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.
This AusArt Day we’re raising funds to bring back un Extended’s Editor-in-Residence program — a paid opportunity that gives emerging arts writers the time, editorial freedom and support to produce ambitious new writing about Australian contemporary art.
Every donation contributes toward the reinstatement of this program: paying an Editor-in-Residence, commissioning writers, providing editorial mentorship, and publishing new reviews on un Extended.
By platforming dialogue between emerging artists, curators, and writers, we seek to ensure that Australian art is documented and discussed.
If you’re in a position to give, a tax-deductible donation to un Projects will directly support our next season of publishing, editorial mentorships, commissioning writers and programming.
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 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 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.
