The Art Diary: 8 outstanding shows on view now in Australia

They are the playful happenstances of our interconnected planet, where diversity, curiosity and art collide.There is however a darker side to the works as we say goodbye to the species we have destroyed whilst creating our new Anthropocene. These creatures peer back at us from their extinct status in a Bush Of Ghosts.

This exhibition attempts to showcase works of art that reflect the depth of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art and culture, with other aspects of the Aboriginal condition.

This series depicts a spectrum of transformations…They sprung from a year of isolation, as I slowly built my own community of butterfly and moth people to celebrate the hope of emerging transformed.

In this new series, Michael Cook moves into the art-historical tradition of still life, while continuing to explore the devastating impact of colonisation on Australia’s First Nations peoples.

His love for photography stems from a chance encounter with its development process, when a schoolfriend’s father showed him how an image could appear, as if by magic, on a sheet of paper in a home darkroom.

Hazara artist Khadim Ali explores the normalisation of war and the experience of refugees through a series of poetic installations and textile works.

I try not to do the most obvious pose. It can affect the electricity or the charge in the work. I have studied a lot of the older painters like Goya, Salvatore Rosa, del Francesco, the Italian school. If you look at their works there might be a tiny finger out of place, a toe pointing upwards, or a figure tipping over.

For the sake of storytelling and taking stories outside of their eras, environments, in order to make them somewhat relatable on a universal level, I blend time and place by using both film and digital photography, both archival material and new material, and erasing colour.