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reflects on the notebook — as witness, a site of translation, a mapping device, a tool to demarcate time and otherwise unpublished notes and drawings.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 Projects x Firstdraft Writers Program – now live!
The Firstdraft x un Projects Writers Program supports emerging writers to develop new critical texts in response to contemporary art, offering financial support and publication opportunities. Our 2025-6 recipients were Emily Hubbard with ‘Nothing To Lose But Your Lanyards! Reflections On Unionising At An Art Gallery’ and Amaara Raheem ‘Protected: Sick Witch Recites | The Greater Mandala of Uselessness’. Read them live on un Extended now!
We’re celebrating the launch of these two texts at Firstdraft in Wooloomooloo, Gadigal/Sydney, Saturday 14 February 2026 from 2pm. Hope to see you there!
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 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.
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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.