To our readers…
As the financial year comes to an end, we want to connect with readers of un Projects and share how important your support is.
In a time where arts publishing is challenging, your support helps us to remain one of Australia’s longest-running independent art magazines, providing a vital platform for artists and writers.
“It’s hard to imagine the arts publishing landscape in this country without un Projects, unmatched in its independence, rigour and reach. I’ve been afforded several opportunities to publish and collaborate with un Projects, and the archive is an indispensable teaching resource.” – Paul Boyé
Support un Projects!
Your support will help us commission vital new works from artists and writers and produce critical events, workshops, and discourse for the arts community over the next financial year.
Please consider donating before June 30th…
These donations ensure that un Projects can keep publishing and supporting writers and creatives for the years to come.
“un Projects is a lodestar for critical art writing. Its commitment to contemporary art and its ongoing support of emerging writers and editors has had a lasting impact on multiple generations of practitioners, critics, and educators. I continue to read, reference, and teach un Magazine and cherish my memories as an un author and un editor. May it continue its important work and never cease to find new readers and new horizons for critical inquiry.” – Astrid Lorange
un Anthology 2014-2024: another decade of art and ideas
Capturing the best of the last decade of: critical essays, experimental texts, exhibition reviews, artist reflections, queer(ed) bibliographies, collaborative poems and urgent political pronouncements published in un Magazine. This un Anthology is a must-read.
Following on from our 2014 anthology, we’ve produced the latest un Anthology 2014-2014 (another) decade of art and ideas, in whcih we asked guest editors from the past 10 years to chose a piece to re-publish from their volume and write a new introduction for it.
Featuring works by Rosie Isaac, Pip Wallis Anatol Pitt, Anastasia Klose, Genevieve Grieves, Andrew Norman Wilson, Sam Peterson, Gabriel Curtin & Ender Başkan, Melissa Ratliff, and Timmah Ball. New introductions from Shelley McSpedden & Meredith Turnbull, David Capra, A. Wurri & Arlie Alizzi, Hugh Childers & Bobuq Sayed, Elena Gomez & Rosie Isaac, Snack Syndicate (Andrew Brooks & Astrid Lorange), Hilary Thurlow & D Harding, and Bahar Sayed & Gemma Weston. Plus essays from Lily Hibberd and Audrey Jo Pfister.
un Magazine double edition 18.3 Sabaar and Other Counter Archives ed. Nadia Refaei and 18.4 Good Grief ed. Olivia Koh
18.3: Sabaar and Other Counter Archives guest edited by Nadia Rafaei. Inside you’ll find pieces on Palestinian Resistance; wild-plant foraging, Ukrainian museum artefacts; roving sound art; protest and activism and the Treaty of Waitangi; and more.
Contributors: Caine Chennatt, Jess Clifford, Grace Gamage, Dean Greeno, Hasib Hourani & Jeanine Hourani, Juliette Berkeley & Ronen Jafari, Sara Jajou, Kiera Brew Kurec, Brooke Pou, Monica Rani Rudhar.
18.4: Good Grief guest edited by Olivia Koh.
Inside you’ll find pieces on NGV’s coin pond, sustainability and arts organisations; efforts to Return Lee Point to Larrakia people; living Irish language, Coburg’s merri merri; Ethopian poetry and silence; and homages to Destiny Deacon; Feliz Gonzalez-Torres; and friends.
Contributors: Benjamin Bannan, Peta Clancy, Jemi Gale & Lily Golightly, Tristen Harwood & Tamsen Hopkinson, Laniyuk , Mihret Kebede, Ellen van Neerven, Lana Nguyen, Zainab Hikmet & Anna Emina El Samad, Jacqui Shelton.
un Magazine 18.2 – After-care
un Magazine 18.2: After-care, guest edited by Joel Sherwood Spring
Contributors: Joel Sherwood Spring, SJ Norman, Enoch Mailangi, Ragnar Thomas, Georgia Hayward, Hideko G. Ono, Suvani Suri, Diego Ramírez, Nadia Demas & roxxy marsden.
Subscribe below to get your print copy delivered straight to your door!
un Magazine 18.1 – Badaud
un Magazine 18.1: Badaud, guest edited by Tara Heffernan
Contributors: Tara Heffernan, Scott Robinson, Daniel McKewen, Elyssia Bugg, Georgia Puiatti, Yannick Blattner, Vincent Lê, Aimee Dodds, Sam Beard, Eugene Hawkins, Francis Russell, Alexandra Peters & Carmen-Sibha Keiso.
Subscribe below to get your print copy delivered straight to your door!
un Extended – un Projects online platform for arts writing, podcasts, and events.
T is for Ti Parks by Loqui Paatsch
‘We can work around Parks and fit him in … compare him with the clunking literal puns of Aleks Danko, or the sexy (albeit in a Carry On, “ooh nurse!” way) pop endeavours of fellow Brits-down-under Michael Shaw and Pat and Richard Larter, fellow furry Kathy Temin, the laminate patterns of Constanze Zikos. Or perhaps use him as a key to unlock the weird and wonderful work of Lou Hubbard, or Josh Petherick and Lewis Fidock’s meticulous oddities, the sinister camp rubbish of Alex Vivian, or the tortured macho Dada of Jamie O’Connell’s Car Spa.’
Loqui Paatsch makes a case for the influential artist-visitor Ti Parks (Australia, 1964-1974), and draws a potential lineage that still echoes today.
Edited by our un Extended Editors-in-Residence, Victoria Perin
Hugo Blomley’s erotics by Savanna Szelski
Victoria Perin starts her un Extended Editor-in-Residence 2025 with a piece from painter and conservator Savanna Szelski who profiles the Naarm-based early-career sculptor Hugo Blomley.
‘The materials themselves, epoxy, resin and fibreglass all contain toxic chemicals. To that list the artist adds himself: “I don’t want to contaminate the works with myself”.’
Read the piece in full here.
Life is Crazy: Catching up with Edward Dean by Ella Howells
Ella Howells wraps up her time as an un Extended Editor-In-Residence 2024, conducts an intercontinental interview with artist-at-large Edward Dean:
Dean: ‘In Australia there’s the orthodoxy of going big or going home. You have to make a spectacle and it’s not questioned as to why it is that way, and in Germany it feels like there’s the orthodoxy of making a little grey square, hardly producing anything and that’s not ever questioned. I would obviously opt towards more bravado, I think that’s cool.’
Howells: ‘An Icarus moment, or something.’
Read the piece in full here.
Sofia Sid Akhmed wraps up her time as an un Extended Editor-In-Residence 2024 with a conversation between Roukaya Hassoun and Celine Skaf on what it means to be an art translator.
‘My challenge with Yumna’s book was in conveying the tone without sounding too rigid or literal in Arabic. There’s a lot of poetry, tenderness and fierceness in her words. I wanted to carry all of that across with minimal sacrifice – loss being unavoidable when shifting from one language to another. The choices I had to make with this work were stark but these decisions often are. I can’t escape the idea of art as a delicate balance between beauty and meaning, and so is art translation.’
Read in full here.
Statement from un Projects:
un Projects joins our community and peers in the arts sector and stands in solidarity with Khaled Sabsabi and Michael Dagostino and demand their immediate reinstatement as the artistic team representing Australia at the Venice Biennale 2026. We believe this decision undermines the integrity of arms-length, peer-assessed decision-making, and compromises freedom of artistic expression for the arts in Australia.
As a platform for independent, critical discussions about Australian artistic practice, un Projects champions experimentation, diversity, transparency, artistic risk-taking and ambition.
un Projects has published writing on Khaled Sabsabi numerous times as an internationally renowned artist whose socially-engaged work has long created a space for reflection and contemplation on power, nationhood, identity, and beauty.
As published on un Extended in 2018, Waqt Al-tagheer / Time Of Change by Adelè Sliuzas (SA);
‘Khaled Sabsabi’s The Speed of Light (2016) reveals the complexity that can be found in a seemingly unexceptional view of the sky from a studio in Sydney. The 11 video screens form a horizonless cosmos within which time and light become uncertain and unfixed. The soundscape is rhythmic, almost stuttering; at the centre of the work is a sense of stillness, despite the fact that this work is about the act of speeding up. Sabsabi’s aim is to reconceive light beyond its physical, energetic properties and expose its pure & divine qualities. He arrives at this by accelerating 218 hours of video surveillance into a one second image, his version of the speed of light. Sabsabi’s treatment of light is religious as much as it is technological, referring to the Sufi Muslim belief of true and divine light, or Nur. Though the divine qualities of the work are uncertain, its interrogation of linear time is emphatically poetic.’
We ourselves are recipients of Creative Australia funding, as are many of the writers and artists within our community. We advocate for the transparency and integrity of the independent review process, and for Creative Australia to remain committed to supporting outstanding and diverse Australian art.
We encourage you to read Khaled Sabsabi’s statement, and the letter from the five shortlisted Venice Biennale artists and curators and join over 3000+ people signing Memo open letter.
un Projects is based on the unceded sovereign land and waters of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation; we pay our respects to their Elders past and present.