While I am admittedly prone to hyperbole, I do think editing un Extended in 2025-26 could have been the best job I’ve ever had. I asked a dozen authors to entertain and inform readers, while writing about art and artists that I personally wanted to know about. And they did it! The power went to my head. This is how Ingrid Sischy must have felt, I say to myself after I call un Projects’ General Manager Audrey Pfister and request an extra $1,000 for an additional commission (and she says ‘yes’!). This is how editing should be: no oversight, with a decadent audience of one (me). We got the photographer Phoebe Hewertson to take handsome portraits of everyone. With a little budget and a long leash, un turned me into a kind of lord of independent arts publishing.
But now the money has gone dry — not just for me, as I quickly whipped through my ten commissions — but for everyone. The un Extended Editor-in-Residence (EiR) program is not running this year because un Projects was not successful in securing funding. Makes sense. It was too excellent, too fun, too fruitful to last.
For me, un Projects is fundamentally a platform for peer-to-peer conversations. Call it an indulgence, perhaps, but a necessary one. (If you don’t have a formal publication in which you can write to your peers, all you have left is gossip). Honouring this, I wanted my un Extended program to showcase young artists and I wanted to match them with young writers. The first to answer the call was Savanna Szelski on Hugo Blomley ('Hugo Blomley’s erotics'). Szelski had a question about why Blomley’s sculptures are so sensual, but so withholding. It’s not a gotcha, but there’s a little frisson when she gets the artist to admit, 'I don't want to contaminate the works with myself.' Art historians of the future can unpick that one.
Now, it’s a small scene here in Naarm, so when I paired authors with artists, I never knew whether they were actually friends or not. Edie Duffy and Yusi Zang: friends (‘Yusi Zang interviewed’). While Tom Denize was supposed to be submitting his article on Andrea Illés’ performance, no rock, no flower at West Space (which featured a livestream locked on Illés the entire exhibition duration), I spotted Denize hanging out in Illés’ bedroom, gossiping in bed (‘You make me (Feel)’). This is fine, good even! Art history is filled with critics who have a vested interest, and much insight can be gained through personal relationships.
I still do not know the status of Maggie Kontev and Caspar Connolly’s friendship (I should have asked!) (‘Caspar Connolly, Eaves, Cache’), but I know for sure that Chunxiao Qu did not know either Lilly Skipper or her art before Qu wrote ‘Quite There, and That’s the Point: On the art of Lilly Skipper’, and I considered that pairing to be inspired. Similarly, matchmaking Amelia Winter with Nunzio Madden (‘Nunzio Madden’s bodies in trouble’) went down so smooth. As editor, I enjoyed pulling strings between two people and tying them in knots; I was the meme where you put the Barbies’ faces together and demand, 'now kiss!'.
Something similar was happening in the symposium ‘Enduring Experimental Poets’ (October 2025), an event I programmed as part of the EiR, which was held in partnership with the Melbourne School of Literature. The silos of local poetry and local visual art feel particularly distant at the moment, with very little compelling slippage between the two. Javant Biarujia, t h a l i a and Catherine Vidler have all worked for decades on unique and radical projects and, as I argued, are all ‘woefully omitted from accounts of Australian experimental art’. To a full house, presenters Brendan Casey, Ella Skilbeck-Porter, and A.J. Carruthers gave introductions to the three poets’work, while the East Melbourne Library was shaken by wild October winds.
If peer-to-peer work is a staple of un Projects, historical reflections can be somewhat neglected or circumscribed. To counter this, Loqui Paatsch made a dazzling case for the UnAustralian artist Ti Parks, someone who older artists consider central to the history of art in Naarm in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but who is now largely overlooked (‘T is for Ti Parks’). Ragnar Thomas wrote perhaps the most important response to Gertrude Contemporary’s retrospective series (Past is Prologue: Four Decades of Gertrude) in a sprawling review of Lisa Radford’s curatorial iteration, in which he asked, who has the authority to write the history of Melbourne's contemporary art (‘Nullus fumus sine igne’)?
There were two commissions that I considered central to my editorial argument. Amy May Stuart’s interview with independent archivist Liam Vaughan documents one of the most significant art historical projects currently being undertaken in Naarm, the Melbourne Art Ephemera Archive, which collects, catalogues and digitises material produced by artist-run, offsite and other non-institutional spaces (‘Melbourne Art Ephemera Archive: Liam Vaughan interviewed’). Vaughan’s project is a DIY undertaking that questions how Naarm’s independent art scene can be preserved when its existence was never meant to last.
Finally, Jarrod Zlatic’s ‘The Crank and Australian art history’ arrived to examine the channels of discontent that undergird local art history. Zlatic does this by picking apart the archetype of ‘The Crank’. Zlatic describes The Crank as a particular type of independent scholar: he (it is always a he/him) is knowledgeable, he is passionate, he is neurotic, he is unbearable. There is a thread between the underworld of local ARIs and the type of conspiratorial scholarship Zlatic describes, as he writes:
The model of the house/studio/apartment/garage/toilet/passage-way/off-site gallery, which has surged over the last decade or so, provides a stark contrast to those who operate within institutional confines. These ad-hoc galleries are compulsive acts of enthusiasm in the face of a status-quo of indifference. This might point to one of the problems for the art historian: The Crank is a surplus of enthusiasm.
Over ten essays and one public program, my EiR tied together these two threads: one devoted to independence (both artistic and scholarly) and the other to something like enthusiasm. While attempting to commission historically sound material on today’s young artists, I also wanted to examine the structures of critical negligence that make local art history so vulnerable to misunderstanding and dilapidation. The two antidotes to this condition as it stands might just be independence and enthusiasm (although perhaps these are symptoms of the disease, and not its cure). Nevertheless, un Projects itself is a living archive that works against these destructive tendencies, and for that I pledge it my undying love and affection.
Read un Projects always, and donate when you can <3
My many thanks to Audrey Pfister and Phoebe Hewertson.
Victoria Perin is an art historian and critic based in Naarm / Melbourne. She is also the Director of Keeper Print Room.