Laing juxtaposes diverse elements to engage with the complex natural, cultural and historical contexts of locations throughout Australia, encompassing a decade of practice with a focus on recent major series, plus key contextual works from the late 1990s, and features a new series of work produced last year in South Australia.

"The work features over 280 works by more than 170 Australian artists drawn from a period of acquisitions which began with the consitution of the MCA in May 1989."--p. 17.

Restrictive border protection policies directed toward managing the flow of refugees coming into neoliberal democracies (and out of failing nation-states) are a defining feature of contemporary politics. In this book, Verónica Tello analyses how contemporary artists-such as Tania Bruguera, Isaac Julien, Rosemary Laing, Dinh Q. Lé, Dierk Schmidt, Hito Steyerl, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green-negotiate their diverse subject positions while addressing and taking part in the production of images associated with refugee experiences and histories. Tello argues that their practices, which manifest across a range of contexts including Cuba, the United States, Australia and Europe, represent an emergent, global paradigm of contemporary art, 'counter-memorial aesthetics'. Counter-Memorial Aesthetics, Tello argues, is characterized by its conjunction of heterogeneous signifiers and voices of many times and places, generating an experimental, non-teleological approach to the construction of contemporary history, which also takes into account the complex, disorienting spatial affects of globalization. Spanning performance art, experimental 'history painting', aftermath photography and video installation, counter-memorial aesthetics bring to the fore, Tello argues, how contemporary refugee flows and related traumatic events critically challenge and conflict with many existing, tired if not also stubborn notions of national identity, borders, history and memory. Building on the writings of such thinkers as Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière, this book offers a useful concept of 'counter-memory' for the twenty-first century. It shows how counter-memorial aesthetics is not only central to the nexus of contemporary art and refugee histories but also how it can offer a way of being critically present with many other, often interrelated, global crises in the contemporary era.

Current: Contemporary Art From Australia and New Zealand is the first comprehensive survey of all that is cutting edge in Australian and New Zealand contemporary practice. In a landmark publication, the book features eighty artists, carefully chosen to best reflect the vibrancy of art of the moment. While Current could be seen as a hot list of contemporary taste in the tradition of Taschen's Art Now, inclusivity is the book's abiding theme. Current is also underpinned by scholarship with commissioned essays by the region's leading writers and curators. Current's beautifully designed pages are filled with many names familiar to followers of contemporary art - including Paddy Bedford, Simryn Gill, Ah Xian, Tracey Moffatt, Shaun Gladwell and Del Kathryn Barton - along with some of the region's freshest new talents, such as Benjamin Armstrong, Monica Tichacek, Rohan Wealleans, Francis Upritchard and Sean Cordeiro & Claire Healy, whose photograph of the contents of a German apartment wrapped in orange twine graces the book's front cover. Current captures the unique essence of contemporary practice in Australia and New Zealand, charged with the dynamic between Indigenous, western and Asian cultures. The eighty selected artists encompass a diversity of culture and subject and employ every available medium, from painting, photography and performance to installation and video art. Current's contextual essays are written by leading authorities in their fields, including Robert Leonard, Victoria Lynn, Justin Paton, Rachel Kent, Nick Waterlow and Brenda L. Croft, who has convened an important roundtable of Indigenous curators to explore the question of the contemporary within Aboriginal art.

This book, one of a series on the gallery's collections, has two broad objectives: firstly to introduce the contemporary collection and the ideas that have provided direction for its evolution; and secondly to address and discuss with brevity and clarity the individual works of art.