Art in the Global Present presents a fascinating collection of essays that together reveal how art is currently navigating a globalised world. It addresses social issues such as the impact of migration, the 'war on terror' and the global financial crisis, and questions the transformations produced by new forms of flexible labour and the digital revolution. Through examining the resistance to the politics of globalisation in contemporary art, presenting the construction of an alternative geography of the imagination and reflecting on art's capacity to express the widest possible sense of being, this book explores the worlds that artists make when they make art.
A multifaceted perspective on the complexity of these issues is reached through the words of a diverse range of art practitioners and commentators, including acclaimed artists Lucy Orta, Callum Morton, Danae Stratou and the collective Postcommodity, international curators Hou Hanru, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Ranjit Hoskote and Linda Marie Walker and art critics, academics, writers and theorists Jean Burgess, Paul Carter, Barbara Creed, Geert Lovink, Scott McQuire, Nikos Papastergiadis, Gerald Raunig and Jan Verwoert.
Author Biography:
Nikos Papastergiadis (Australia) is a Professor in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne and founder-with Scott McQuire- of the Spatial Aesthetics research cluster. He is director of the Research Unit for Public Culture. He is project leader of the Australian Research Council Linkage Project, 'Large Screens and the Transnational Public Sphere', and chief investigator on the ARC Discovery Projects, the 'Spatial Impact of Digital Technology on Contemporary Art and New Art Institutions' and 'Public Screens and the Transformation of Public Space'. His major publications include, Spatial Aesthetics: Art, Place and the Everyday (2006), Empires, Ruins and Networks: The Transnational Agenda in Art (2005), Metaphor and Tension (2004), Complex Entanglements (2003), The Turbulence of Migration (2000), Dialogues in the Diasporas (1998) and Modernity as Exile (1992). Victoria Lynn (Australia) is Director, TarraWarra Museum of Art, a position she took up in April 2012. As an independent curator and writer based in Melbourne, she was the Visual Arts Curator for the Adelaide Festival in 2010 and 2012 where she curated the inaugural Adelaide International: Apart, We are Together (2010) and Adelaide International: Restless (2012). With Nikos Papastergiadis in 2010 and 2012 she also co-convened Artists' Week, a four day international symposium on contemporary art. Exhibitions curated include: 'Animate Inanimate', TarraWarra Museum of Art, 2013, 'Sonic Spheres', TarraWarra Biennial 2012, 'The Trickster', Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Korea 2010; 'Double Take, the Anne Landa Award for Video and New Media', 2009, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; 'turbulence', 3rd Auckland Triennial, 2007, New Zealand; 'Julie Rrap: Body Double', Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2007 and 'Regarding Fear and Hope', 2007, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne.
