Call for proposals – un Magazine 20.2: The Leftovers– guest edited by Jessyca Hutchens
The title of this issue is foremostly a reference to the three-part HBO television series, The Leftovers (2014-17) adapted from a novel by Tom Perotta, where roughly 2% of the world’s population suddenly and inexplicably disappear. The main characters chart a course through a world being re-shaped by new but familiar responses to collective trauma — nihilistic cults, charismatic leaders and conspiracy theories; self-help, self-diagnosis, and self-harm; mystical visions and psychosis; experimental therapies, sham technological panaceas and calls to return to order. A major arc of the third series plots a journey into ‘Aboriginal Australia’, with a knowing performance by the late David Gulpilil, who calms down one of the central characters’ fantastical projections onto Indigenous people as holding prophetic answers to humanities distress. The part is almost a perfect inversion of Gulpilil’s role in Peter Weir’s dystopian The Last Wave (1977). Instead of the white guy saviour being able to tap into Indigenous spiritual power, the old man is simply given some much needed care and brought back down to earth.
This is what it humbly means to occupy a leftover position — neither a return to mythical, irrecoverable ‘origins’, nor a form of dismantling the old and starting over — but a kind of working with what you’ve got. Maybe I am oddly nostalgic for this middlebrow ‘prestige tv’ era artefact as a melodramatic yet sincere grappling with a world that was just then on the brink of the post-truth era and pre-pandemic, imagining an ‘event’ that would fragment the world into ever finer-grained more recalcitrant communities, gathered around personal pathology or global conspiracy.
By this time, many of the well-worn artistic approaches to working with traces of loss and repressed history and trauma — institutional critique within museums, postcolonial poetics, the artist as historian or archivist, re-enactment (Schneider) — had already perhaps started to feel sombre and outpaced by the great weirding of the world and its intensified collapsing of shared senses of reality (namely, because, the old institutions now caricatured themselves). Like a good film noir, The Leftovers refuses a satisfying solution to its central mystery; humbles the egos and personal ‘copes’ of its protagonists; and throws everyone back into the tangled mess of an unreal world, scrambling to hold the threads of the past.
In terms of the leftovers to be explored in this issue: artistically and theoretically, what are we drawing from to get us through another day? What are the strange returns and re-runs and do they help us keep pace with the world? Have we made something worth consuming again or have we just gotten lazy? What are cogent modes of refusal and what are retreats? How do we chaotically hold together without projection, control, or neo-primitivism? Of relevance might be theories and practices of relational autonomy and self-determination; undercommons (Moten and Harney), survivance (Vizenor), fugitivity, adjacency (Campt). Maybe back to Derrida yet again — remnants, remainder, trace. I’ve started to mull over the phrase inhabiting the trace for a while now — because it speaks to a way of living and grappling with traces of the past (absent-presences) as dynamic everyday surplus forces rather than as nostalgic, lost, or repressed objects. What is ours to pick-up and share and what tastes good tomorrow?
News:
In collaboration with local publications, a select work from un Magazine will be read during Soft Stir’s Soft Listening event as part of the Melbourne Art Book Fair. Soft Listening reimagines contemporary print publications as a live literary soundscape. Join us Thursday the 14th of May at Tender Place in Brunswick 6-9pm, and at the NGV Art Book Fair the following weekend. RSVP here.
KINGS x un Projects: Emerging Writers Program 2026
Over the program, each EWP writer will produce and publish the two texts outline above: a KINGS exhibition text-response, and a review to be published on un Extended.
Writers will receive ongoing mentoring, peer-to-peer feedback and editorial assistance towards the publication of these texts. Writers will receive a fee for the un Projects
Applications are due by Wednesday, 6th May 2026, 11:59pm. Apply here.
Out now: un Magazine We Swear We Saw This. Drawings about notebooks and notebooks about the Wor(l)ds.
19.2 We Swear We Saw This, guest edited by Azza Zein reflects on the notebook — as witness, a site of translation, a mapping device, a tool to demarcate time and otherwise unpublished notes and drawings. Inside you’ll find Articles that explore the variety of methodologies found in artists’ and writers’ notebooks. 📔 Including historicism on Australian painter Bea Maddock, Palestinian artist Nahil Bishara, New Zealand Choreographer Douglas Wright, American modernist poet H.D, and conceptual artist Lutz Bacher. You’ll find artist pages with sketches of Nubia, carrier pigeon portraits, familial scrapbooking, surreal playing cards and notebook neologisms. Reflections on local projects from Dandenong’s ‘HOME 25’ exhibition, to Launceston’s ‘Portrait of Community’ at Sawtooth ARI. The notebooks you will encounter here, Zein writes, are an assemblage of… wandering lines: some resilient insertions, some playful, some occulted, some caring and reparative.
Contributions by Menna Agha, Mya Cole, Carlos Eduardo Morreo, Marcela Alejandra Gómez Escudero, Joyce Joumaa, Tina Stefanou, Miriam La Rosa, Sunny Lei, Laura Luciana, Hugh Magnus, Marcus McKenzie, Thomas Moran, Georgia Mulholland, Zoë Sadokierski, Zara Sully & Lisa Roberts and Toyah Webb.
Designed by Dennis Grauel & Zenobia Ahmed.
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un Magazine 19.1: Resonant imaginaries and sound clashes: contemporary – political – disruptive – polyrhythmic ed. Lucreccia Quintanilla.
Featuring contributions on experimental walking radio work, polyrhythms and singeli music, decolonising legacy sound art, Taiwanese noise scenes, ecological-focused sound workshops, and more from:
Samuel Beilby, Ross Bolleter & Eduardo Cossio, Daisy & Nicholas Currie, Suneel Jethani, Nadeem Tiafau Eshraghi & Ripley Kavara, Anabelle Lacroix, Wen Pei Low, Justine Makdessi, mgmgmgmg, Victoria Pham, Geoff Robinson, Hayden Ryan, Edwina Stevens, Shareeka Helaluddin & Aasma Tulika, and Hannah Wickramasuriya.
Designed by Dennis Grauel & Zenobia Ahmed.
Order your copy by subscribing to un Magazine online today, or by making a one-off purchase below!
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 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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un Extended – un Projects online platform for arts writing, podcasts, and events.
Caspar Connolly, Eaves, Cache
by Maggie Kontev
After the recent passing of the French minimalist composer Éliane Radigue, I came across an image of her in circulation. Taken in Nice in the late 1950s, Radigue is photographed holding a spikey conch shell to her ear. In a 2011 Frieze interview with the Australian sound artist Paul Schütze, the composer describes her sound and art as being spaces, ‘conch shells in which the audience [is] placed – as if they are inside the body of an instrument’. While contemporary sound art often involves the all-encompassing effect of submersion, as in the work of Marco Fusinato, Ryoji Ikeda or Holly Herndon, Caspar Connolly’s exhibition Eaves at Cache uses the conch to subtly attune the viewer, inviting them to lean in and seek out the sound.
Read the piece in full here
Nothing To Lose But Your Lanyards! Reflections On Unionising At An Art Gallery
by Emily Hubbard
It’s been ages since I first worked in the arts but it’s something that I often reflect on. In recent times, it has become apparent how cultural institutions and creative festivals’ main objective is not to benefit the broader public to engage, learn and be creative, but rather, are operated for the benefit of the rich and powerful. For artists and arts workers, it can feel like a lonely and hopeless industry where you just keep gritting your teeth, biting your tongue and showing up to keep the often questionable shows on the road. And while my experience of working in the arts was defined by juggling casual employment, navigating nepotism and pouring free drinks at VIP opening events, the lessons I learnt from the industry are as inspiring as they are deflating.
Read the piece in full here.
Sick Witch Recites | The Greater Mandala of Uselessness
By Amaara Raheem
Gunyang / Midsummer
This is a spell to reverse the night.
This is a spell to enter the archive.
This is a spell to tell the story – again.
On the longest day of the year, when the Sun King was at the end of his youth, I went to the Imaging Service Centre in Camberwell, sat by myself in a small room that could easily be mistaken for a cupboard and waited to be called for an ultrasound. I took off my yellow corduroy skirt and undid the shell buttons of my brown silk shirt. I put on the white hospital gown they gave me but I kept wearing my gold sandals. I looked in the mirror and thought how healthy I glowed on this midsummer day. My skin was clear, my eyes were bright and my hair shimmered like a soft storm cloud. I nodded and smiled at the woman in the looking glass. She nodded and smiled back.
Read piece in full here.
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.