un Anthology 2014-2024
Our 20th unniversary publication is here! 📦
Following on from our 2014 anthology, this un Anthology 2014-2014 (another) decade of art and ideas, 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, Neika Lehman & 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 18.3 Sabaar and Other Counter Archives ed. Nadia Refaei and 18.4 Good Grief ed. Olivia Koh
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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
Dr. 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.
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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.
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News:
Call out for un Magazine is now open.
Call for proposals – un Magazine 19.2: We swear we saw this. Drawings about notebooks and notebooks about the Wor(l)ds guest edited by Azza Zein
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Proposals are due by midnight AEDT – 21 April 2025. Late or incomplete submissions may not be considered.
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un Projects is excited to announce our second 2025 call out for contributions to un Magazine…
un Magazine 19.2: We swear we saw this. Drawings about notebooks and notebooks about the Wor(l)ds
ed. Azza Zein
un Magazine 19.2 We swear we saw this explores the variety of methodologies found in artists’ and writers’ notebooks. The theme of the issue adapts titles from Michael Taussig’s book and Adrian Piper’s work.[1]
The anthropologist Michael Taussig expands on how drawing, as a non-verbal record, is ‘naked witnessing’.[2] He highlights the role of chance in fieldwork notebooks and compares this chance to Marcel Proust’s ‘mémoire involontaire’.[3] For Taussig, drawing becomes play, and text becomes work. Would the writer Orhan Pamuk agree? Aren’t Pamuk’s newly published notebook pages wanderings and play in words, colours and scribbles?[4] Should we search for the chaotic and ‘nomadic’ Rousseau-like confessions in annotated scrapbooks? Can the involuntary connections that happen with juxtapositions of archival images and fictional text bring a temporal disconnect and subvert homogeneous narratives of wars and peace like in the artist Walid Raad’s Atlas series?[5] Or should we consider the notebook as a site of refusal as the painter Lee Lozano’s pages have been read? Can notebooks reveal genealogies of resistance in the immediacy of notetaking and the urgency in documenting what is witnessed, such as in conflict zones?[6] The list goes on and you can fill a whole notebook. As the poet Adrienne Rich states, can we ‘reopen these notebooks with an image befitting the long, erotic, unended wrestling of poetry and politics?’[7]
un Projects invites artists, curators and writers to reflect on the notebook. Is it a witness? Is the notebook a protagonist? Is it a site of translation? Is it a mapping device? We call on artists to discuss the value of artistic notebooks in all forms; field notes, scrapbooks, digital notes, seriality of maps demarcating psycho-geographies, and the relationship between a text and an image.
- How does a notebook operate as a witness to events, sites and time?
- Can the diaristic style reveal censored truths?
- Can the notebook be a fictional device?
- What hidden translations are revealed in a notebook?
- How important is the materiality of the notebook? Does it have any sensorial experience beyond sight?
- What is the difference or similarity between a manuscript and a notebook?
- Can the notebook be relational?
- What genealogies of resistance can the notebook reveal?
Bring in your ethnographic methods, auto-ethnography, anti-ethnography, archives and counter-archives, fictional approaches and creative engagement with the notebook.
We are looking for various forms of writing and artistic pages that critically engage with such materials as notes, marginalia, in their relationship with drawings as well as their capacity to demarcate time, (counter-)geographies and otherwise unpublished notes and drawings.
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 Extended – un Projects online platform for arts writing, podcasts, and events.
Listening to the Archive by David Chesworth
Latest on un Extended: David Chesworth discusses the experimental music venue Clifton Hill Community Music Centre (1976-1984) a lively place where young artists from two distinct generations created, performed, debated and occasionally shirt-fronted each other. In a cavernous ex-organ factory, an emerging postmodernism rubbed up against counterculture aesthetics.
‘Similarly, there are no rules when it comes to listening to the everyday sounds in the world around us where we constantly engage with a vast archive—our personal mental archive—that we’ve come to know and understand. Yet, there are always some sound events we don’t immediately grasp, where our curiosity is sparked as we try to discern their context and meaning, and ultimately, whether the sound signals something threatening. As Deleuze (after Bergson) tells us, this is the zone where real thought occurs: in our case, in the gap between the incoming perception of sound and the affect, thought, and musical meaning it generates.’
Read in full on un Extended now. Edited by un Extended Editors-in-Residence Ella Howells.
Radical Hope: The Charge that Binds
‘In times like this, it can be hard to hold onto art’s significance in the broader scheme of things and easy to dismiss it as unimportant or trivial even. I don’t believe that art has the capacity to evoke social change en masse — that feels too lofty a claim, and amongst other things, social media has too far divided us and diminished our capacity for critical thought — however I do believe that when we are truly present in the gallery or engaged in dialogue there, art has the capacity to expose us to different ideas, phenomena, histories and lived experiences that might shift or at least evoke critical reflection on our perceptions of the quotidian.’
Latest on un Extended: Anador Walsh considers how exhibitions and curatorial models respond to climate emergency and where hope figures in her review of The Charge That Binds currently showing at ACCA. Edited by un Extended editors-in-residence Sofia Sid Akhmed.
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.