Gavin Hipkins' experimental screen narrative, This Fine Island, is screening at the New Zealand Film Archive in Auckland (click here for screening dates/times). Hipkins' film revisits Charles Darwin's journey to the Bay of Islands in 1835, but in his adaption, Darwin's nineteenth-century travel writing in The Voyage of the Beagle becomes a vehicle for present day tourisms, travel romance, and racial othering, against the backdrop of New Zealand's lush landscape.
Image: Gavin Hipkins, This Fine Island , 2012 (production still), 12 mins, 16mm transferred to Digibeta

Paola Pivi's Untitled (Zebra) is the latest billboard project at New York's High Line. Pivi's work is the seventh installment on the 25-by-75-foot billboard, which has previously featured works by John Baldessari, Anne Collier, David Shrigley, Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, Elad Lassry and Thomas Bayle. Read more…
Image: Paola Pivi, Untitled (Zebras), High Line Billboard to 2 January 2013

Every year Auckland's Artspace works with artists to create a range of editions to support its exhibition programme. This year Alicia Frankovich has produced a tote bag in an edition of 100 and selling for $35. You can support Artspace by ordering one here.
Image: Alicia Frankovich, After Medea, 2012. Cotton tote bag, digital print.

frieze's Cristina Ricupero reports on a high season in Seoul where the country hosted four biennales concurrently, including the Gwangju and Busan biennales, along with two exhibitions of artists prizes (the Hermes Foundation Missulsang Prize and the new Korea Artist Prize), and a major exhibition celebrating what would have been Nam June Paik's 80th birthday. Read more…
Image: Nam June Paik, One Candle (1989), installation view, Nam June Paik Centre, Seoul

Video artist Elizabeth Price is has been awarded the Turner Prize 2012. Read more…

Recently Art Radar Asia talked to Rhana Devenport about the exhibition Sub-Tropical Heat: New Art from South Asia which ended last month at New Plymouth's Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. The exhibition was the fifth in a series of shows on contemporary Asian art which began with Media Arena: Contemporary Art from Japan and Transindonesia during Greg Burke's time as director of the GBAG, continuing with China in Four Seasons, Activating Korea and Sub-Tropical Heat initiated by the current GBAG director  Rhana Devenport. Read more…

Carriageworks and 4A Centre for Contemporary Art are presenting Waste Not, an exhibition by Chinese artist Song Dong that has traveled from the artist's family home in Beijing, to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and on to the Barbican Art Gallery in London and now to Australia where it will be shown at Carriageworks in association with the Sydney Festival. At the same time, 4A is showing Dad and Mum, Don't Worry about Us, We are All Well, a survey show of Song Dong's work over the past two decades.

Waste not runs at Carriage works from 5 January to 17 March and Dad and Mum, Don't Worry about Us, We are All Well runs at 4A Centre for Contemporary Art from 5 January to 30 March 2013.
Image: installation view of Song Dong's Waste Not at the Barbican Art Gallery, London

MoMA has acquired 14 video games for its collection in the architecture and design department including classics like Pac-Man and Portal. They form the seedbed of an initial wish list of about 40 to be acquired in the near future.

“Are video games art? They sure are, but they are also design, and a design appproach is what we chose for this foray into this universe,” says department curator Paoli Antonelli. “Our criteria, therefore, emphasizes not only the visual quality and the aesthetic experience of each game, but also many other aspects – from the elegance of the code to the design of the players's behaviour – that pertain to interaction design.”

Ross Manning's Field Emissions continues at Starkwhite this week.
Image: Ross Manning, Field Emissions (2012), installation view, Starkwhite, November 2012

Last month government officials ruled that a traditional Christmas tree should be banned from Belgium's main public square because it might offend the local Muslim community. Now the decision to replace it with an 8o-foot Christmas tree sculpture by French collective 1024 Architecture has come under fire from Catholic Belgians who see the work as an overly PC attempt to secularise Christmas.
Image: 1024 Architecture's ABIES Electronicus, Brussels

Teresa Margolles, whose work addresses the violence of drug-related crime in Mexico, has been named as the winer of the fifth Artes Munde Prize. The £40,000 prize is awarded ever two years to artists who engage with social reality and the human condition. Read more…

Ann Shelton's in a forest features in the Australian Centre of Photography's Summer Season exhibition which opens in Sydney tonight and runs to 17 February 2013.

Christo is creating for Abu Dhabi a colossal 150-metre-high, flat-topped pyramid that would overshadow the Great Pyramid of Giza. The work will be made out 410,000 multi-coloured oil barrels inspired by the yellow and red sands of Al Gharbia, which he views as a “spectacularly beautiful desert location” for the work. Read more…

Seung Yul Oh will take up a Nanji Studio residency in the New Year. Administered by the Seoul Museum of Art, the residency was set up to act as an incubator for young Korean artists. While in Seoul, Oh will also present his first solo show at ONE AND J gallery.
Image: Seung Yul Oh, The ability to blow themselves up (Still #1), 2012

Ross Manning's exhibition Field Emissions runs to Saturday 22 December.

You can catch Ross Manning's sonic performance at Starkwhite today at 4pm, followed by drinks with the artist to celebrate the opening of his exhibition Field Emissions.

Images: Billy Apple's installation at Starkwhite for his 50th birthday held on Thanksgiving Day, Thursday 22 November

On Thursday 22 November 1962, Billy Apple came into being. It is exactly 50 years since that art historic moment.

In London in 1962, I began an extended work, which was part of an effort to break down the separation between “art activity” and “life activity”. I decided to use my own identity as the vehicle with which to explore the concept of the artist as “art object”. Billy Apple 1974

On the eve of his show at Lisson Gallery, which includes past and new work, Lawrence Weiner talks to The Art Newspaper about using text as material, why he doesn't like to be called a conceptualist and his ambivalence about the power of the art market. Read more…

MoMA has acquired the score for one of the most controversial gestures in the history of modern music. John Cage's 4' 33″ meditation on the act of listening, which was inspired by Robert Rauschenberg's revolutionary white paintings, will go on view at MoMA next year. Read more…

As New York is drying out from the flooding caused by Hurricane Sandy, Venice has been hit by torrential rain and unusually high tides putting 70% of the city under water.

The low-lying city of lagoons experiences problems from high waters every winter, especially around St Mark's square where many of its building are regularly flooded, but this is the fourth time the city has faced extreme flooding since 2000, which Italy's environment minister, Corrado Clini, insists is caused by global warming.

Venice is is in the process of building an elaborate system of sea walls to cope with the worsening annual flooding, but the work is not scheduled for completion until 2015.

Captured by contact microphones placed throughout the city centre, the sound of traffic, air vents and building vibrations infuse broadcast test tone colour fields to visualise real time noise in Clinton Watkins' City Noise project commissioned by the Auckland City Council's public art team for the Bledisloe Walkway light boxes. City Noise opens at 5.00pm tonight at the walkway between the Aotea Centre and Wellesley Street.
Image: Clinton Watkins, Magenta (High Rise Sub Sonics) 2012

Performa's RoseLee Golderg, asks what took so long for curators to catch on to live art? Read more…

Alicia Frankovich will present her new piece, The opportune spectator, in an evening of performances at Arratia Beer, Berlin on Friday 16 November at 7.15pm.

Our next show is Field Emissionsby Brisbane-based artist Ross Manning. The artist will launch the exhibition with a sonic performance on Sunday 25 November (time to be announced later) and the show will run from 26 November to 22 December 2012.
Image: Ross Manning, Dichroic Filter Piece (extended projection), 2012. Dichroic filters, cut glass, dvd player, projector

Seung Yul Oh's exhibition Huggong continues this week, closing on Saturday 17 November.
Image: Seung Yul Oh, Huggong (2012) installation view

Art restorers working on frescoes in a forgotten chapel in Assisi believe they have stumbled across proof that images found under layers of grime are the work of medieval artist Giotto. Read more…
Image: Restorer Sergio Fusetti working on frescos that may be the work of Giotto

Martin Basher is showing in the group exhibition Strangers in a Strange Land at LMAKprojects in New York. The exhibition opens tonight (NY time) in the wake of the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy.

The ICI's Independent Vision Award for emerging curators has gone to Jay Sanders, curator of performance at the Whitney Museum in New York, and Nav Haq, a curator at MuHKA in Antwerp. The biennial award goes to emerging curators from around the world who have demonstrated “exceptional creativity and prescience” in organising exhibitions, coordinating research and for related writing.

Sanders and Haq were chosen by Hans Ulrich Obrist from a shortlist nominated by 15 internationally recognised curators. “Nav Haq fredquently takes us into the polyphony of art centers, creating shows and projects that broaden the scope of our thinking,” he said. “Jay Sanders stays close to artists, gaining a strong understanding of an artist's body of work – both emerging and overlooked – so that ultimately audiences can know an artist deeper.”
Image: Haq and Sanders