UNITED KINGDOM: A collaboration between identical twins drawing on the traditions of European folklore, Gothic Romance and Hollywood cinema, blending British whimsy with a darker psychological ambiguity that lends depth and complexity.
Fantasy
AUSTRALIA: Pat Brassington exploits the legacies of Surrealism while subtly subverting those (primarily masculine) traditions with a clearly feminine and feminist inflection.
USA: Repurposing their household possessions to create a mandala or build a spaceship, Stephan Hillerbrand and Mary Magsamen use photography, video, performance and installation to explore the paradoxes of the American Dream.
UNITED KINGDOM: Voted one of the top three physique photographers in Europe in the fifties and sixties, Frank Morton published under the professional name of Hoffman of Edinburgh. This article takes a double historical perspective combining his interview made in 1986 and my own present-day reflection on his life and work, three and a half decades after his death.
ITALY: Elena Givone uses photography and storytelling to help young refugees imagine a better future – images to inspire hope in the child and compassion in the viewer.
AUSTRALIA: Photography, digital montage and embroidery combine in images that draw the viewer into the often-disquieting aesthetic of dreams.
CHINA: A fusion of theatre and photography that, with an eccentric magic, weaves together the light and dark of the human condition.
CANADA: Combining humour with cultural critique; history with psychology, Diana Thorneycroft constructs visual stories of the anxiety and contradiction embedded in the dark subsoil of Canadian national psyche.
INDIA: Described as “the most entertaining artist-iconoclast of contemporary Indian art”, Pushpamala N’s pioneering and influential feminist–conceptual photographic performance works seek to subvert the dominant cultural and intellectual discourse in India.
AUSTRALIA: An anthropomorphic metamorphosis in which bees not only evolve to humanoid form but behave with all the perverse complexity of humankind.
MEXICO: Dulce Pinzón creates latter-day visual fables that address real social issues: racial prejudice, low-paid workers, environmental damage.
USA: Meticulously crafted miniature worlds that speculate on a future without human beings.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Colourful, painstakingly created installations that envision the artist’s innermost thoughts and feelings through metaphor and fable.
AUSTRALIA: Occult rituals that combine mysticism and modern technology, embodying the personal and the cosmic, the esoteric and the erotic.
NETHERLANDS: Knighted by the Dutch Government, Erwin Olaf has earned a world-wide reputation for his immaculately choreographed tableaux that subtly suggest the ultimate uncertainty of being.
SPAIN: Images that borrow the narrative or visual architecture of other stories, other pictures, animating each with the personal in ways that evoke new meaning.
BELGIUM/FRANCE: Visual poetry, nature photography and digital design come together in Catherine Nelson’s transcendent landscapes to evoke the complexity of ecological equilibrium.
AUSTRALIA: Japanese myth and sensual metaphor reflecting upon the ebb and flow of loves now unrequited.
SWEDEN: A simple pinhole camera used to create images that evoke the primordial and the post-apocalyptic; a tension between humankind and the rest of nature.
PERU: Lyrical images that find a melancholy beauty in dilapidation and enfold maternal wisdom in pictorial fables.
UNITED KINGDOM: Whimsical, poignant, fantastical, dark… these family photos restage the complex nature of parenting and the domestic dynamic, from ageing and the shift in mutual dependence, to ultimate departure.
UKRAINE: Visualising the journey towards self-realisation that dances between empathic attunement and the artist’s own interior sensibility.
RUSSIA / SPAIN: Alisa Sibirskaya creates photographic tableaux echoing themes from the Dutch Baroque and Siberian folktales that capture the luminous glow of a bygone age.
SAUDI ARABIA: Fascinated by harmony and dissonance, and the cycles of return, Saleh AlDaghari’s picture-making sits on the cusp between surrealism and allegory.
AUSTRALIA: Luminous yet elusive images that navigate the gulf between the world of the senses and the interior realm of the self.
AUSTRALIA / ICELAND: Haunting images of natural, urban, and industrial landscapes that rekindle a mythical past or spark ethical speculation about the future.
ARGENTINA: La sensibilidad de la pintura y las técnicas de la fotografía se conjugan para crear un realismo mágico irónico pero extrañamente familiar.
ARGENTINA: The sensibilities of painting and the techniques of photography blend to create an ironic but strangely familiar magic realism.
AUSTRALIA: Fables that are at once personal and universal, familial and public, recounting childhood perspicacity and adult frailty far the here and now.
LEBANON / AUSTRALIA: Dreamlike psychodramas that envision the émigré’s feelings of separation, longing and isolation.
FINLAND: Landscapes, ice, and flea-market clothing and fabrics come together in an unusual aesthetic and conceptual marriage – part myth, part speculation.
INTERNATIONAL: Nine photographic artists from across five continents reflect on what motivates them to create photographs.
AUSTRALIA: Figures from history and legend elegantly reconceived with the technology and sensibility of the present.
AUSTRALIA: Fantastical photographs suggesting a domestic magic brought into being by longing, obsession or childlike exuberance.
NEW ZEALAND / AUSTRALIA: A visual storyteller exploring the interior world of the mind through the shared imagination of the community.
MEXICO: Obscure rituals that blend the contemporary with the timeless, the personal with the collective, to suggest imaginary states and real-world paradoxes.
AUSTRALIA: Raucous, irreverently grandiose images that bring to mind the diverse traditions of William Hogarth’s 18th-century satirical etchings, 19th-century history painting and 20th-century cinema.
ARGENTINA: The museum revealed as a place of haunting apparitions. Or is it we who are more truly ghosts in the museum…?