The reason why I enjoy writing for the Australian/British magazine ArtsHub so much , is because it gives me the possibility to delve deeper into the media industries I’m working into. So here’s my piece number eight for this great webmagazine. Here I explore how online sharing has created new rules of exchange for artists who must find ways of converting followers who like their work into paying customers.
Here’s the link to the article
Read More
British webmagazine Middle East Monitor has just published my article on Clandestine Integration. This project aims to foster dialogue between the African and the European shores of the Mediterranean by inviting artists to share a period on a sailing boat and creating original work on board.
Here’s the link to the article
Read More
Australian magazine Onya has just published my article on “No One Ever Leaves For Good: Australian Artists Making It Internationally”. In the piece I analyse the attitude and expectations of Australian artists and curators when it comes to exhibit overseas or move abroad. This article is part of my reportage/research on emerging artists in Melbourne.
Here’s the link to the article
Read More
Uk/Aussie webmagazine ArtsHub has just published my article on how the online competition model and design crowdsourcing are impacting the design industry. It’s a tough world for creatives here on the internet people!
Here’s the link to the article
Read More
The thing I love about Australians is inventiveness. Down Under there are so many unusual spaces that have been reconverted into galleries, and they are in the most unexpected places. I talk about them in my new article for the Australian webmagazine ArtsHub called “Unconventional spaces democratising art”:
Here’s the link to the article
Read More
My article about the pros and cons of Australian artists trying to build a career overseas has just been published on the webmagazine Arts Hub with the title: “Should you go international? – Australians no longer need to look overseas to build an arts career but it remains a temptation and a challenge.” For this article I gave voice to some of the artists I interviewed during my reportage in Australia.
Here’s the link to the article
Read More
The other day, waiting for the tram, I was lazily browsing through a lifestyle magazine. An ad captured my attention. It said: ‘Don’t you deserve a job you love?’ In the corner of the page was the name of the graphic design school that would ostensibly make such a job possible. The tram arrived. ‘We all want a job we love’, I was thinking (seated next to the typical Melburnian drunk vomiting on the floor) but it feels like it’s the first time in history we can actually think of deserving that luxury. It’s no mystery why; in the last decade, the number of people working in the arts (or associated creative professions) has increased at a much higher rate than general employment. A creative and fulfilling job is one of the great aspirations of the post-Baby Boomer generations.
In the healthy Australian economy this desire does not seem so outlandish, unlike in Europe where, in these times of economic crisis, you are lucky to have a job of any kind. In Australia more and more people are actually working, or studying to work, in the arts industry. Just looking at the people in the tram, aside from the amiable drunkard, everyone under the age of thirty seemed to exude some kind of creative attitude. The pink-haired girl in front of me held a folder of drawings. Two hippie friends near the door carried guitar cases. And a guy at the back of the tram seemed to not have paid his travel fare – which in my Italian hometown is a form of art as well, especially if you manage to not get caught.
Read More
Some time ago a friend of mine – Bietolone we will call him – told me that he was waiting at the clinic of venereal diseases in London (a banal candida, he quickly added). In the waiting room a tall slim bombshell from Russia struck up a conversation. She said she was sick of London and she wanted to move elsewhere. Like, in that very moment. She explained she was a sculptor, and England was no place to live for an artist anymore. When he heard that Bietolone gulped. He notoriously had a soft spot for artists. He would have already asked her out if only they wouldn’t have met at the clinic of venereal diseases.
She proclaimed that the future for the arts was in Asia, and she had already picked a city to live: Singapore. She threw her blonde hair behind her shoulders and asked Bietolone in a heavily accented English: “Do you want to come with me?”
“Let me think about it” he replied seriously.
She scribbled her number on a piece of paper, gave it to him and disappeared in the stairwell before even getting her diagnosis.
Twenty-fourteen has been a year of cementing for me. I recovered for my crazy mindset according to which I should have pick a new country to live in every year. These last twelve months have been much quieter, with small scattered events versus the glaring adventures in Indonesia or Australia of the past few years. But after you do your research, there is also the part where the research comes into being, and that’s what happened in 2014. This year was meant to see the harvest.
I’ve been writing for magazines since 2008, and for English magazines since 2012, but this year I feel I took it to a new level, increasing the number of articles published and types of magazines I’m freelancing for. This year I’ve published twenty-one articles in total, five in Italian and sixteen in English, which is a great achievement for me, considering that I have split my time also with other projects. I’m happy to have started a steady collaboration with Trouble Magazine, who is publishing the English version of all my interviews from my Indonesian and Australian reportages.
Read More
“Lorcan O’ Neill is a very open minded gallerist and he welcomes people with initiative. If you want I can give you his contacts and you guys can propose a project to him.”
It was my friend Rbb to speak. Stout, tanned, nervous, short hair and a striped shit – pretty much a young Picasso – he was now working at Lorcan O’ Neill, one of the most prestigious galleries in Rome. He was a good artist and a generous person. He talked really fast, with a cadence making his words sound like there were trundling down a long staircase. Maybe if he would have born in another century, land in a different art scene, he wouldn’t just have helped set up Giorgio Griffa’s show at Lorcan – he would have actually had his own art exhibition there.
The Times of Malta has just published my article on Shaun Gladwell’s performance featuring BMX champion Matti Hemmings at Artissima Art Fair in Turin.
“It was actually quite enjoyable to see Shaun Gladwell’s high-brow/low-brow performance. I liked this idea that art is made to be used and experienced. I started imagining Shaun sitting in a pub with Hemmings, bouncing off ideas before a beer. ‘Man, let’s climb the Mont Blanc, let’s spend the whole winter in Brazil, let’s make a performance with you riding Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel. And let’s make that pretentious crowd at Artissima watch it!’ ”
Here’s the link to the online version of the magazine
Read More
For years I’ve considered myself a massimalist.
I’m Italian, I’m Neapolitan. We are baroque people. We are about adding, getting into the abundance of love, life, colours, art, words, food, everything. We don’t throw away stuff. We are sentimental people and everything has a value to us. An old handkerchief can remind us of a particular day, a necklace of a particular person. Objects for us are about suggestions, evocations.
Also, we don’t throw away stuff because “It can always be useful”. We stuff our shops with exotic objects, our wallets with family photos, the windows of our car with praying cards, our bookshelves with books. We are curious people, we are open to change our mind even in the span of a short conversation – in fact more often than not we are also contradictory in our speaking and thinking. I’m guilty of that myself, never getting straight to the point but continuously overlapping levels and levels of thoughts. A common Neapolitan saying is: “A cap’ è na sfoglia ‘e cipolla”, meaning “The head is as layered as an onion”. We might have an opinion about everything, but deep down we question everything.
Read More
Naima Morelli is an arts writer and journalist specialized in contemporary art from Asia-Pacific and the MENA region.
She has written for the Financial Times, Al-Jazeera, The Art Newspaper, ArtAsiaPacific, Internazionale and Il Manifesto, among others, and she is a regular contributor to Plural Art Mag, Middle East Monitor and Middle East Eye as well as writing curatorial texts for galleries.
She is the author of three books on Southeast Asian contemporary art.
Reach out: contact [at] naimamorelli.com
