(Alfred:) Mission breakfast with Papuan coffee. Meeting with Michael Kisombo, curator at the beautiful National Museum. We agree in a setting for a 3 day workshop in the museum directly before our exhibition opening, so that the workshop result can be presented while the opening ceremony. We have a big room for our show, a dusty dark white cube without windows. We have to fill this space! we confirm the dates, press work, details of the opening ceremony etc. We will need to make a flyer very soon. I promise to send it the next day. After this meeting, we go back to the shopping mall to visit a small art gallery in the basement. The two artists there are very happy to meet us. We ask oone of them to make sketch for our flyer. After one hour we get a well ment drawing, but we desite to take another drawing of him and to combine it with the texts fonts from the computer. The flyer has to be done today, we will need it tommorow.
(Marion:) I discovered going around by pmv (public motor vehicle) – a kind of minibus- isn’t a complete “no go” anymore as it has been in previous years. passengers are seated correctly, not piling up on foreign laps anymore and the bus is no longer overloaded. People are still surprised and starring than we enter a pmv but mostly they try to talk to us friendly and help to indicate then we want to get off. From the Waigani Drive it is a long way to the National Museum and Art Gallery and it is hot, hot, hot, the sun is “cooking our skin” – but as usually this misery ends at last and in the garden of the museum we are greeted by Michael K. who is our contact and support person at there. We had a round-table talk in an empty hall with the table clothed with blue velvet standing directly in the middle. I know Michael and Anton (technical staff) from my first two exhibitions which had set up in late 90th at the Museum. Together we try to arrange things for the two-day workshop and the following exhibition at the beginning of November. If half of arrangements we asked for will become reality it will be quite a lot. After a brief look to the venues we are friendly accompanied out and the meeting is over… My gut feeling tells me there will be plenty of surprises when it comes to concrete organisation of the workshop and exhibition. In the afternoon we had a stroll through “Vision city” (a typical ugly third-world-shopping mal) and got stuck at the exhibition of contemporary art set up under the escalator leading to the car park. I am amazed to see still the same types of painting as 10 years before… colourful faces and dancers … some with the same names signed some with new names. I have to admit that at the first glimps I rather felt bored. But than we had a closer look to the single works I discovered a few interesting new paintings.