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1 month ago | 
overland.org.au | Norman Saadi Nikro |Ben Brooker |Karen Wyld
In her The Afterlife of Palestinian Images: Visual Remains and the Archive of Disappearance, the Palestinian filmmaker, writer, and artist Azza El Hassan provides compelling terms of reference by which to engage the fate of Palestinian artefacts as “remains,” or “remnants of plunder.”Concentrating mainly on film and photography, El Hassan focuses primarily on the “afterlife” of artefacts subject to Israeli violence and theft.
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1 month ago | 
overland.org.au | Ben Brooker |Karen Wyld |Scott Robinson
The term “green growth” was coined twenty years ago by Rae Kwon Chung, a director at the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP). The concept captured the emerging idea that, rather than being antithetical to economic growth and technological progress, these paradigms could be given a sustainable makeover through government investment in renewable energy, green agriculture, sustainable forestry, and the like.
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Dec 3, 2024 | 
overland.org.au | Ben Brooker |Samantha Floreani |Liliana Mansergh
Textile and fibre art’s long association with the decorative and feminine — “women’s work” — has ensured the medium’s marginality in the history of the fine arts. In her classic study The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the making of the feminine (1984), Rozsika Parker traced embroidery’s status from a professionalised skill practiced by men and women during the Middle Ages to a leisure activity mostly enjoyed by affluent women in modern times.
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Oct 30, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Ben Brooker |Arts Highlights
Dogs have long been a feature of Markus Zusak’s fiction. His pre-fame trilogy of Young Adult novels, centring on brothers Cameron and Ruben Wolfe and their family, deployed the animal as a metaphor for tenaciousness. In the trilogy’s final book, When Dogs Cry (2001), Cameron and Ruben all but adopt Miffy, a Pomeranian whose scrappiness matches that of the brothers and whose death provides the book’s emotional fulcrum.
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Sep 29, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Ben Brooker |Arts Highlights
Bad Boy is the second work in a series of what playwright Patricia Cornelius and director Susie Dee have called ‘visceral dramatic monologues’. The first, RUNT (2021), centred on the unnamed homunculus of the play’s title, portrayed with memorable physical intensity and dexterity by Nicci Wilks.
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Aug 18, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Ben Brooker |Arts Highlights
Theatre Lyrical and gritty theatre from Benjamin Nichol fortyfivedownstairs ABR Arts • 19 August 2024 Theatre Lyrical and gritty theatre from Benjamin Nichol fortyfivedownstairs ABR Arts • 19 August 2024 Milk and Blood are the third and fourth instalments in Benjamin Nichol’s anthology series of works for solo performers. The preceding plays, kerosene and SIRENS, similarly played as a double bill at fortyfivedownstairs a year ago and were roundly lauded (this critic, sadly, did not see them)....
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Jul 23, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Ben Brooker |Arts Highlights
Given the global resurgence of interest in compounds such as psilocybin, LSD, and ayahuasca, it is a wonder more contemporary novelists have not turned to psychedelic experience for inspiration. It is, after all, hard to think of the golden age of psychedelics – roughly the mid-1960s to mid-1970s – without recalling the trippy, Zeitgeist-capturing literature it produced, including Hunter S.
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Jul 11, 2024 | 
australianbookreview.com.au | Ben Brooker |Arts Highlights
Feminist reimaginings of canonical male-authored texts are nothing new. In fact, following innumerable retellings of the Greek myths, the trend may have peaked last year with the publication of novels spotlighting the marginalised female characters of, among others, Nineteen Eighty-Four (both Katherine Bradley’s The Sisterhood and Sandra Newman’s Julia), Arthurian legend (Sophie Keetch’s Morgan Is My Name), and Romeo and Juliet (Natasha Solomons’s Fair Rosaline).
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Apr 19, 2024 | 
thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Ben Brooker
“How inappropriate to call this planet ‘Earth’,” observed English science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, “when clearly it is ‘Ocean’.” Seventy per cent of the planet’s surface is water. The largest sea, the Pacific, is bigger than all the continents combined. And while we humans may, for the most part, occupy the 30 per cent of the world’s surface that is land, our bodies comprise mostly water. Like the sea, our blood is coursed by salt.
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Mar 29, 2024 | 
thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Ben Brooker
It must occasionally rankle Nadine Garner that, at 53, the veteran actor still doesn’t look a world away from the child part that launched her career, the mettlesome Tamara in the beloved 1980s television drama The Henderson Kids. On the day we meet in a cavernous Melbourne Theatre Company rehearsal room, she is bright-eyed and bustling, her black sleeveless top revealing unmistakably gym-sculpted biceps.
