Visual Arts

4 – 12 August - National Gallery of Indonesia, Jakarta

20 August – 7 September - Jogja Gallery, Yogyakarta

The video works exhibited by Shaun Gladwell and Craig Walsh at the International Triennale of Contemporary Art Yokohama 2005 form the basis of this touring exhibition.  These two Australians were a highlight of this major contemporary event in Asia.  Streetworks: Inside Outside Yokohama gives access to their practice plus providing a taste of this important exhibition and event.

While Walsh connects the gallery space to the outside urban environment, Gladwell works in reverse.  In different ways both artists have produced work that generates a tension between gallery and the street.  Their emphasis on other opposing values is also highlighted in an exhibition that moves laterally around concepts of performance and documentation, high art and low art, sub-cultural and pop-cultural, staged and real.

In Yokohama, Walsh exhibited scale models of the exhibition venue (shipping warehouses) and inserted a recording camera within the model.  The captured image is then projected onto another larger surface inside the actual warehouse.  Walsh exposes the process of private voyeurism through a public display (projection).

Gladwell presents extreme sports (skateboarding, BMX, break dancing, and street culture – hip hop and graffiti) within an urban environment through video works.  He stimulates the barren and closed urban space by dramatizing the images through the use of slow motion. In Yokohama, Gladwell continued his ‘extreme-art' interest with a series of video works honouring urban street culture.  Images of break dancing and skateboarding manoeuvres investigate the physical and psychological dynamics of urban environments.  These moving images are slowed down and presented to a soundtrack offering an almost religious experience to the viewer.

Artist Craig Walsh demonstrates his work to local media at a press conference on 20 August 2008 at Jogja Gallery.

Nunuk Ambarwati (Program Manager, Jogja Gallery) and Sarah Bond (Manager Visual Art Program, Asialink Melbourne) during a press conference on 20 August 2008 at Jogja Gallery.

Australian Minister for Home Affairs the Hon Bob Debus MP, musician Achmad Dani and artist Shaun Gladwell officiated the opening of Streetworks exhibition

Australian Ambassador Bill Farmer, Minister for Home Affairs The Hon Bob Debus MP, musician Achmad Dani and artist Shaun Gladwell at the opening of Streetworks

Indonesian audiences were captivated by the striking images of Streetworks at the National Gallery of Indonesia from 29 July - 12 August

Australia's Minister for Home Affairs Bob Debus admires Craig Walsh's new media piece, Cross-Reference, at the opening of Streetworks at the National Gallery of Indonesia, 4 August