Before taking photographs, artist and photographer Ellen Dahl does extended research on her chosen location, then embarks on a field trip, including delving into local history and the site’s topography and climate.

“I also consider what it might look like depending on season and long-term weather forecast,” says Dahl, who moved to Australia as an adult but is originally from arctic Norway and of Sámi descent.

Dahl recently won the Murray Art Museum Albury’s $30,000 National Photography Prize for 2024, for “Four Days before Winter”, part of an ongoing project exploring the peripheral Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard – the fastest warming place on earth.

The large, suspended work presents close up details of collapsing terrain due to the melting permafrost and considers photography’s intrinsic involvement in how we see and feel about the world around us.

“I use Google a lot, and I am obsessed with weather apps – I have three different apps on my phone,” says Dahl. “Once I’m in the field, I tend to let go of my pre-conceived ideas – and try to just be open to what the site reveals to me. I consider my methodology in the field a three-way collaborative process between the site, the camera optics and the artist.”

In Svalbard she spent five days shooting on a Nikon mirrorless camera in order to experience the Arctic at its most raw and barren. “As someone who was born in the Arctic north of mainland Norway, I knew that the snow was just about to arrive, blanketing the archipelago in snow for the next eight months. Winter literally arrived the day we departed, delaying our flights as they frantically cleared the tarmac for snow.”

Dahl’s works and the works of the other finalists in the prize, including Skye Wagner, Kai Wasikowski and Sammy Hawker, are on view until 1 September 2024 at MAMA. See mamalbury.com.au

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Jean-Michel Basquiat rose to fame in the 1980s and was instrumental in elevating street art to high culture — challenging preconceived notions of what art could be. His bold strokes, fractured anatomies and fragmented texts created a visual language uniquely his own. As a young graffiti artist, his tag was “SAMO”— short for “same old shit” — speaking to the complexities of identity, race and society in New York City. A collaboration with Andy Warhol in the mid-1980s was a defining moment in his career. Sadly, Basquiat passed away in 1988 at the age of 27, from a heroin overdose.

Despite the brevity of his career, Basquiat’s legacy endures in exhibitions, collections, books, museums, campaigns and, most recently, through a collaborative effort between his estate and the Australian contemporary artist James Peter Henry.

“Basquiat was someone who painted with 100 per cent authenticity. I was very much inspired by that,” says Henry, who notes that they each studied ancient art (Basquiat, African art; Henry, Aboriginal art). As a mural artist, Henry, 40, has long known the value of bringing art to the streets. He’s also passionate about nurturing artistic talent in others. When he visited Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles and saw the large number of homeless people living there, he was struck by an idea. “I decided then and there that I had to work with the Los Angeles Mission,” he says of the charity dedicated to ending homelessness, “and use my art to help those who were going through very hard times.” With the help of the LA Mission, Henry wrote an arts program for the homeless. “We knew that we needed funding and awareness to make this happen,” he says. “Through the generosity of the Basquiat estate, we were able to elevate our program to make people more aware of what we were doing.”

The collaboration has transcended social barriers and fostered a sense of community and inclusion in the area.

Basquiat’s sister Lisane Basquiat is the co-executor of the Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat and is committed to continuing the dialogue her brother began. “When we learned about the LA Mission’s commitment to make art accessible to all, we saw it as a natural and aligned opportunity for us to contribute to the goals of their art program,” she says.

Basquiat’s interest in social justice and his use of art as a form of activism continues to inspire artists and activists alike. His legacy is a reminder of the power of art to spark change.

James Peter Henry’s Los Angeles Mission project continues in May with
a major LA institution.

This is an extract from our newest issue.

To read the full story, pick up a copy of our “Amour” issue in newsagents and Coles nationally or buy now to have it delivered straight to your letterbox. You will find it on Page 52 of Issue #18, titled “Painting Outside the Lines”.

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From the pearl-shell designs of Darrell Sibosado, a Bard man from the Kimberley, to a colour-saturated mural by the Yuwi, Torres Strait and South Sea Islander man Dylan Mooney and the intricate body tattooing of the Baiga people in India by Mangala Bai Maravi — these are just a few of the 14 First Nations artists from Australia and around the world brought to the 2024 Biennale of Sydney by the event’s “Visionary Partner”, Fondation Cartier. The legendary jeweller is supporting the arts festival through its Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain — the company’s art museum at its headquarters in Paris.

Another key element of the partnership is the appointment of a First Nations curatorial fellow. The first recipient: Tony Albert, a Kuku Yalanji artist from Queensland who is well known for his confrontational expropriations of tropes about Aboriginal people and culture. He contributed an important work to the 2020 Sydney Biennale titled “Healing Land, Remembering Country”, a massive installation in a specially built greenhouse on the Cockatoo Island site. Albert is, like everyone involved with the sprawling event, working almost around the clock to ready the work of nearly 100 artists across six major sites in Sydney.

“It’s one of the wonderful things about biennales and triennales and through opportunities like the commissions from Fondation Cartier,” he says. “We get to dream big and execute projects that possibly wouldn’t happen outside of that scope.” 

Albert’s role, among other things, is to help the 14 Fondation Cartier artists realise their vision. Most of them are new to the Biennale. A key part of his mission: “I can really be a conduit between the Biennale and the artists,” he says. “There’s an opportunity for engagement, particularly about cultural nuances, within the office and dealing with artists, that I think becomes really useful.

“You can do in one phone call what would take someone else a week,” he adds.

Albert joins the Biennale’s curatorial team, led by Berlin-based co-curators Cosmin Costinaș, who worked on the Venice Biennale in 2022 after 11 years at Para Site, the prominent arts centre in Hong Kong, and Inti Guerrero, who has curated exhibitions and institutions in Belgium, Ireland and the UK. The Biennale’s CEO is Barbara Moore, who is now overseeing her third iteration of the event.

The centrepiece of this year’s Biennale is one of the more spectacular refurbishments Sydney has witnessed in a long time. The enormous White Bay Power Station is familiar to anyone who travels west across the Anzac Bridge. The facility, built in the early 1900s, has lain fallow for decades. It has now been rehabbed and made fit for the public and will serve as the towering focal point of the 2024 Biennale, before becoming a permanent cultural hub as part of the redevelopment of the surrounding Bays West precinct.

The 24th Biennale of Sydney, “Ten Thousand Suns”, continues until June 10 at the White Bay Power Station, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney, UNSW Galleries and Artspace in Woolloomooloo.

This is an extract from our newest issue.

To read the full story, pick up a copy of our “Amour” issue in newsagents and Coles nationally or buy now to have T Australia delivered straight to your letterbox. You will find it on Page 30 of Issue #18, titled “Under the Suns”.

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If you peered through one of the microscopes at the artist Candice Lin’s installation “Lithium Sex Demons at the Factory,” on view at Canal Projects in downtown New York last fall, you would have seen a writhing horned creature, animated in psychedelic colours on a small video screen. One such screen was embedded in each of the six metal workbenches that lined the edges of the space; at the centre of the room was a wooden platform, raised several feet off the ground — a surveillance tower from which visitors could assume the perspective of an employer presiding over the stations below. Lin, 45, was partially inspired by the Malaysian-born anthropologist Aihwa Ong’s research into accounts of demonic possession and paranormal activity among a group of women in rural Malaysia in the 1970s. The women had suffered lithium poisoning while working at battery factories and began to break into fits of destructive rage during their shifts. In Lin’s retelling, the workers are resurrected as demons, seething with chaotic desire.

Stories of exploited, vengeful workers are an established subgenre in art and pop culture. Think of movies like “Office Space” (1999), in which a trio of office drones, consistently humiliated and mistreated by their supervisors, concoct a scheme to rob their company, or “9 to 5” (1980), starring Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin as secretaries who overthrow their misogynist boss. In the past few years, since the pandemic triggered one of the worst job crises in decades and as burnout rates reach record highs among Americans, many releases have depicted similarly debilitating workplace angst. The restaurant kitchen in FX’s series “The Bear,” which premiered in 2022, is a ticking time bomb of screaming, stove fires and oil burns. And in the French Canadian director Éric Gravel’s 2021 film, “Full Time,” a single mother’s life as the lead chambermaid of a luxury hotel in Paris unfolds with the intensity of a continuous heart attack. These stories are extreme yet familiar. (“The Bear,” for all its frenetic pacing, dips into full-blown surrealism only during interludes showing lead chef Carm’s dreams.) But in the year and a half since social-distancing orders were lifted, labour conditions for many workers have remained just as precarious, and a spate of recent projects seem to be asking, What happens after burnout? These stories portray workers who are not simply anxious and exhausted but violently combusting.

In the upcoming Romanian movie “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World,” a film-production assistant named Angela zooms around Bucharest interviewing ex-factory workers who were injured on the job. Ironically, her own livelihood seems to be putting her in danger: She works 16-hour days and spends a good chunk of her shift driving up and down a narrow, single-lane road that locals call “Death Highway.” (An extended montage shows the graves of the more than 600 people who have perished in crashes along this stretch). The director Radu Jude wrote Angela’s character with a real-life P.A. in mind: a 22-year-old who died after falling asleep at the wheel. Pushed to breaking point, Angela only finds reliable relief via the foul-mouthed tirades she films as her online alter ego, Bobita. If overwork depletes us, forcing us to abandon our personal lives, then, Jude seems to suggest, our last defence might be to build brand-new selves, ones that are too outrageous and furious to be denied.

But when self-degradation feels like a standard part of the job description, what becomes of the human bits we leave behind? Last summer, a retrospective at New York’s Whitney Museum dedicated to the artist Josh Kline, “Project for a New American Century,” seemed to align fortuitously with the concerns of the screenwriters and actors who were striking at the time. That movement pushed back, in part, against the unchecked use of A.I., which, the strikers argued, threatens to dehumanise the creative work force. Kline’s work has long explored the dystopian possibilities of technology: Series such as “Unemployment” (2016) and “Blue Collar” (2014-20) — both of which were featured in the Whitney show — use 3-D-printed sculptures to reckon with the punishing nature of labor and the displacement of workers by automation. In “Blue Collar,” shopping carts and a janitorial buggy are filled with plastic body parts and flesh-colored appliances, as well as boxes of branded merchandise and cleaning supplies, reminding viewers of the violence of equating people with commodities. In “Unemployment,” life-size sculptures of office workers curled up in the fetal position are wrapped in transparent plastic trash bags, gesturing at the disposability of human labor. Both series show in a “stark and unsettling way just how precarious certain jobs are,” says Christopher Y. Lew, the retrospective’s curator. “And the kinds of extremes people are willing to go to just to complete their work.” Kline’s collection of limbs are an eerie reminder of what’s at stake in the late-capitalist rat race: Collectively, we’re not so much addicted to work, he seems to say, as we are acutely aware that our jobs are required for our survival.

Both Kline’s techno-purgatory and Jude’s macabre road movie are damning portraits of modern work life. And neither suggests a remedy. In Lin’s depiction, though, the workers do triumph, in a gruesome sort of way. In their fantastical, demonic resurrection, they have performed the ultimate rebellion, refusing to be labeled mere workers and refusing to meekly submit to their afflictions. In real life, the Malaysian factory workers weren’t fully responsive to the Western treatments — like Valium — that their employers put forward, reacting more positively to the services of a shaman, who performed an exorcism to rid them of their maladies. The women needed a cure that “matched [their cultural] paradigms,” Lin says. In other words, they did what so many of today’s low-wage, gig and essential workers strive to do: They forced their employers to meet them on their own terms.

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