Samoa House Library was created in response to The University of Auckland’s decision to close three specialist libraries: Fine Arts, Music and Dance, Architecture and Urban Planning. As members of ‘Save the Fine Arts Library’ campaign, we organised to raise public awareness of the decision and to halt the closures. While our campaign was successful […]

It occurs to me that the bookended timeline proposed between issues 13.1 and 13.2 of un Magazine – from the fall of the Twin Towers in 2001 (the historic location around which issue 13.1 was built), to the introduction of the ‘Melbourne Model’ in 2008 (the focus for 13.2) and beyond to our current conditions […]

We’re already here, moving. We’ve been around. We’re more than politics, more than settled, more than democratic. We surround democracy’s false image in order to unsettle it. Every time it tries to enclose us in a decision, we’re undecided. Every time it tries to represent our will, we’re unwilling. Every time it tries to take […]

Australian White Ibises are better known as bin chickens to most Sydney-siders. The nickname derives from the species reliance on rubbish and public bins to sustain themselves. Ibises are naturally inclined towards a diet of insects and molluscs, but with the loss of their wetland habitats to climate change and land redevelopments, they have been […]

UCLA. Broad Art Centre. Classroom 2122. Great Expectations. A bildungsroman novel by Charles Dickens. The narrator: Pip. A retrospective narrator for a recursive structure. Recounting, with hindsight, the story of the young boy he once was. Two Pips per page, often more. For instance: older Pip remembering younger Pip thinking about his future. Identity formation […]

Whenever we establish our spaces, specifically for us, those spaces are inherently seen as threats.[^1] Joseph Cullier, cofounder of The Black School In his address to the 2018 Distinguished Alumni Awards Dinner for the University of Auckland, Fijian Pākehā artist Luke Willis Thompson described receiving his first undergraduate scholarship as ‘a moment of mobility … […]

The words below form multiple threads of preliminary thoughts shared between Joel Sherwood-Spring and Carol Que from December 2018 to August 2019. Both young academics tenuously located between the institution and their creative and political work ‘outside’, the conversation here spans lands, architectures, gentrification, and education. Joel’s words are indented and Carol’s are left aligned.[^1] […]

Serene Velocity in Practice: MC510/ CS183* (2017-19) imagines two classrooms, each based on a real course taught by adjunct lecturers in United States’ tertiary education institutions. Evangelical pastor John Wimber taught ‘MC510: Signs and Wonders’ in the School of World Mission and Church Growth at Fuller Theological Seminary between 1982 and 1986. Silicon Valley entrepreneur […]

Kym Maxwell is an artist and educator residing in the Kulin Nation of Naarm (Melbourne).

Who said it? is a tweeted intervention drawing attention to how the language of the contemporary University is little different to the language of corporate marketing. Pivoting off the imperative that the University must ‘take its place’ in a marketised world, I tweet copy from University promotional material alongside that of merchant banks, real estate […]

The following text is developed from a body of research originally produced as part of The Combative Phase, an exhibition of films and documents and a series of programs held at Yale Union (Portland, US) in 2017. Left to themselves, large communities do a dreadful job of communicating internally. Ghettoes, whether in Bel Air or […]

I suspect the art world thinks I’m ugly — maybe. This is not about a lack of swipes on Tinder or an unreturned call, it’s something else. Well, I’m just going to say it: the thing is, there’s a local photographer that did not approach me at an impressionable age to pose on camera (the […]

Curators: Kathleen Linn and Sarah Hibbs Artists: Xanthe Dobbie, Clare Longley, Loc Nguyen, Nabilah Nordin / Nick Modrzewski, EJ Son and Sophie Takách Nestled amongst the corridors and storage units of Kennards Self Storage in Ultimo, Sydney — on Gadigal and Guring-gai land — lies Potential Space. Like a lung that breathes in and expands, […]

By virtue of the grid, the given work of art is presented as a mere fragment, a tiny piece arbitrarily cropped from an infinitely larger fabric. Thus the grid operates from the work of art outward, compelling our acknowledgement of a world beyond the frame. — Rosalind Krauss, 1979. Box of Stamps, a new solo […]

why must a gown either creep or caress & not slip into both These words, rendered delicately in pink and barely visible atop exposed aggregate and polished concrete flooring, graze my soles as I enter Hannah Gartside’s Fantasies at Ararat Gallery TAMA. Autumn Royal’s poetic response references a tag from a vintage nightie that Gartside […]

a body of assumptions a mind coerced into trusting your prescribed narrative has me flattening concealing trying to be loud though pillowy lips and building blocks reverse my progress it is these marks from which resurrection trembles Over the course of their emerging career, Felix Atkinson’s artistic practice has worked towards resisting dominant frameworks of […]

Curator: Maria Morata Artists: Suzanne Treister, Pinar Yoldas, Lu Yang, Marco Donnarumma, Renaud Marchand, Yvonne Roeb, Alan Warburton For those unfamiliar with the term ‘posthuman’, Maria Morata’s curatorial project Zoextropy. The Posthuman Beauty could suggest a world filled with monstrous dystopic creations. Perhaps one might envision a spectacle, something along the lines of enthusiastic technophilia, or visions of a […]

Artist. Innovator. Feminist. Lizard. Conversation-starter. What can I say about Marina Abromalizardvic in a thousand words that can’t be gleaned from spending even a few seconds in her presence? What could I attempt to articulate, that wouldn’t be dwarfed by the flood of unspoken understanding that one feels opposite her, gazing into a face that […]

Artists: Matt Arbuckle, Sean Bailey, Lucia Canuto, Rafaella McDonald, Jahnne Pasco-White, Laura Skerlj Curators: Daine Singer and Laura Couttie In 2009 Maggie Nelson published her cult hit Bluets, a book of prose poetry exploring grief, loss and suffering via meditations on the colour blue. Nelson’s oft quoted text stands as the curatorial and conceptual inspiration […]

Exhibiting artistsCeri Hann, Danielle Freakley, Eric Demetriou, Gabriella D’Costa, Jacqui Shelton (with Alice Heyward and Megan Payne), Jake Moore, Makiko Yamamoto, Mel Deerson and Briony Galligan, MP Hopkins, Simon Zoric and Steven Rhall. PerformancesAsh Kilmartin, James Rushford and Rachel Yezbick, Jacqui Shelton (with Alice Heyward and Megan Payne) Jake Moore, Kate Brown, Mel Deerson (with […]

Nanette Orly and Sebastian Henry-Jones are two Sydney based curators who are doing things differently. Their curatorial practices are collaborative and artist-led, and for them inclusion and diversity are not simply boxes ticked but entrenched ways of working. Theirs is a subtle and destabilising activism that models a better, more dialogical way of curating across […]

Liam O’Brien’s recent screening of Empty Avenues (Best of Season 1) (2018) at Seventh Gallery was staged in a dim room with two armchairs, a wooden coffee table, a lamp and two portable heaters. As visitors entered this fabricated space, they were faced with a second living room, on screen. The set inside the film […]

On 14 February 2019, a suicide bomber drove an SUV packed with explosives into a Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) convoy in the Pulwama district of Jammu and Kashmir, killing forty CRPF troopers in one of the deadliest attacks on India’s armed forces in the past three decades. The Pakistan-based militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) took […]

This is the second of a two-part conversation series between Sophie Rose and Utility, an ongoing collaboration between sound artists Austin Buckett and Thomas Smith. You can read the first part here. Describing the project as a shared fascination with the ‘existing constellation of fake and real sounds’, Smith and Buckett draw from the seemingly-infinite […]