Art and artists

Our Members be Unlimited is a book of about workers and their unions. It starts out with the formation of the first workers union in a dark field in Europe, and takes us all the way to the first rumblings of new unions in gig-economy workplaces like the Amazon fulfilment centre. It’s an innovative new onramp for a modern politics of collectivism and its possibilities.

What happens, in that moment of encounter, when a book states its intention, pre-empting the act of reading it?

The opportunity to write music for an exhibition of paintings by Turner was irresistible. Turner had been a favourite artist…

‘Buried Not Dead is a study in the forces that can both create the conditions for art and cultural flourishing, as well as the conditions for its inhibition and decline.’

How alienating, how jarring, to be made aware that you’re one step away from a cascading world of ones and zeros instead of live, decaying art objects. Get free of queues and tickets and blood-sugar crashes, but can’t shake the feeling that a high-quality colour book reproduction would offer a superior form of viewing. Wonder if Walter Benjamin could have dreamed of such a flaccid form of artistic replication as a virtual gallery tour.

A key motif in Ali’s work is the dev, or demon, which is used to reflect critically on the experience of marginalisation.

The direction of indirection, or the discipline of indiscipline (to quote Frank Moorhouse) gives her writing a flow that is beguiling as well as relaxing. It suspends questions of interpretation and replaces them instead with interactions: the meaning of a work of art, whether from the Renaissance or from last week, is not to be written down like the answer to a question posed in an examination; it is found in our relationship to it, what we do or don’t do with or around it.

The precocious teenage girl looms large in pop music, a culture that has always been enamoured by stories of youthful ingenuity.

This interview is from Diversity Arts Australia’s Pacesetters Creative Archives project, a chronicle of the histories of creative practice of migrant, refugee and culturally diverse communities in Australia.

The work of homemaking in which the filmmaker is engaged is thus not only about the creation of a continuity between past and present. It is also about the future – how we remember the person that we will become.