EDITOR’S NOTE
In a time when visual culture is saturated with content—both profound and disposable—Artist Profile is exploring one of the most foundational yet misunderstood aspects of art: judgement.
Judgement in the visual arts isn’t just about critique or elitism. It’s about discernment—the ability to evaluate technique, context, intention and innovation across all its genres. Artists exercise judgement constantly: deciding what to include or exclude, when a work is finished, or whether to break a rule. Our writers, photographers and editorial team engage with the same process, yet from different perspectives.
This issue of Artist Profile provides insight into how judgement evolves. Context, cultural frameworks, and new critical angles shift our understanding of what is valued. What was once dismissed can later be sanctified—and vice versa. Artist Profile offers a sharper understanding of how judgement is shaped, and why magazines devoted to critical thinking are vital in the arts.
Mikala Tai’s essay on Lisa Reihana—this issue’s cover artist—explores her political aesthetic; few artists working today navigate the tensions between beauty and brutality as powerfully as Reihana. Her work is a critical contribution to post-colonial discussion in contemporary visual art—not just because of what it says, but how it says it.
Tai argues that in Reihana’s art, rather than reject visual pleasure, she harnesses it to expose colonial mythologies. The result is a body of work that challenges the viewer to reckon with the vestiges of colonisation, not through didacticism, but across immersive, embodied experience. Her use of video, scale, and theatricality resists the categorisation of Māori and Pacific art as peripheral or ethnographic. She places First Nation narratives at the centre of global contemporary art.
In a time when cultural institutions are being asked to confront their colonial histories, Reihana shows us how art can do more than reflect history—it can remake it. Her artwork also reminds us that aesthetic judgement is never apolitical, and that true beauty often lies in the act of resistance.
A yo-yo judgement that has stirred considerable debate within the Australian and international art community is Creative Australia’s decision to first dismiss and then reinstate artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino as the representatives for the Australia Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale. This farce has been understood as both a political and aesthetic judgement. The controversy surrounding the decision transcends routine curatorial practice. It revealed the entanglement of art, national identity, institutional power and cultural diplomacy on the international stage.
The subsequent reinstatement of Sabsabi wasn’t a change of curatorial direction, but a response to widespread public backlash. It was artists, curators and cultural commentators who publicly criticised the decision, seeing it as a betrayal of Creative Australia’s own principles of artistic independence and pluralism. This reversal was a defensive move, aimed at trying to preserve institutional credibility and defuse the reputational damage inflicted by the initial decision. In this sense, Creative Australia’s actions have been judged as reactive rather than visionary, evidencing a lack of consistent commitment to artistic freedom.
The independent review by Blackhall & Pearl, funded by the federal arts minister Tony Burke’s Office for the Arts, laid bare what many suspected: that the Creative Australia board acted hastily under pressure, with inadequate governance structures and no clear process for navigating politically sensitive artistic selections. It also revealed Burke’s pre-board meeting phone call to CEO Adrian Collette, illustrating a fine line between consultation and influence.
After absorbing the expensive Blackhall & Pearl findings, Burke kept the Creative Australia board and CEO, and elevated the deputy chair, Professor Wesley Enoch, to the position of chair following the resignation of Robert Morgan in the wake of the dismissal controversy.
Creative Australia’s wavering to media outrage hasn’t just cost one artist, one curator or one Venice Biennale—it has caused the erosion of trust and has detrimentally impacted artistic and curatorial risk. The Sabsabi-Dagostino affair is a lesson. Enoch’s appointment is not only a test of whether he or Creative Australia has learned from it, it’s also an assessment on whether Burke, as Australia’s arts minister—for more than three and half years including the six months during the prime ministerships of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard—has the capacity to know what good political and aesthetic judgement for the arts is beyond his own political ambitions and for the Australian Labor Party.
Thank you for your ongoing support of Artist Profile.
Kon Gouriotis
Editor
Artist Profile acknowledges the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the traditional owners of the land on which we work.
CONTENTS
ISSUE
Issue: Does the demand for accountability really account for art? by Aleks Wansbrough
COVER FEATURE
Lisa Reihana by Mikala Tai
PROFILES
Monica Rani Rudhar by Sebastian Goldspink
Tamara Henderson by Eve Sullivan
Ana Pollak by Rhonda Davis
James Geurts by Peter Hill
Mason Kimber by Jack Howard
Katy B. Plummer by Lucy Stranger
Lesley Dumbrell by Joe Frost
INSIGHT
Poem: Trusina 1992̶ 1993 after Gbenga Adesina by Dženana Vucic
Sydney Contemporary Special Editon By Imogen Charge
Process by Claire Conroy
Essay: To Everything There is a Season by Brad Buckley
Tribute: Heroically Beautiful, Bruce Goold by George Gittoes
Review: Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 by Hili Perlson
Review: Cézanne to Giacometti: Highlights from Museum Berggruen / Neue Nationgalerie by Sasha Grishin
Review: Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890–1940 by Susan Charlton
Review: French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston by Alan Krell
Review: Sam Contis: Moving Landscape by Laetitia Wilson
Review: Breaking the Silence by Lansheng Zhang
Review: Walking Home: Road to Trachoni Kythreas by Roslyn Orlando
Poster: Reg Mombassa, Starving wolves at the gates of civilization
Review: A Meditation on Impermanence by Inga Walton
Review: What Artists See, Essays by Quentin Sprague by Mimi Kelly
Film: The Future is Now by H.R. Hyatt-Johnston
Preview: Salvatore Zofrea: Seven Days of Summer by Lucy Stranger
Discovery: Susan Jacobsen by Emma Walker
Short Story: Will there be a way? by Nola Farman
