Earth Hour 2012

“Earth Hour is a worldwide event organized by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and held on the last Saturday of March annually, encouraging households and businesses to turn off their non-essential lights for one hour to raise awareness about the need to take action on climate change. The event, conceived by WWF and The Sydney Morning Herald, first took place in 2007, when 2.2 million residents of Sydney participated by turning off all non-essential lights. Following Sydney's lead, many other cities around the world adopted the event in 2008. Earth Hour 2012 took place on 31 March 2012 from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., at participants' local time”. – Wikipedia

A volunteer lights one of 5000 blue and green candles in an eight-meter shape of Planet Earth in front of the Brandenburg Gate during Earth Hour 2012 on March 31, 2012 in Berlin, Germany. According to organizers, Earth Hour 2012 has participants including individuals, companies and landmarks in 147 countries and territories and over 5,000 cities agreeing to switch off their lights for one hour. The Brandenburg Gate, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Big Ben Clock Tower in London, the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro and the Empire State Building in New York are among the monuments whose operators have agreed to participate in the demonstration. (Photo by Adam Berry/Getty Images)

Badaling Great Wall after turn off the lights during the Earth Hour 2012 power switch off on March 31, 2012 in Beijing, China. About 124 Chinese cities joined a WWF worldwide initiative Earth Hour, to call on people to switch off unnecessary lights for one hour tonight, in support for energy-saving efforts and global warming prevention as a shared responsibility.(Photo by Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)

A candle mural is lit on the forecourt of the Opera House representing WWF and 60+ as the lights are switched off for Earth Hour on March 31, 2012 in Sydney, Australia. Earth Hour encourages individuals around the world to turn off their lights for one hour at 20:30 local time on March 31, 2012 to take a stand against climate change. (Photo by Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images for WWF Australia)

The Eiffel Tower is seen after the lights are turned off during Earth Hour 2012, on March 31, 2012 in Paris, France. (Photo by Antoine Antoniol/Getty Images)

The lights are turned off on The Houses of Parliament in central London, to mark Earth Hour on March 31, 2012 in London, England. (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

The Empire State Building seen in darkness as part of Earth Hour on March 31, 2012 in New York City. (Photo by John Lamparski/Getty Images)

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Sculptures By Patricia Piccinini

  

“Patricia Piccinini (born in 1965 in Freetown, Sierra Leone) is an Australian artist and hyperrealist sculptor. Her art work came to prominence in Australia in the late 1990s. In 2003 she was selected as the artist to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale.

Piccinini's mixed media works include the series Truck Babies, and the installation We are Family which was exhibited in Venice in 2003. Piccinini works with a wide range of media, including sculpture, video, drawing, installation and digital prints. Her major artworks often reflect her interests in issues such as bioethics, biotechnologies and the environment. Other Australian artists who work in a similar idiom are Martine Corompt, Sam Jinks and Ron Mueck.

Piccinini's work often anthropomorphises inanimate objects and presents them with a high degree of industrial finish, revealing the equal influence of 19th Century Surrealism and 20th Century advertising”. – Wikipedia

Progenitor and Offspring by Patricia Piccinini.

















The Embrace by Patricia Piccinini.









Big Mother by Patricia Piccinini.

“Ronald “Ron” Mueck (born 1958) is an Australian hyperrealist sculptor working in the United Kingdom. Mueck's early career was as a model maker and puppeteer for children's television and films, notably the film Labyrinth for which he also contributed the voice of Ludo, and the Jim Henson series The Storyteller.

Mueck moved on to establish his own company in London, making photo-realistic props and animatronics for the advertising industry. Although highly detailed, these props were usually designed to be photographed from one specific angle hiding the mess of construction seen from the other side. Mueck increasingly wanted to produce realistic sculptures which looked perfect from all angles.

In 1996 Mueck transitioned to fine art, collaborating with his mother-in-law, Paula Rego, to produce small figures as part of a tableau she was showing at the Hayward Gallery. Rego introduced him to Charles Saatchi who was immediately impressed and started to collect and commission work. This led to the piece which made Mueck's name, Dead Dad, being included in the Sensation show at the Royal Academy the following year. Dead Dad is a silicone and mixed media sculpture of the corpse of Mueck's father reduced to about two thirds of its natural scale. It is the only work of Mueck's that uses his own hair for the finished product.

Mueck's sculptures faithfully reproduce the minute detail of the human body, but play with scale to produce disconcertingly jarring visual images. His five metre high sculpture Boy 1999 was a feature in the Millennium Dome and later exhibited in the Venice Biennale.

In 1999 Mueck was appointed as Associate Artist at the National Gallery, London. During this two-year post he created the works Mother and Child, Pregnant Woman, Man in a Boat, and Swaddled Baby. In 2002 his sculpture Pregnant Woman was purchased by the National Gallery of Australia for A$800,000”. – Wikipedia

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Thaksin arrives in Cambodia

Red Shirts posing with armed security sent by Hun Xen to protect Thaksin, his Siamese croc friend

14/04/2012
Bangkok Post

"If a Cambodian group banned from returning to Cambodia [rallied] in Thailand, what would we think? It would be a jumbled relationship."

Fugitive former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra arrived on Saturday in Siem Reap, Cambodia, where thousands of his supporters were waiting to greet him.

He was welcomed by red-shirts from Surin province who were waiting for him at the City Angkor Hotel since the morning.

Thaksin was scheduled to take to the stage to talk to his supporters at a local stadium at 5pm. A Buddhist ceremony with 260 monks from Angkor Wat and a Songkran water-pouring ceremony for Thaksin are planned in Siem Reap on Sunday.

Thaksin supporters have been traveling to Siem Reap via road from Thailand since Wednesday. Provincial authorities have set aside a 22-hectare campsite for them about two kilometres outside of Siem Reap.

The Phnom Penh government has said that it will foot the bill to provide crowd control and protection for the deposed Thai leader, who has strong links to Prime Minister Hun Sen.

Reports said as many as 4,500 Cambodian security personnel could be involved, with observers forecasting as many as 50,000 Thai supporters of Thaksin descending on the area near Angkor Wat.

"We have a duty to provide security for Thai people and for Thaksin," national police spokesman Kirt Chantharith told AFP.

He said there was no specific threat to anyone's safety, but noted that the red shirts had a long-standing rivalry with Thai political opponents.

"This is a huge and historical event," he said. "Many thousands of security forces will be in place."

The Cambodian government is also olffering free admission to Angkor Wat for visiting red shirts. A day pass to the Unesco World Heritage Site normally costs US$20.

Veteran politician Snoh Thienthong, advisory chairman of the Pheu Thai Party, and Public Health Minister Witthaya Buranasiri earlier Saturday crossed into Cambodia via the Aranyaprathet border checkpoint.

A large number of Pheu Thai MPs have also made the pilgrimage.

Members of the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) from 20 northeastern provinces travelled in more than 200 buses, vans and private cars across the Chong Sangam border checkpoint, according to MCOT.

Thaksin arrived in Cambodia from Laos, where he told supporters that he hoped to be back in Thailand in time to celebrate his birthday on July 26.

"He's trying to come back this year so you can see this tour as a trial balloon," said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political scientist at Chulalongkorn University.

Opposition figures in Cambodia have questioned the wisdom of the government rolling out the red carpet for Thaksin and appearing to back one side in a political dispute in another country.

Kem Sokha, president of the opposition Human Rights Party, said this weekend’s gathering could harm Cambodia’s relationship with Thailand in the future.

"No one can hold power for good," he was quoted as saying by Voice of America.

"There will be a leadership change in that country. For us, as a country, we are supporting one group and confronting another group. One day, when [the second] group wins and leads the country, what will they think?"

Lao Monghay, an independent analyst, told VoA: "If a Cambodian group banned from returning to Cambodia [rallied] in Thailand, what would we think? It would be a jumbled relationship."

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Cambodian statue sparks legal battle in US

14 April 2012
By Brigitte Dusseau (AFP)

NEW YORK — For a year, an ancient Cambodian statue of a warrior has been at the center of a legal battle in New York in which US authorities back Cambodia's claim that the artwork was looted.

The standoff between Sotheby's auctioneers, who intended to sell the thousand-year-old statue, and the US government hardened on April 4 when a federal prosecutor in New York demanded its surrender.

For now, Sotheby's holds onto the work, but its future is unclear.

The US Attorney's office said in a statement that the "Duryodhana" statue was "stolen from the Prasat Chen temple at Koh Ker in Cambodia. The Koh Ker site is very significant from a religious, historical, and artistic perspective, and the Duryodhana is considered to be a piece of extraordinary value to the Cambodian people and part of their cultural heritage."

A court then ordered Sotheby's, which insists the statue valued at $2-3 million can be sold legitimately, not to sell or transfer the work.

The row blew up last year shortly before the planned March 24 auction, when Cambodia's government sent a letter through UNESCO claiming ownership over the 10th century work. Sotheby's stopped the sale.

"We saw their announcement (to put it on sale) before March 2011. Then, we sent an official letter asking Sotheby's to withdraw it from the sale because the statue was illegally trafficked out of the country. That's why they withdrew it," said Hab Touch, director general at Cambodia's Ministry of Culture. "Now we are working to bring it back."

The statue's origin is not under dispute: its pedestal and its ankles and feet remain at the site of the Koh Ker temple, northeast of Angkor Wat. It made a pair with another statue which is also in the United States, at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena.

French archeologist Eric Bourdonneau said "many signs point to them being looted in the early 1970s," a period when Cambodia was in a civil war.

He termed the statue, which appeared in the West at a 1975 auction in London, exceptional, "one of the masterpieces of Angkorian art".

According to prosecutors, Sotheby's imported the statue in April 2010 "and made arrangement to sell the statue, despite knowing it was stolen from Koh Ker."

The complaint alleges that an expert asked by Sotheby's to write up the statue for the auction catalogue herself raised doubts over the legality.

But Sotheby's denied doing anything wrong, saying it "strongly disputes the allegations".

"This sculpture, which had been in the possession of a good faith owner who obtained good title almost forty years ago, was legally imported into the United States and all relevant facts were openly declared," the auction house said.

"We have researched this sculpture extensively and have never seen nor been presented with any evidence that specifies when the sculpture left Cambodia over the last 1,000 years nor is there any such evidence in this complaint," it added.

Sotheby's said it had been in "active discussions" with the US and Cambodian governments and that the result was "disappointing".

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