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.
un Projects

un Anthology 2014-2024

Our 20th unniversary publication is here! šŸ“¦

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 youā€™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 youā€™ll find pieces on NGVā€™s coin pond, sustainability and arts organisations; efforts to Return Lee Point to Larrakia people; living Irish language, Coburgā€™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

Black and white photo on purple paper of a performance with four women lying on the floor and one male hunched over them.

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 RamĆ­rez, Nadia Demas + roxxy marsden.

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Black and white photo on purple paper of two people in front of a TV in a gallery, turned to each other.

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 LĆŖ, Aimee Dodds, Sam Beard, Eugene Hawkins, Francis Russell, Alexandra Peters & Carmen-Sibha Keiso.

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Upcoming events:

un Magazine 18.1/2 Naarm launch šŸø 

With our physical magazine copies finally in our hands weā€™ve decided to celebrate with a Naarm launch with some un Talks: contributor readings!

18.1 BADAUD ed. Tara Heffernan
18.2 AFTER-CARE ed. Joel Sherwood Spring

6-8pm Wednesday | 26 February at West Space, Collingwood Yards, 30 Perry St, Collingwood VIC, Wurundjeri Country.

Readings from: Elyssia Bugg, Eugene Hawkins, Vincent LĆŖ, Diego RamĆ­rez, & Joel Sherwood Spring (NSW)! šŸ«£

The launch event is held in West Space’s exhibition ā€˜The place we do not know is the place we are looking forā€™. Of which 18.2 guest editor Joel Sherwood Spring and contributor Suvani Suri are both in.

Our double edition 18.1 Badaud X 18.2 After-Care is one of our most interesting and bold yet, with pieces on: art criticism and the capitalist subject, outsider art, American portrait photography, AI Safetyism, art vandalism, the cooption of politicised language, and profiles of Australian artists Tim Johnson, Tim Burns and Unbound Collective, and more! 

Come along to West Space in Collingwood Yards on Wurundjeri Country, to celebrate with drinks, snacks and readings, and importantly ā€” grab yourself a physical copy of the magazine!

This event is free to attend and wheelchair accessible, if you require auslan or have any other access requirements please get in touch with un Projects. 

Supported by City of Yarra.

See you next week!

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.ā 

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 AdelĆØ Sliuzas (SA);

ā€˜Khaled Sabsabiā€™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. Sabsabiā€™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. Sabsabiā€™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.ā€™

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 Sabsabiā€™s statement, and the letter from the five shortlisted Venice Biennale artists and curators and join over 3000+ people signing Memo open letter.

#reinstatekhaled

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. 

ā€˜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 archiveā€”our personal mental archiveā€”that weā€™ve come to know and understand. Yet, there are always some sound events we donā€™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.ā€™

Read in full on un Extended now. Edited by un Extended Editors-in-Residence Ella Howells.

Francis Carmody, Laschamp cycles: Aurora I 2024; Laschamp cycles: Aurora II 2024, installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Commissioned by Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Courtesy the artist. Photograph: Andrew Curtis.

Radical Hope: The Charge that Binds

ā€˜In times like this, it can be hard to hold onto artā€™s significance in the broader scheme of things and easy to dismiss it as unimportant or trivial even. I donā€™t believe that art has the capacity to evoke social change en masse ā€” that feels too lofty a claim, and amongst other things, social media has too far divided us and diminished our capacity for critical thought ā€” 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.ā€™

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.