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

Archives: Articles

Rosemary Overell

Two Cups And A Jimmy’s Mince And Cheese Pie Wrapper

Artist: Jay Hutchinson ‘… and they actually still eat meat pies here! Yes – the women too … yes meat pies …’ Meat pies. That’s a little #flashbackfriday from me calling … My sister? My mother? Anyway, calling somebody after I first moved to Ōtepoti Dunedin. They still eat meat pies. Away from the spaces […]

Tristen Harwood

Memories Of Underdevelopment: Art And The Decolonial Turn In Latin America, 1960–1985

Hope seems absent when an exhibition featuring around 400 works by more than sixty artists situates decolonisation in the past. Memories of Underdevelopment: Art and the Decolonial Turn in Latin America, 1960–1985 (22 March – 09 September 2018) at Museo Jumex in Mexico City examines a shift in Latin American visual arts towards decolonial thought […]

Amy Spiers

Damaging the Damaging Machine

To be vandal is to damage what you are supposed to revere, to bring to an end what you are supposed to reproduce. If talking about sexism and racism damages institutions, we need to damage institutions. – Sara Ahmed[^1] Dismantling forms of oppression, for instance, involves a certain way of destroying what has been built […]

Sumugan Sivanesan

Marking Histories’ Discontents: Frontier Imaginaries Edition No. 5, Trade Markings

Artists: Richard Bell (with As Long As It Takes), Marcel van den Berg, Blade, Alice Creischer, Bonita Ely, Ho Rui An, Gordon Hookey, Patricia Kaersenhout, Karrabing Film Collective, Tshibumba Kanda Matulu, Tom Nicholson, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Rachel O’Reilly (with PALACE, Valle Medina & Benjamin Reynolds), Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Ryan Presley, Rammellzee, Farida Sedoc, The Otolith […]

Lucreccia Quintanilla

Salt.

Artist: Selina Thompson The thing about grief is that it is hard to place and yet there are constant reminders of it everywhere. The other thing about grief is that we are conditioned to believe that it is a transient state. What happens when the grief is carried for generations and embedded in one’s history […]

Bianca Barling-Seden

Seeing Voices

Artists: Damiano Bertoli, Erik Bünger, Catherine or Kate, Michael Cook, Fayen d’Evie and Bryan Phillips, Léuli Eshraghi, Alicia Frankovich, Susan Hiller, Alex Martinis Roe, Angelica Mesiti, Clinton Nain, Rose Nolan, Erik Bünger, Sean Dockray, Hannah Donnelly, Rosie Isaacs, Wrong Solo. Curators: Hannah Mathews, Helen Hughes and Frances E Parker. Cultural geography, language, power Anyone familiar […]

Studio

Kalinda Vary // Paralleling Emotions

Watch video here » Kalinda Vary’s practice explores ideas of emotionality, vulnerability and power, humour and humiliation, constraints of language and the problems with representations of identity. Her recent work concentrates on queer concerns of the body, performance within social structures and imposed cultural identities. In ‘Paralleling Emotions’ Kalinda discusses using humour as a tool, her […]

Jess Cockerill

Bureau of Meteoranxiety

Are you worried about the weather? Feel like the seasons are out of sync? Fretting about longer summers, strange storms, or rising sea levels? Fear not; the Bureau of Meteoranxiety (or BoMa) may have the appropriate therapy to calm your climate concerns. Perth-based multimedia artists Olivia Tartaglia and Alex Tate will be running their ‘public […]

Maddee Clark and A. Wurri

Editorial: The Unbearable Hotness of Decolonisation

Seddon cafe, Saturday morning. Red car parked nearby. Pure, unadulterated salt. Wild harvested in a collaboration of respect. A. Wurri : Decolonise your knowledge, decolonise your desire, decolonise your body, decolonise your fashion, decolonise your spice rack, decolonise your gut, decolonise your reading list, decolonise your seating arrangement, decolonise your watch, decolonise your pedagogy, decolonise […]

Tāwhanga Nopera

Watch the stars – we navigate points of light in the dark

Whakapapa is generally translated as genealogy. Whakapapa can mean to lie flat, to place in layers, to recite in order; or considered in parts as ‘whaka’ – cause to be, to become; and ‘papa’ which can mean – the Earth, or anything broad flat and hard. In te reo Māori ‘papa’ has many meanings associated […]

Megan Cope

Toponymic Interventions #1 (Gold Coast, place: Boykambil) 2013, still from Video Projection. Image courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Adric Watson

Ellen O’Brien

Beyond Remembering: The Role of Memorialisation in Decolonisation

‘Did you know Barangaroo is named after a courageous and spirited Aboriginal woman?’ So says a section of the Barangaroo website titled ‘The Stories’, the question posed above an aerial image of a glass-walled building. Barangaroo is an urban redevelopment on the harbour of what is currently called Sydney; a place where the ‘past meets […]

Rebecca McCauley

Australian landscape photography: the colonial project, the panorama, its undoing

A sunset over gentle oceans~ Bondi Beach Awakening Time-lapse shot of a waterfall~ Caressing Waters (alternatively Majestic Beauty, or, Waters of Life) The still course of a waterway,mirroring the bushland above~ River Reflections Uluru during a storm, at sunrise~ Heartland Revival People want peace in their lives and in their surroundings and nothing delivers as […]

Natasha Matila-Smith

The quiet need no defence

We were trying to blast this myth that the non-Western Other exists in a time and place that is completely untouched by Western civilization or that in order to be authentic one would have to be devoid of characteristics associated with the West. It’s reasonable to say that non-Western cultures have a better understanding of […]

Kenzee Patterson

Log somewhat overshadowed by utilitarian roof structure

Beginning in March 2016, I undertook a two-year period of practice-led research as part of a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) research degree at Sydney College of the Arts. The origin of the research project lay in a self-reflexive inquiry into my attraction to working with steel and other metals in my art practice. Through […]

Susie Anderson

beyond rewriting the story achieving Indigenous sovereignty through Virtual Reality

Our knowledge of land as its own technology is second to none. Two hundred and thirty years of adapting as necessary, often as lives depended on it, has seen us turn to other mediums. We used the tools that arrived on boats. Our storytellers use English in literature, cameras in photography, film and many other […]

Julie Gough

The Traveller

Lately I’ve started driving around Tasmania again, making another film. Since 2009 I’ve made twenty-four of them, I can’t stop. Short, long, some seem unwatchable, nevertheless they record and become a record, a counter to so much that seems missing. They are my memory work. Sometimes it is hard to start, to reverse out of […]

Georgina Watson

Larks in the dawn

Georgina Watson currently lives in Tāmaki Makaurau and has recently completed an MFA at Elam School of Fine Arts. Recent projects include ‘Haughty Skies’ in Distracted Reader #3, Auckland, forthcoming (2018), Anxious Garden, Enjoy Gallery, Wellington (2017), Pack Lite Organised by Stella Corkery, NY, LA, Auckland (2017) ‘Collective Fruits’ in Wormhole, Melbourne (2016), amongst others. […]

Beth Sometimes and Lorrayne Gorey

Angkentye arle akngerrele

Lowlee: Can we just talk like now and you can record or…?  Beth: Yeah yeah yeah OK I’m recording now  Lowlee: Ye, kele.  Beth: Ye, ka…  Lowlee: Werte!  Beth (laughs): Werte! Ayenge Arrernte akweke ware akaltye-irre….ke, no – how do I say it in the past tense?  Lowlee: Ke  Beth: ke, akaltye-irreke, akweke ware, ke […]

un Projects

Singing the Archive – presenting Ara Irititja

What you are about to read is a demonstration of Ara Irititja given at the International Australian Studies Association (InASA) Conference in December 2016.[^1] In the darkened lecture theatre, a clip from the Ara Irititja archive is projected onto the wall. It shows old people including Rene Kulitja’s father Walter Pukutiwara performing inma at a […]

Fran Edmonds, Jessica Bennett and Lily Graham

‘Places’ of belonging: Korin Gamadji Institute, the Sovereignty exhibition and contemporary Aboriginal youth culture

In southeast Australia the Aboriginal population is young; more than fifty percent are under twenty-five-years old. Yet, Aboriginal young people in Victoria remain a minority within the broader community. Many have limited opportunities to engage in programs reflecting their everyday experiences or to identify with others from similar backgrounds. The following is a conversation between […]

Steven Rhall

Timmah Ball

Kate Leah Rendell

An unsettled Settler response to Open Cut

Settlers Miners Same Thing – Jacky Green Although I know Aboriginal sovereignty as always present, embedded within country, I find my strongest encounters with specific sovereignties of place often occur in unexpected moments – like a bolt of remembering – chanced upon in the presence of a scar tree or a reference found deep within […]