The gentlefolk of the 19th century were obsessed with the afterlife. In 1850, when the life expectancy of a 10-year-old was 58, preparing for the spirit world was a priority. This resulted in a collective morbidity and a fascination with ghosts, seances, hypnotism and objects belonging to the deceased. Sinister and menacing though these hobbies were, they reveal the counter-point of death, which is the rapture of being alive.

Along with the rage for hypnotism, teleporting, illusionism and spirit communing was a more serious scientific interest in neurology and the tenuous lines between life and death.

Orange Regional Gallery is showing until February 20 a fabulous exhibition of modernist paintings from the Chroma Paint Collection with others from the Orange collection. Artists include Macleod, Kingwarre, Hickey, Pople, Watkins, Walker, Cuthbert.

Where and what is the border between film and visual art? Is it true that we see art but watch films? Such issues have been under discussion since Andy Warhol first played with film, though these days the words ‘moving image’ rather than film are used as many films are not made with actual film but with digital equipment. And it is certainly the advent of digital equipment — lighter, cheaper, quicker — that has led many more artists to make moving images part or all of their work. Maybe moving images are just a tool, but what a tool.

The biennial Adelaide Film Festival (AFF) has made a huge global mark through part-funding, and sometimes commissioning, films with its investment fund. Successful examples from the past are Ten Canoes, Look Both Ways, Lucky Miles and The Home Song Stories. For the first time in 2009, the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund has commissioned a visual artist to make a work to be shown during the film festival.

Lynette Wallworth’s experimental approach to the moving image has seen her develop new ways of experiencing the illusions of which it is capable. Her moving image installations are interactive in subtle and complex ways that cross the boundary between the moving image and life as they play on the emotions of the viewer. The AFF’s newly commissioned moving image work by Wallworth, called Duality of Light, will be shown at the Samstag Museum of Art along with a retrospective of other significant and award-winning works she has made over the last seven years: Hold, Invisible by Night, Damavand Mountain and Beautiful Sunset.

And the creative nexus between moving images in cinema and gallery contexts will be explored in the two-day Art & the Moving Image Symposium. Speakers include: Mexican Canadian electronic artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, senior curator, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Laurence Kardish; and Vasif Kortun, the founder of Platform Garanti, Istanbul.

Kortun is also curating Socially Disorganised, an exhibition of videos focusing on humorous urban dissent by international artists Halil Altindere, Fikret Atay, Cheng-Ta (Yu), Hala Elkoussy, Daniel Guzman, Kuang-Yu (Tsui), Minouk Lim, Ahmet Ögüt, Wael Shawky, Nasan Tur and Alexander Ugay, to be shown at the Experimental Art Foundation (EAF).

The Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia (CACSA) is showing Scratch an Aussie by Richard Bell, which uses satirical role reversal to comment on racism in Australia. The show also includes famous Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei’s Fairytale — a documentary about the passage of 1001 Chinese people to Kassel, Germany, for documenta 12 — and CACSA curator Peter McKay’s Road Movies — a local contribution by 15 Adelaide-based artists who have each made a digital video in one week with a basic camera. McKay says, “The idea is to emphasise the immediacy of the medium and cultivate the conditions to construct a coherent yet significantly improvised exhibition.”

KEN SCARLETT travelled to Cottesloe to see how a west coast version of Sculpture by the Sea would fare. He reports on its success.

Sculpture by the Sea began in 1997 at Sydney’s Bondi Beach as a one-day wonder, with sixty-four works on the beach and along the spectacular cliff-side walk. In subsequent annual exhibitions over the last twelve years, a remarkable 1186 sculptures have been displayed.

Artist: Linton Meagher Born in Sydney in 1975 and studied art at the Julian Ashton School and at the University of Sydney, completing a Bachelor of Arts (Fine Arts) in 1996. Collections include the World Health Organisation (Paris), Xenos and T. & C. Business Consulting (Sydney). ‘My portfolio conveys the progression in my work away from traditional oil on canvas towards more conceptual mixed media work mosaic work with fibreglass and Perspex. Prior exhibitions have focused on the fragmentation of images and have included mosaics made out of glass marbles and hydraulically pressed and machine cut Coca Cola can pieces cast in resin…’ Upcoming exhibition (early 2008), will continue the use of pills and capsules (Encapsulations exhibition) and extend into the use of 20,000 surgical scalpels cast in resin. All the capsules in the artworks are empty and fully encased in fibreglass resin.

“Working in porcelain as I do, the material is inherently translucent and white which is one of the qualities that first attracted me to it. When you pick up a small blue and white bowl from the kiln, and the light shines through between your fingers… This quality is perfect for the material to be used with light and I have long been attracted to these potentials. In this current work, I have begun to explore further the ways that light can be incorporated in with porcelain to enhance the material.” Alistair Whyte.

Tall Stories “The original inspiration for the totems came from Nepalese prayer wheels and the interaction the worshippers had with these tactile objects. The eclectic nature of my totems is a metaphor for the diversity that exists in communities and the importance of the interaction of people of different ethnic, religious and social groups. The variety of textures, shapes and surfaces also evoke images of geological and biological diversity…” Lex Dickson.