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This study interrogates the breakages that occur in peoples’ lives such as psychological breakdowns, political ruptures, and the effects of history evolving ideologically such that the axioms of the past are overturned and people subsequently lose their sense of identity or purpose. The book combines creative writing pieces in which writers draw from personal experiences to demonstrate the impact of breakages with more discursive essays that question artificial breakdowns between disciplines and the imperative that underpins all knowledge: its provisional nature in conflict with the human need to categorize and define. It focuses on the psychologies that haunt creative autobiographical pieces, as well as the plight of broken minds and bodies in the face of trauma, historical change and political events. It also looks directly at the ideas of thinkers and artists from the past and the impact their work may still have despite shifting paradigms, ruptures and re-formations. Furthermore, it queries new formations by directly asking: why did former ideas break and why the need for salvaging the past (or authenticating the present) by identifying precursors?
'One of my stand-out Australian reads from 2016 . . . A glorious novel, meditative and special' Hannah Kent, author of BURIAL RITES Arky Levin, a film composer in New York, has promised his wife that he will not visit her in hospital, where she is suffering in the final stages of a terminal illness. She wants to spare him a burden that would curtail his creativity, but the promise is tearing him apart. One day he finds his way to MOMA and sees Mariana Abramovic in The Artist is Present. The performance continues for seventy-five days and, as it unfolds, so does Arky. As he watches and meets other people drawn to the exhibit, he slowly starts to understand what might be missing in his life and what he must do.
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Fugitive History: The Art of Julie Gough celebrates Gough's art practice, which has been central to her search for, and creation of, an identity for over twenty years. As an Aboriginal woman whose family from Tasmania had moved to Victoria and left behind connections to place and history, this search became as much about negotiating absence, distance, and lack, as discovery. This title includes essays by Brigita Ozolins, artist and senior lecturer at the Tasmanian College of the Arts; James Boyce, author of Born Bad and Van Diemen's Land, which won the Tasmanian Book Prize; and Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Professorial Fellow and Chair of Global Art History in the Department of Art, Curating and Visual Studies at the University of Birmingham.
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Skylarks and Rebels is a story about the fate of Latvia in the 20th century as told by Rita Laima. Laima, a Latvian-American, chose to leave behind the comforts of life in America to explore the land of her ancestors, which in the 1980s languished behind the Iron Curtain. In writing about her own experiences in a totalitarian state, Soviet-occupied Latvia, Laima delves into her family’s past to understand what happened to her fatherland and its people during and after World War II. She also pays tribute to some of Latvia’s remarkable people of integrity who risked their lives to oppose the brutal and destructive Soviet state.
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Wolfhagen draws his inspiration from the Tasmanian Highlands and the Freycinet Peninsula, finding in his spare and moody paintings the great beauty and the natural rhythms and forces of these vast areas of land and sea. They contemplate the tumult of nature, the moods of desolation, isolation and tranquility which transform the landscape.