“Organisation for Cultural Exchange and Mishap”
Janina Green, Raafat Ishak, Patrick Pound, Law Man Lok, Leung Chin Fung, Leung Mee Ping, So Yan Kei and Brett Jones
4 July → 26 July 2003
This project is based on the imagining of a cultural exchange organisation. Organisation is not an organisation in the sense of having an administrative infrastructure or a defined institutional voice but rather is a fluid composite of practice as enacted by artwork, documents and dialogue developed over an indeterminable period of time.
OCEM involved three Australian and three Hong Kong artists in a cross-cultural dialogue. It attempted to reframe some of the issues surrounding trans/cultural practices, epitomised in the booming international exhibition circuit, international biennales and artist residency programs. In this sense, it aimed to consider just why cultural exchange projects are regarded as important and how they affect and engage with participants in different cultural contexts.
Janina Green is an artist in Naarm/Melbourne.
Raafat Ishak was born in Egypt and lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne. Working across painting, sculpture and installation, Ishak's multidisciplinary practice utilises abstraction and seriality to critically examine how the organisational principles of architecture and the cultural politics of statehood shape communal experience.
Aotearoa/New Zealand born, Naarm/Melbourne based artist Patrick Pound is an avid collector, equally interested in systems and the ordering of objects: an attempt, perhaps, to make things coherent. As he says, ‘to collect is to gather your thoughts through things’.
Law Man Lok
Leung Chin Fung
Leung Mee Ping
So Yan Kei
Brett Jones works with ideas around the copy and the original. Using various reproduction mediums including casting, photography, video and sound he is concerned with creating opportunities for displacing and unburdening the referent. He co-founded West Space in 1993 where he was centrally involved until 2008.
