Localities of Desire is an aptly titled exhibition of twenty seven artists from many different cultural origins and ten countries. Primarily the show investigates, in a non-didactic curatorial style, the complex conceptual, formal and thematic aspects of cultural difference manifested in the diversity of media, styles and techniques included. The curatorial rationale of the show not only critiques the complexities and orthodoxies mutating between western metropolitan culture and its peripheral (post)colonial regions, but it foregrounds the often (in)visible local origins, histories, sites, and traditions that have shaped the aesthetic and textual architecture of the exhibits themselves.
One of the show's more successful critical aspects was its emphasis on illuminating the socio-cultural and historical dynamic that informs these art works within a context of enhanced global digital cross-cultural communications. Hence, traversing the large gallery space we encounted art steeped in a pictorial and spatial language that spoke of multifaceted encounters between national and ethnic groups, as in Soungul Kim's video exhibit, Narelle Jubelin's delicate postcolonial installations or Fiona Hall's and Simryn Gill's appealing collaborative work Bio-Data.
Clearly this exhibition was interested in exploring: firstly, how contemporary cultures impact on each other in many complex unpredictable ways and, secondly, how local and global indigenous cultures and traditions should be seen in the larger context of human social interaction. Further, as a fundamental corollary of these two vital features of the show, we appreciate how artists of diverse ethnic and national origins generate their personal meanings and communicate to each other along informal (rather than the more conventional) global and national channels of communications. This is a significant critical and curatorial idea which underpins Localities of Desire, as is the attendant notion