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reflects on the notebook — as witness, a site of translation, a mapping device, a tool to demarcate time and otherwise unpublished notes and drawings.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.
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 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.
Subscribe below to get your print copy delivered straight to your door!
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.
Subscribe below to get your print copy delivered straight to your door!
un Extended – un Projects online platform for arts writing, podcasts, and events.
right: Ephemera documents being sorted for archiving.
Melbourne Art Ephemera Archive: Liam Vaughan interviewed
by Amy May Stuart
Melbourne Art Ephemera Archive was established by Liam Vaughan in 2020, with a specific focus on collecting and cataloguing materials produced by artist-run, offsite and other non-institutional spaces. These documents consist of roomsheets, flyers, posters, social media posts, essays and so on, which often fall outside the remit of larger institutional collecting practices. Yet these are the records art historians will need, in ten or twenty years, when they are attempting to recover what the grassroots artworld was like. As a long-time, chronic ephemera hoarder, I sat down to chat with Vaughan about the Archive’s genesis, function and why it’s important.
You make me (Feel)
by Tom Denize
‘In the lead up to her first major solo show no rock, no flower at West Space, a lot of what Illés and I have discussed is the flattening of performance that occurs post-factum — whether that be through the documentation, conversation or writing (as I am now doing).’
Edited by our un Extended Editor-in-Residence Victoria Perin.
Nullus fumus sine igne
by Ragnar Thomas
‘How are the increasingly distinct artistic fields of the institutional and the offsite, to negotiate their shared histories and practices? Though oppositional in many respects, recent years have seen variously successful attempts at refolding. Melbourne is a small ecosystem, naturally many shed artists trickle down and find a place at Gertrude at some point or other.’
Ragnar Thomas dissects Gertrude Contemporary’s anniversary exhibition, commissioned and edited by un Extended Editor-in-Residence, Victoria Perin.
T is for Ti Parks by Loqui Paatsch
‘We can work around Parks and fit him in … compare him with the clunking literal puns of Aleks Danko, or the sexy (albeit in a Carry On, ‘ooh nurse!’ way) pop endeavours of fellow Brits-down-under Michael Shaw and Pat and Richard Larter, fellow furry Kathy Temin, the laminate patterns of Constanze Zikos. Or perhaps use him as a key to unlock the weird and wonderful work of Lou Hubbard, or Josh Petherick and Lewis Fidock’s meticulous oddities, the sinister camp rubbish of Alex Vivian, or the tortured macho Dada of Jamie O’Connell’s Car Spa.’
Loqui Paatsch makes a case for the influential artist-visitor Ti Parks (Australia, 1964-1974), and draws a potential lineage that still echoes today.
Edited by un Extended Editor-in-Residence, Victoria Perin
Hugo Blomley’s erotics by Savanna Szelski
Victoria Perin starts her un Extended Editor-in-Residence 2025 with a piece from painter and conservator Savanna Szelski who profiles the Naarm-based early-career sculptor Hugo Blomley.
‘The materials themselves, epoxy, resin and fibreglass all contain toxic chemicals. To that list the artist adds himself: “I don’t want to contaminate the works with myself”.’
Read the piece in full here.
Life is Crazy: Catching up with Edward Dean by Ella Howells
Ella Howells wraps up her time as an un Extended Editor-In-Residence 2024, conducts an intercontinental interview with artist-at-large Edward Dean:
Dean: ‘In Australia there’s the orthodoxy of going big or going home. You have to make a spectacle and it’s not questioned as to why it is that way, and in Germany it feels like there’s the orthodoxy of making a little grey square, hardly producing anything and that’s not ever questioned. I would obviously opt towards more bravado, I think that’s cool.’
Howells: ‘An Icarus moment, or something.’
Read the piece in full here.
Sofia Sid Akhmed wraps up her time as an un Extended Editor-In-Residence 2024 with a conversation between Roukaya Hassoun and Celine Skaf on what it means to be an art translator.
‘My challenge with Yumna’s book was in conveying the tone without sounding too rigid or literal in Arabic. There’s a lot of poetry, tenderness and fierceness in her words. I wanted to carry all of that across with minimal sacrifice – loss being unavoidable when shifting from one language to another. The choices I had to make with this work were stark but these decisions often are. I can’t escape the idea of art as a delicate balance between beauty and meaning, and so is art translation.’
Read 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.