greatmore residency, Cape Town, South Africa (2006); and NSW Ministry for the Arts Studio Residency, Artspace, The Gunnery, Sydney (2002). Harry’s work is represented in major private and public collections including Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. He is represented by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.

Richard Bell

Richard Bell, Broken English (production still), 2009, DVD, 13:00 mins

Richard Bell was born in 1953 in Charleville, Queensland, and is a member of the Kamilaroi, Kooma, Jiman and Gurang Gurang communities. Based in Brisbane, Richard has held numerous solo exhibitions since 1990. He is represented in major collections in Australia and New Zealand and is internationally recognised through numerous exhibitions, including the significant European touring exhibition Aratjara: art of the First Australians, 1993; Culture warriors, the National Indigenous Art Triennial, National Gallery of Australia, 2007; the 9th and 16th Sydney Biennales, 1992 and 2008; Australian Perspecta 1993, Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Unfamiliar Territory, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art in 1991 and Half-Light: Portraits from Black Australia at the Art Gallery of NSW. His work was the subject of the survey exhibition Positivity, presented by the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, in 2006. He won the National Telstra Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award in 2003. In 2009, an exhibition of the Bell’s practice to date entitled I am not sorry, was held at Location One, New York, and he was also the recipient of Location One’s International Fellowship for that year. In 2011, a touring exhibition of Bell’s work Uz vs Them, organised by the American Federation of the Arts will be exhibited throughout North America.  A past member of the Campfire group, Richard is a founding member of proppaNOW, the Brisbane-based Aboriginal artists collective that also includes Tony Albert, Vernon Ah Kee and Gordon Hookey.

Michel Tuffery

Povi Vasa, 2011, installation view, site-specific projection, Campbelltown Arts Centre, photography: Susannah Wimberley

MICHEL TUFFERY M.N.Z.M; Born 1966 Wellington, Aotearoa – New Zealand of Samoan, Cook Island and Tahitian descent.

On paper and by reputation Michel Tuffery is one of the seminal role players for visibility of Contemporary Pacific Island art locally and beyond the wider Pacific. His creative output is expansive as he is adept at all arts media, printing, painting and sculpting, and works collaboratively with technicians and other art practitioners to realise his performance and installation projects, requiring moving image, light and sound.  His concerns are measured and politicised around the conservation of the environment and shaped by his Pacific Island ancestry.

Dacchi Dang

Dacchi Dang, Phoenix (still), 2011, three-channel video installation, courtesy the artist

Dacchi Dang was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and currently lives and works in Sydney. His personal experience as a refugee informs how he sees the multiple geographical and social landscapes of Australia and Vietnam, providing an understanding of the physical and cultural terrain of both countries. With this approach he creates or reinvents layered landscapes through his personal experiences and memories, to explore how the home, as a mythical symbol of refuge in the Diaspora, is inexorably linked to identity and belonging, to the ways in which narratives of personal journeys are inscribed into space. Dang has a Graduate Certificate of Applied science in Cultural Heritage Studies, University of Canberra (2003); an MA and BFA, College of Fine Arts, University of NSW (1996, 1991); and is currently undertaking a Doctor of Philosophy at the Queensland College of Arts, Griffith University.

Phaptawan Suwannakudt

Phaptawan Suwannakudt, The Elephant and the Journey, 2006, installation view, Acrylic on canvas, felt tip pen on Perspex, courtesy of the artist. Photography: Susannah Wimberley

Phaptawan Suwannakudt graduated from Silpakorn University, Thailand with a degree in English and German in 1980. She worked extensively as head of a team on full-scale Buddhist temple painting schemes and hotel decoration projects in Thailand in the 1980s and 1990s, and was active in the organisation of women’s art exhibitions in Bangkok. Later as a mature student she completed a Master of Visual Arts at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney in 2005.

Khaled Sabsabi

Khaled Sabsabi, 99, installation view, multimedia installation, Campbelltown Arts Centre, 2010, photography: Ian Hobbs

Khaled Sabsabi is an artist and community arts practitioner who specialises in multimedia, sound, video, installation and hip hop production. His work reflects the complex and often fraught space of border identities, migrant territories and identity production, characterised by an ever-changing and contingent nature. Born in Tripoli, Lebanon, in 1965, Sabsabi migrated with his family to Australia in 1978 and settled in Western Sydney. Since the late 1980s he has worked with communities to create and develop arts programs and projects that explore people and places from broad social, political and ideological spectrum’s.
For more information, please see the artists website.

Lisa Reihana

Lisa Reihana, installation view, Edge of Elsewhere 2010, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Photography: Ian Hobbs

Lisa Reihana was raised in Blockhouse Bay in Auckland, New Zealand. As a result of the widespread Maori migration from New Zealand’s rural areas to city centers in the mid-20th century, Reihana grew up in an urban environment away from her traditional marae (tribal homelands and community). This displacement from the marae and an ongoing physical interaction with the ancestral world piqued Reihana’s interest in Maori customary practice, her work often investigating traditional elements found in marae such as carving and weaving. Her art practice can be characterised broadly as installation that utilises video and sound, however she also works in mediums including film, photography, sculpture, costume, body adornment, and text-based works. Her works communicate complex ideas related to community, Maori identity, portability, hybridity, sexuality and gender.

Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba

Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Breathing is Free: 12,756.3 – Guangzhou (2011) single channel digital video, 19:10, courtesy the artist and Mizuma Art Gallery,Tokyo and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York

Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba was born in Tokyo. He earned an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art after receiving his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has had solo exhibitions at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome; and the Kunsthalle Wien, Austria. His work has been included in numerous biennials, including the Shanghai Biennale, the Venice Biennale, the Istanbul Biennial, an the São Paulo Biennale. He currently lives in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietname. Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s films explore Vietnamese ‘boat people’ after the Vietnam War.

Arahmaiani

Arahmaiani, Home, 2011, video and installation with flags, installation view, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, photography: Susannah Wimberely

Arahmaiani was born in Bandung, West Java, Indonesia, and is one of Indonesia’s most prominent contemporary artists. Working primarily in performance and installation since the early 1980s, Arahmaiani has gained an international reputation for her provocative work. Her Indonesian heritage, Western art training and humanist concerns which explore themes of violence, repression, conformity and the role of women in contemporary society and cultures, has seen Arahmaiani curated into numerous exhibitions and performances, ranging from those held directly in street protests in Indonesia to contemporary art museums in Asia, Europe and America. Arahmaiani represented Indonesia at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 with the work 11 June 2003, which responded to the violence and consequences of the terrorist attack of 12 October 2002 on Bali, in which 202 people were killed. Recently, Arahmaiani has produced art and social projects in Germany, Malaysia, Singapore and the USA, and was included in Contemporaneity: Contemporary Art of Indonesia at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai (2010). Arahmaiani lives and works in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

Brook Andrew

from left: Even a Failing Mind/Feels The Tug of History & How Did Obama Win Over White, Blue-collar Levittown, installation view, Campbelltown Arts Centre, 2010, Photography: Ian Hobbs

Brook Andrew is a Melbourne based artist who works with neon, installation, photo-media, mixed-media, performance and video. Andrew challenges cultural and historical perception, using text and image to comment on local and global issues regarding race, consumerism and history. Andrew travels locally and internationally, actively visiting museum collections and local communities to research and make new work.