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 […]

We are sitting on a bench in Ivan Franko Park in Lviv. The leaves on the trees shimmer like sequins, reflecting the midsummer sun, the shade provides relief from the heat, as do the iced drinks we are sipping. We have spoken about family, about politics, about the war, about the future. We talk about […]

cold morning in 2021 I first heard Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s ‘Ceist na Teangan’ read aloud on a podcast three years ago, mid-winter. It was read in Irish and then as Berla (in English). This is the moment that led me to learn Irish. 4 August 2024 I read Ní Dhomhnaill’s poem aloud as Gaeilge on […]

The Listening to the Archive website is a collection of music performances, along with associated recordings, posters, and publications, from events held regularly at the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre (CHCMC) between 1976 and 1983. Also known as the Organ Factory—named after the community-run building that housed the centre—CHCMC became a space for experimentation in music, […]

Translation is like trying to hold the wind. You can feel it, but you can’t keep it. In a captivating conversation with Celine Skaf, a translator and interpreter, we delve into the emotional landscapes that emerge when art is transmitted across languages. Skaf shares her journey through film, poetry, and visual art, revealing how these forms shape her translation practice.

In a world teetering on the brink of social and climate collapse, “The Charge that Binds” at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art offers a glimmer of hope. This exhibition challenges dominant narratives and amplifies the voices of the historically marginalised, intertwining art with urgent conversations about identity, colonisation and ecological crisis. Through immersive installations and collaborative works, the show invites audiences to reflect on our interconnectedness with the planet and each other. As we confront the looming specter of fascism and environmental degradation, this exhibition emerges as a radical act of collective resilience and a call for transformative change.

A pseudo-fictional review of Lovefool and AdminAdmin Issue #1 at Strawberry, 2024 1996: it was the summer before sixth grade. It was also the summer Jill Bates told my friend John she wanted to give him a handjob. None of us had gotten a handjob before and even less of us knew what it actually […]

Co-curated by Olivia Koh and Nadia Refaei. Friday 18 October 2024, Naarm/Melbourne and Nipaluna/Hobart. This short film program, Collection (spell), is co-curated by un Magazine guest editors Nadia Refaei and Olivia Koh (recess), the current editors of incoming issues 18.3 Sabaar and Other Counter Archives and 18.4 good grief. This screening took place concurrently in […]

When we founded the Melbourne Sculpture Biennale, I was inspired by the DIY culture in our artistic community and the rich history of artist-led projects, as well as a new wave of young art graduates who are starting various project spaces. There is this fertile ground in Melbourne right now. People seem to be taking on different kinds of projects and running with them. That, for me, was the catalyst as well as my personal interest in sculpture.

In 1974 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released That’s Entertainment! to celebrate the studio’s 50th anniversary which now, in 2024, marks its 100th year centenary. Perhaps to echo the film’s status as a proto-highlight reel anticipating a legacy, the exhibition of the same name at Animal House is a dedication to Yusi Zang, Tim Woodward, Beth Maslen, Chris Madden, […]

The Possibilities Are Immense: Fifty Years of the George Paton Gallery comes at a transitional moment for the University of Melbourne’s student gallery, also known as the GPG. In 2022, the GPG moved out of the decrepit old asbestos-riddled student union building and into the new student ‘precinct,’ a conglomerate of sinewy grey concrete, golden […]

Housed within Buxton Contemporary, The same crowd never gathers twice is an exhibition with a curious title. It initially provoked me to think of moments when I found myself situated within crowds, organised or not, such as the dinner table, the food court or a tram stop. And how fleeting the configurations of crowds are, […]

Travelling north on the 86 for the group exhibition Five rooms and house rules at Bundoora Homestead Arts Centre, I find myself playing a kind of phrase association to see how frequently I can think of different idiomatic uses of ‘house’ and ‘home’. For the most part, the ‘home’ sayings encircle the same kind of […]

Last month, GPU manufacturer NVIDIA’s share prices tumbled by nine-point-five per cent, representing the greatest loss in market value in one day for any company ever at a loss of 279 billion dollars 1. The GPU is the primary technology that powers AI, and harnessed en masse allows for inference to be conducted at industrial […]

Dylan Marriott REMEMBER THE DARKNESS Gallery Notturno, 259 Elizabeth Street, Melbourne  23 June – 27 July 2024 Wake up, put on pants and catch the tram into the city. At the intersection of Elizabeth and Lonsdale street, cross over. Keep walking. You will see a brown dog near the entrance to the Emporium. It will […]

Đây Thôn Vĩ Dạ by Hàn Mặc Tử Sao anh không về chơi thôn Vĩ?Nhìn nắng hàng cau nắng mới lên.Vườn ai mướt quá, xanh như ngọcLá trúc che ngang mặt chữ điền. Gió theo lối gió, mây đường mây,Dòng nước buồn thiu, hoa bắp lay…Thuyền ai đậu bến sông trăng đó,Có chở trăng về kịp […]

un Projects and MUMA presents…  US-based cultural theorist Catherine Liu, Professor of Film & Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class, for a lecture on the rise of trauma culture and its historical transition from private suffering into public life. Liu examines […]

un Projects is coming to Meanjin/Brisbane this Saturday! ‘Care, Who Cares? is a one-day symposium hosted by @griffithuniversityartmuseum and @ima_brisbaneexploring the murky notion and rhetoric of care, coinciding with the exhibition ‘Duty of Care’. Incoming un Magazine guest editors Tara Heffernan (18.1 Badaud) and Joel Sherwood Spring (18.2 After-care) will be presenting respectively, and we […]

Friday 16 August 6pm Featuring curator Aziz Sohail in conversation with artists Thang Do and Mandeep Singh. Followed by readings from artist Parminder Kaur. Alongside these readings and conversation, artist Andrea Illés will be performing her evolutive work, sorry I was so hungry. From 4pm, Illés will be visible from a humble computer screen, sitting […]