Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth Home was curated by, and held at the Art gallery of Western Australia for the 2000 Perth International Arts Festival. It aimed to encourage us to consider how the notion of home is constructed at a time of globalisation of culture. Not an especially new idea, and one that even Perth has seen in local (or should that be domestic) variations for a number of years. What distinguished this particular 'at home' was the global breadth of its guests. Artists from Europe, Africa, North America and one from Singapore all contributed images and objects to help stimulate a dialogue about that most sacrosanct, and so often despoiled, of places.
Given the scope of the artists' work the contextualization of the show was broad, but the idea of 'home' and its inferred antonym 'global' would have repaid closer definition. The problems that cultural institutions have in avoiding the role of authoritarian didact are evident, but here there needed to be an examination of cultural and conceptual contexts beyond the exhibition format itself. In this case, the artists were presented as if they had cultural equivalence. It is indeed democratic to have artists from the majority of the world exhibiting alongside their 'first' world colleagues, but it was not the case that their voices had the same authority. Sarah Morris's imagery of an urban United States was easily (we see it almost daily in the mass media), if not always accurately, read. Its familiarity militated against a reading of her work as a critical text. This ease of legibility became exaggerated, and exacerbated, by its comparison with other filmic evidence of what is to most Australians