Editorial 15 April 2019

Welcome and farewell. Farewell to RealTime, a 25-year publishing adventure that has come to a celebratory conclusion and welcome to the RealTime Archive, a massive documentation of a period of remarkable transformation driven by the artists who inspired us and to whom we and our many writers creatively responded.

In Response: Dialogues with RealTime, the exhibition

Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter

This innovative UNSW Library exhibition features displays and live presentations by Martin Del Amo, Branch Nebula and Vicki Van Hout reflecting on their works and the critical response to them.

Martin Del Amo: In response…

Martin Del Amo

Dancemaker Martin Del Amo tellingly juxtaposes Heidrun Löhr’s photographs of his creations across his career with intimate and extensive reflections on the works and the RealTime reviews.

In Response… Artists in Action

Keith Gallasch

Keith Gallasch witnesses the three live presentations made for In Response: Dialogues with RealTime, in which Martin Del Amo, Branch Nebula and Vicki Van Hout idiosyncratically animated their installations.

Art & review: an enduring loop

Keith Gallasch & Virginia Baxter

In a catalogue essay for the exhibition In Response: Dialogues with RealTime, Virginia and Keith delineate their vision of the complex interplay between artist, artwork and writer in the making of a review as it unfolds in real time.

The RealTime team

This new section features a joint biography for Managing Editors Keith and Virginia, seen here with RealTime staff in 2014. More entries will be added as we complete the archive.

Multiversing The Rocks

Keith Gallasch

Looking for an adventure that takes you deep into Sydney’s The Rocks as both an actual and virtual space? The City of Forking Paths is a “physical cinema” work originally commissioned from Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller by the City of Sydney for the 2014 Biennale of Sydney. It’s up and running again.

Sydney Chamber Opera, La Passion De Simone: spiritual turbulence

Keith Gallasch

Deploying installation, video art and evocations of durational performance art, Sydney Chamber Opera stages Kaija Saariaho’s La Passion de Simone with a daring representation of the philosopher mystic Simone Weil.

THE LOOP: Waiting for DAU

A New York Times report on a massive cinematic installation by Russian film director Ilya Khrzhanovsky inspired by the life of Nobel Prize winning theoretical physicist Lev Landau grabbed our attention. With 13 feature-length films, performance and much else, it’s about to open in Paris, police permit pending.

Editorial 5 December 2018

Welcome to a bumper holiday edition of RealTime featuring extensive reviews of two critically important festivals, OzAsia (image above Yui Kawaguchi) and Climate Century; treasurable reflections on writing for RealTime by Richard Murphet and Gail Priest; and a look at how Australia’s Indigenous dance scene is set to change as new companies emerge.

OzAsia 2018 performance: More than cultural diplomacy

Ben Brooker

Deeply engaged by five works in a bracing festival, Ben Brooker writes of their evocations of “displacement, the unsettling of body and being by the effects of colonisation, technology and environmental disruption.”

My RealTime years: art, writing & terror

At a time when “politics takes no notice” of art, Richard Murphet looks back with passion to the revelatory works he wrote about for RealTime, with a sense of community and a freedom to engage beyond the parameters of ‘reviewing.’

Notes from the sound underground

Gail Priest

Reflecting on her emergence as a writer on (and practitioner of) sound art over two decades, Gail Priest maps a wonderful constellation of artists, events, reviews, video interviews and phases in the development of a diverse and now pervasive artform.