to carry songs: a diary        and thoughts              about language                    in fragments  : reflections from March Meeting 2025: Sharjah Biennial 16  1. Between 4 February and 10 March 2025, I went to Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab […]

I’m on the phone with the artist Edward Dean. He’s supposed to be in German class right now, but he’s ducked out early and is walking through the snow. He finds himself living in Berlin, by way of Lisbon, by way of Melbourne, originally from Albury, NSW. We’re catching up on the state of things, […]

Last November, a banana duct-taped to a wall sold for US $6.24 million. The piece, Comedian (2019) by Maurizio Cattelan, runs in a limited edition of three, the second of which having been sold for much more than its estimated value to Justin Sun, a collector and the founder of the cryptocurrency platform TRON.[1] Sun […]

What would you do if you felt exiled in a place you call home? What measures would you take if you felt excluded from the community you believe you belong to? If you found yourself with nowhere to escape to, trapped in a space where your oppressors reside, what steps could you take? How do […]

( ) // Signal: Begin with a scene   of a faded colonial signal    —road sign, farm fence, fuzzy    radio broadcast, oxidised inscription.    How does this signal connect you to the past?                     What phantom dispatches does it relay                —impossible testimony—what orders make    flesh reverb // are they written? Exhumation in brown // red: Imagine the process  […]

CIRCULAR / LINEAR / TIME  In Te Ao Māori, time is cyclical: both the beginning and end are part of the same phenomenon. The past, present and future are experienced simultaneously. The whakatauki (proverb)‘Ka mua, ka muri’ is the idea that we walk backwards into the future. It tells us that we must look to […]

We would like to acknowledge the sovereign Traditional Custodians of the land on which we live as uninvited guests, in the suburb now known as Coburg – the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Eastern Kulin Nation in Naarm. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung people of the Kulin Nation, who are the Custodians of […]

Ronen Jafari likes to cook with and for friendsJuliette Berkeley doesn’t really do anything.

On 11 December 2023, a group of artists and activists took another step in their ongoing protest at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. The group, called Te Waka Hourua, used power tools and spray paint to alter the text of an English display panel in the museum’s Te […]

Hasib Hourani and Jeanine Hourani in conversation across April – June 2024 HH: What is archive to you? What is something you’ve been doing lately that feels like a process of archiving? JH: I’ve been thinking a lot about the process of archiving recently actually. I’ve been thinking about it within a broader framework of […]

We have been sending each other drawings and letters and adding onto them. The artwork is so busy and full like a conversation with all of the words squished in together. It’s hard to talk about our friend because we miss them but because we both knew them we are sort of keeping them here […]

September 2024 I composed this editorial many times over in my head, but had trouble putting the words down. This text surmises months of thinking and of avoiding thinking. Under frameworks of Western social values, loss and grief are often siloed; only appropriate in certain circumstances. [1] Western mourning practices are marked by offering condolences, […]

In my childhood home, we had a living room that we used only for when guests visited. It was the untouched section of the house and featured a Persian-style carpet, cream leather couches, a coffee table covered with a small crochet doily, a dining table with a plastic table protector and four mahogany wall units. […]

I don’t live as an artist. Destiny Deacon, 2018 multi-dimensional     magick K’ua K’ua     Erub/Mer     woman funny     sharp     strong     communal history     politics     radio     performance photography     video     installation Thanks, Sis, for dropping the ‘c’     for us urban Blaks You gave us way to     break […]

I take my pill every morning and I observe its colour, the same pale blue used in a series of works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Loverboy, made between 1989 and 1991. Blue curtains, blue stacks of paper, blue lollies. The title suggests that the works are portraits, yet these monochromes do not depict a figure; instead, […]

Like all Indigenous people, I believe unequivocally, that my lands are the most beautiful lands in the world. My Country, Larrakia Country, is so abundant with life and beauty, gifting us astounding moments daily.  Gangly legs and knobbly knees, I’m a child standing in our backyard and watching the sky light up with radiant pink […]

Underneath the water, leaves and coins, I suspect there might be more bluestone, sitting on top of a large bed of soil of Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country. I chose to photograph this place as a way to anchor this piece, following an exercise my friend Tim Humphries shared with me earlier this year. Then he […]

The women have always danced until their skin gives out. Barefoot, my aunties lay their heels down for the final song. Their shoes rest under the table with the unclaimed tights someone has taken off. Its flesh belongs to another body of overtax and overburden and oversweat. My cousin will pick it up at the […]

18 August 2024  Dearest Zainab,  As my sister Safa and I were rushing down Sydney Road — stuck behind the 19 tram in Brunswick —  trying to make it to the last coffee shop open on a Sunday, she mentioned your cousin, Lina. How her visit in January felt like it had just happened, last […]

When reflecting on institutional archives, I found myself simultaneously hopeful and anticipatorily disappointed.  Growing up between Kerala and Kuwait during the Gulf Wars as a displaced third-culture child, I must have internalised a stock image of an animated cast of ‘working professionals’, individuals unrestrained by gender, ethnicities, mobility, ability and means, who balanced personal needs […]

September 2024 This issue takes its title from the sabaar, a cactus that once grew along the borders of now-flattened Palestinian villages. Almost impossible to eradicate, the sabaar continues to reappear and grow along those same lines, demarcating where those villages once stood.[1]  Nothing is less clear than the word ‘archive’.[2] In its most basic […]

This letter was originally penned for members of Broom and Brine’s Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. Broom and Brine operates a small organic market garden in lutruwita/Tasmania and CSA is an experimental farming methodology, pioneered by Booker T. Whatley in Alabama during the 1970s. Whatley, a horticulturist, professor and civil rights activist, encouraged farmers to […]

It was a warm summer’s day; the overly ‘fresh’ smell from the fishing boats mingled with the aroma of thousands of herded, bundled, tightly penned sheep waiting to board the next freighter. My cousins and their friends and I were sitting on, in, and around my grandfather’s boat, in the various gaps between our family […]

One squally, middling afternoon, I take a train from my home in Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Wellington up the Kāpiti coast in an attempt to recreate the conditions in which a viewer might have originally encountered the Palestinian artist Inas Halabi’s sound work Hopscotch (the Centre of the Sun’s Radiance). But ‘viewer’ is something of a misnomer. Commissioned […]