We kick off the new year with the publication of an interview I did some time ago with ceramic artist Vipoo Srivilasa for CoBo Social. His work explores the similarities between the cultures of his native Thailand and his adoptive home, Australia. Vipoo’s art is playful and profound– as well as being highly collectible.
Here is the link to the interview
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Indo Pop Painting draws influences from comics and graffiti. In this essay for the Hong Kong-based webmagazine CoBo I analyze a style that goes beyond a simple market trend. From the “fathers” of the style, such as Eddie Hara, Heri Dono and Agung Kurniawan, to the “older brothers” Uji ‘Hahan’ Handoko and Eko Nugroho, and the plethora of younger 20-something artists, Indo Pop is here to stay.
Here is the link to the article
Australian magazine ArtsHub has just published my latest piece where I profile three Australian art professionals who are leaving their mark on the Singapore art scene. These are Ben Hampe, co-founder of Chan Hampe Galleries, Bala Starr from the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore at LASALLE and artist Belinda Fox. This piece is part of my reportage on contemporary art in Singapore.
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This is a public service announcement (with guitar! As the Clash would say); I’m working on a new book. It will revolve around my research on contemporary art in Singapore and will explore some concepts I started looking at in my previous book, Arte Contemporanea in Indonesia, un’introduzione.
Of course, having a second “baby” might look easier if you already had that kind of experience. But a second book comes with its new challenges. On top of that, I also had an aborted book which still is very much a looming presence. (Should we stop once and for all with these stupid baby metaphors when talking about book projects?)
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When I chose to become a freelance journalist, the possibility of working from everywhere was extremely luring. And I experimented a little with it, especially that couple of years that I was based first in Melbourne, Australia, and then going back and forth between Rome and Sorrento every two weeks. I quickly found out that what I pictured as total freedom, actually required an unusual amount of discipline.
In this piece for ArtsHub I interviewed absolute experts on location independency: writers Shannon O’Donnel of A Little Adrift, Jeannie Mark of Nomadic Chick and artist Veronica Kent. In this sense writing for ArtsHub is fantastic because it gives me the chance to go around and ask questions on matters that I feel pressing. And being a full-time digital nomad is still something I give a lot of thought to.
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Hello from Singapore! Before leaving for the Lion City (I’m conducting interviews for my upcoming reportage), I was spurred by a comment by artist Grace Siregar to look at gender gap in the arts in South East Asia. I talked about it with a few people and wrote a piece on the subject for ArtsHub.
Here’s the link to the article
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Time for a throwback. In February 2013 I left Italy for Australia. I lived in Melbourne for almost an year, and while I was there I started freelancing for English-speaking magazines – though I had already published a couple of pieces for Art Monthly Australia and others the previous year. There I developed a research on the local art system and artists in Melbourne – with a small side report from Perth.
When I came back to Italy, my idea was to make a book about emerging artists in Melbourne, with a similar concept to my Indonesia book. I wanted to give a synthetic but thorough introduction to a an art scene not well known abroad, this time making the book more narrative and focusing on the struggles of the emerging phase of an artist’s career. Because of other commitments – finalizing and publishing the Indonesian book, freelancing steadily for magazines, curating exhibitions, starting out as video-journalist and so on – I ended up working on it intermittently. That made it harder to pick up the book where I left and get back into the right mindset for writing again.
This summer 2015, after having struggled with a final draft of the book, I finally decided to put the project on hold indefinitely. Whether I’ll work on it or not in the future, a part of my research has been published on a number of Australian, Italian and international magazines. Even if the published material is just the tip of the iceberg, it can give you an idea of what I’ve looked at while in Australia – I find the interviews in particular a useful resource. In this long-winged post I’ll give you the coordinates of my reportage, plus the photostory of my research Down Under.
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UK/Australian webmagazine ArtsHub has just published my new piece: “The slow truth behind overnight success”. For artists, the fairy tale of a big break is usually only half the story. Years of preparation is often behind an ‘overnight success’.
Uk/Aussie webmagazine ArtsHub has just published my article “Australia’s biggest year at Venice” about the Australian presence at the Venice Biennale 2015 – which is unprecedented in terms of numbers and critical success. It was great to see these talented artists exhibit in the one of the world’s most prestigious events and have a chat with them over coffee… or ice cream.
Here’s the link to the article
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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
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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
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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.
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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
