Call out for proposals 21.1 Autodidactism ed. Paul Boyé:
We’re excited to announce our call out for proposals un Magazine 21.1 AUTODIDACTICISM guest edited by Paul Boyé.
If the 20th century was the age of the promethean — the hubris of which is epitomised by the 1968 Whole Earth Catalogue’s purpose statement : ‘we are as gods and might as well get good at it’ — then the 21st century has been a failure of the bootstrap in two senses. First, our weary hands slipping at each bootstrap-pull attempted and secondly, to borrow from the computational definition, a dusty kernel of techno-optimism that is failing to reboot the system.
Within the western context at least, the last one hundred years or so places the figure of the autodidact — someone who learns skills through self-teaching or informal education — in the middle of several contradictions. The academic and elitist establishment traditionally patronises the autodidact as incomplete, one who may be able to perform skillfully in any given field, but lacks the moral and cultural capacity for judgment and greater purpose. On the other hand, the technocratic middle-class emerging from the industrial society of the US valued invention, enterprise and the ‘self-made man’. Here, the elite academy is represented as a boorish timewaste, distrustful and a bulwark to private enterprise.
The endgames of such contradictions, otherwise known as ‘neoliberalism’, has led to a devaluing of state education and the forum of public intellectualism more broadly, and replaced it with a contrived entrepreneurial drive that treats thought and creativity as venture for small business start-up and influence. What then remains of our sputtering engines of self-development? Is there anything salvageable from the fading ideals of alternative education, knowledge-sharing and DIY?
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We are seeking all kinds of submissions from arts criticism essays, artwork pages, interviews, artist profiles, exhibition reviews, and more!
un Magazine 20.1: Stones & Circuits: Art, AI, and the More-Than-Human Commons:
Meet un Magazine 20.1: Stones & Circuits: Art, AI, and the More-Than-Human Commons.👀
Guest edited by V Barratt and Julianne Pierce (VNS Matrix), this issue brings together artists, writers and thinkers imagining technology beyond extraction, surveillance and corporate control.
Through anti-racist, decolonial and transfeminist perspectives, Stones & Circuits explores the commons as a way of building different futures—where art isn’t just responding to technology, but actively reshaping it.
Featuring contributions from Thomas Capogreco & Nū, Dave Court & Jennifer Mathews, Francesca da Rimini, Xanthe Dobbie, Amit German, Katy Ilonka Gero, Sarah Kantrowitz & Petja Ivanova, Suzanne Kite, Angela Ka Ki Lee & Chris Tegho, Make or Break, OMSK Social Club, Lexei Sasha Salpeter, Mara Schwerdtfeger, Tayer, Bianca Tainsh, and Jemimah Widdicombe.
When you subscribe to un Magazine, you’re not just getting a magazine — you’re helping sustain critical art writing, experimental ideas, and independent voices that simply wouldn’t exist otherwise. Help keep independent art publishing alive.
Join us at Season for the NSW launch of un Magazine 20.1: Stones & Circuits: Art, AI & The More-Than-Human Commons. On Thursday 24th September you can grab a copy of your own! We will celebrate with drinks and readings from anti-racist, decolonial and transfeminist perspectives by local contributors Amit German, Katy Gero, Make or Break + Andrea Lim, and Maya Schwerdtfeger. The timely new issue, guest edited by V Barratt and Julianne Pierce (of VNS Matrix) features writing that explores the commons as a way of building different futures—where art isn’t just responding to technology, but actively reshaping it.
Featured speakers/performers include:
Amit German (they/she) is an interdisciplinary trans artist working across performance, video and sound, drawing from research, work and lived experience at the intersection of linguistics, psychology, speech pathology, disability and trans community care. Their practice is shaped by non-institutional approaches to learning and making, developed through necessity, experimentation and collaboration (running without instructions).
Katy Ilonka Gero is a poet, essayist, and computer scientist. Her work explores the role of computation in the writing process. Her first book of poetry, The Anxiety of Conception (Nothing to Say Press, 2025), investigates the reordering of memories. Recently she became a Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Sydney.
Make or Break Bec Gallo and Connie Anthes devise and experiment with process-based projects that are often co-authored with other people, communities, systems, and things. They will be joined by their collaborator, Andrea Lim! Andrea Lim is an interdisciplinary artist working across performance and sound. Her current practice complicates the subject matter of morality in today’s socio-political climate.
Mara Schwerdtfeger is a composer and curator based in Sydney on Gadigal Country.
Free. All welcome. Season ARI
3a Joynton Avenue
Zetland, 2021, NSW
Don’t miss this special evening!
RSVP or grab your copy today! ⋆˚࿔
Coming soon:
Same Page Art Book Fair (Naarm/Melbourne)
24–25 October, 2026
Presented by Gertrude and Perimeter, Same Page features stalls, book launches, and public programs to platform a curated network of imprints, publishers, and distributors dedicated to supporting artists, writers, and thinkers. Held annually since 2023 in Naarm/Melbourne, this bespoke art book fair is a community-focused event that showcases the practices of small presses and collective efforts in contemporary art publishing.
21-31 High St
Preston, VIC 3072
Overprint Art Book Fair (Gadigal/Sydney)
Sunday 8th November, 10-4pm
Join us at the inaugural Overprint Art Book Fair to celebrate the richness of art books in their many forms! Run by Ruby Powell-Hughes (Always Friends ©) and Matt Dunne (Tall Poppy Press, MEL Photobook Fair), this event brings together atelier publishers, independent presses, self-publishers, zine makers, designers and artists in Sydney.
Harold Park Community Hall
1 Dalgal Way
Forest Lodge, NSW 2034
un Projects needs your support…
Independent arts publishing is in a precarious place right now as funding shrinks, costs rise, and spaces for rigorous, independent, artist-led writing disappear.
For over two decades, artists, writers and readers have helped shape un Projects into one of Australia’s long-running independent art publishing platforms for quality discourse.
Now we’re asking for your support as we operate in 2026 without annual local and state funding…
Every contribution — big or small — directly supports artist fees, writer commissions, editorial mentorship, and free public programming. Critical writing needs critical support.
If you want thoughtful, independent arts discourse to continue existing in Australia, please help sustain it. We can’t do this without our readers support.
What does your donation support?
$100 → pays it forward, buying un Magazine for those who can’t afford it
$250 → pays a speaker
$500 → commissions a writer
$800 → helps run a public program
$1000 → supports an editor
Whether it’s $20, $50 or $500, every donation directly supports the people who make independent arts publishing possible.
>>Donations are tax deductible.<<
💌 Support un Projects today! 💌
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.
Order your copy by subscribing to un Magazine (you’ll be the first to receive it!), 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 18.1 Badaud x 18.2 After-care
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.
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.
un Extended – un Projects online platform for arts writing, podcasts, and events.
Review: Ngarn Wa’ngal: Art of the Gum Tree
by Victoria Mathison
‘‘Castrated, broken, a thing wronged’
— Oodgeroo Noonuccal, 1960, Municipal Gum
This month I was reminded of the folding powers of grief and of its parsimonious insistence that time does not stop in the way that it should; that life, albeit changed, does and must go on. Displaced by the awareness of this unsolvable wound, I walk to the Potter Museum of Art along the residential flank of Lygon Street and pass a gum tree packed in with bitumen. Lopped branches lie at its roots as if beheaded; the leaves still a virile green — preternaturally greener still for the white lacquer backdrop of a Holden Captiva. Above, a length of telephone wire seems to account for the amputation.
Read the 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.