 | Professor Diana Wood Conroy, Friederike Krishnabhakdi-Vasilakis, Prof... Professor Diana Wood Conroy, Friederike Krishnabhakdi-Vasilakis, Professor Luke McNamara  | | WMD/Twin Towers/ToraBora, Brogan Bunt | WMD/Twin Towers/ToraBora, Brogan Bunt |  | Whitegoods#6, Derek Kreckler | | Whitegoods#6, Derek Kreckler |  | Terebinth, Diane Epoff | Terebinth, Diane Epoff |  | What Belongs Where?, Friederike Krishnabhakdi-Vasilakis What Belongs Where?, Friederike Krishnabhakdi-Vasilakis |  | Tohhot, Mehmet Adil | Tohhot, Mehmet Adil |  | The Eye of Surveillance, Noa Price |  | The New Age, Steven Thor Gunnin (stories), After the Flood, Juilee Pryor (images) |
Tactics Against Fear – Creativity as Catharsis
3 - 28 September 2007
Opened Tuesday 11 September 2007, 12.30pm
Curator: Friederike Krishnabhakdi-Vasilakis
Tactics Against Fear – Creativity as Catharsis opened in the Long Gallery on Tuesday 11 September 2007. This collaborative exhibition of works from the Faculty of Creative Arts reacts to the modern culture of fear we know as the ‘war on terror’.
Curator, Friederike Krishnabhakdi-Vasilakis, PhD Candidate School of Art and Design, has provided FCA staff members and Post Graduate students with this forum to explore the notion of fear from a personal perspective through creativity.
‘The artists in ‘Tactics against fear’ let us know that what keeps us safe is constant practice, not the inflation of fear, but remembering who we are really. We hope that good may come through representation, observing with a raised eyebrow, scrutinising with fierce attention what is going on. Freiderike Krishnabhakdi-Vasilakis’ curatorship has assembled a group of works that pull apart the strangeness and fearfulness that is the underside of our present prosperous culture.’
Professor Diana Wood Conroy, August 2007
The exhibition was officially opened by Professor Luke McNamara, Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Wollongong.
Participating Artists:
Mehmet Adil
Didier Balez
Michael Barkl
David Blackall
Sue Blanchfield
Brogan Bunt
Diane Epoff
Mark Havryliv
Christine Howe
Derek Kreckler
Friederike Krishnabhakdi-Vasilakis
Terumi Narushima
Noa Price
Juilee Pryor
Mary Rosengren
Wendy Suiter
Steven Thor Gunnin
Annette Tzavaras
Jelle Van den Berg
WMD/ Twin Towers/Torabora 2007
Computer application by Brogan Bunt
please visit http://mediaarts.uow.edu.au/iconistory/
From the Curator:
Over the past six years, following the events of 9/11 in 2001, western society has undergone significant political, legal and social changes. The notion of terror - in action, word and image, has institutionalised fear on several levels: the emotional, the social and the political. Fear, it seems, justifies varying degrees of administrative arbitrariness, which as long as there is a commonly acknowledged denominator like terrorism, public opinion (when informed by fear rather than knowledge) can be swayed to overlook politicised abuse of the law. The protection of law from arbitrariness and from fear that makes arbitrariness possible, then, is a pressing issue in the current climate we live in.
The idea behind this exhibition, Tactics against Fear –Creativity as Catharsis 2007 is to provide alternative readings to popular culture and a public language of fracture, hostility and threat by exploring tactics of fear from a personal perspective grounded in institutional space. The artworks invite to experience an audio, visual, textual, tactile, and performative response from the specific vantage point of the Faculty of Creative Arts (FCA) at the University of Wollongong. Here, 19 FCA staff and FCA postgraduate students - writers, journalists, composers, musicians, poets, graphic designers and visual artists respond to the current climate of the rhetoric of fear around the ‘war on terror’ through interdisciplinary collaboration. Artists and scholars have addressed the notion of fear as a result of the existing rhetoric of terror after terrorist attacks such as the 9/11 events in the USA, or the bombings in Madrid, London and Bali, by investigating the question what is the current climate in which we work and live?
These considerations lead to a number of questions: If the scholar has a ‘specific public role in society’, as Edward Said insisted (Wallen Closed Encounters: Literary Politics and Public Culture, University of Minnesota Press 1998: 215), how can s/he creatively connect with issues that affect society? Is s/he, to say it with Said, endowed ‘with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public’? (1998: 215).
The art works, coming from a creative rather than from a scientific, legal or historical speaking position, explore today’s popular visual culture from various angles. However, the underlying common notion is that language – spoken, written, imaged or performed – can be formative in the development of fear. In that sense, the exhibition investigates tactics of fear as a result of the current rhetoric of terror in the realm of visual culture.
Friederike Krishnabhakdi-Vasilakis
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