Sarah Low, A Wild and Fragile Coast  Brunswick Street Gallery, Fitzroy VIC 18.04.24 – 05.05.24 On Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, I run out of adjectives and exhaust all expletives. The intensity of the landscape seems to ask for nothing less than a total obliteration of the self; a sacrifice of one’s body plunging into the turbulent […]

Futures Gallery, Collingwood, VIC Alice Ramsden – Murmurations 06.04.24–04.05.24  The blue in Quiescence embodies what the title suggests: a stillness, a latency, a tenuous space between calm and activity. Fading and blending into the surrounding hues, it seems a dampened blue, reminiscent of water damage. A blue conceded, yet, also, a blue birth. A blue […]

We loved having everyone back in May part of our event responding, writing and discussing wani toaishara’s 𝙖 𝙢𝙤𝙨𝙩 𝙗𝙚𝙖𝙪𝙩𝙞𝙛𝙪𝙡 𝙚𝙭𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩 by @wanitoaishara with @westspace  Emerging writers were invited to collectively experiment through writing and reading. Over two lively hours in the gallery, we watched the work, connected with peers, made new friends, experimented with […]

For Magnetic Topographies, a social practice becomes a place-based practice becomes a compost made up of new friendships and knowledge. A practice that is playfully unassuming yet deeply anti-institutional: meet your friends, go for a walk, see what happens. 

Cache, Melbourne  Clara Joyce – Breathing and Chaos 6.4.24 – 7.4.24 I’d love you even more if you came with me. I was underway, underweight and emotionally charged entering the building. With bleached streaks and big pillows under your painting desk, I’ve followed you ever since you melted my legs, right in front of me […]

I felt completely unable to start this piece of writing. Even the slightest murmur could have salvaged my muted despair. But silence entombed me underneath this unceremonious mound of doubt, where I could only hear the hissing noise of total emptiness. Every sentence felt clunky, every thought irrelevant, every metaphor nonsensical. My world was blank […]

Roberta Joy Rich, The Purple Shall Govern, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 03 November – 31 December 2023 I enter through the PICA Hub (Activity Space). Painted purple, the room heaves with the collective grief that has amassed in the six weeks since the exhibition’s opening. “Free Gaza” is etched in chalk provided by the […]

Dream Gallery, Pakenham  Hana Earles & Anabel Robinson 27.11.23 – 07.12.23 So I’m in Pakenham, in the middle of an empty office-turned-studio, in the middle of a field, perhaps too caffeinated, and staring at some art. Audrey chaperoned the four of us up from the city in her Subaru Forester accompanied by her dog, Ruby. […]

John Nixon, Four Decades, Five Hundred Prints, Geelong Gallery Saturday 18 November 2023 to Monday 11 March 2024. The distillation of an entire artistic practice and career into four decades of prints made between 1982-2020 suggests a lens through which to focus our appreciation on just one aspect of the life of Australia’s most significant […]

Galleries: BLINDSIDE (Melbourne) Exhibitions: Alex Hobba, Cockfighter’s Ghost There is something threatening about having a wide range of interests. Information aesthetics seem poised to overwhelm you with junk. Organising quickly becomes a profession and a chore, the logics of advertising and marketing simultaneously grow more obvious and more oblique. Advertising as a discipline is predicated […]

In the lead up to un Projects’ 20 year anniversary, we hosted Language Ecologies, a day of panel discussions, readings, and performances that explored the multiple ways language and writing emerges from, and shapes, artistic practice. Situated in James Nguyen’s exhibition ‘Open Glossary’ at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Language Ecologies fostered discussions on […]

In our previous editorial for Issue 17.1 we described the decision to explore the theme RESIST before this issue’s theme of RETURN as an instinctual decision. On reflection, this is not true. Our intent in choosing both words as prompts was to understand how they manifest in creative work. We see them everywhere: in material, […]

Hana Pera Aoake Te Ao Māori[1] asks us to reflect upon the stories of our ancestors as a way of understanding how we navigate the present and understand our responsibilities in the future. For instance, the stories of the demigod and trickster Māui, whoses name means to question and challenge, changed the world with the […]

Every hour I am paid more than twice a day’s wage to put a stranger to sleep. I stroke their hair three times then kiss their forehead in reverse. They leave their body so that another might enter as the strip lights change from green to blue. Reception tells me they come here to surrender, […]

A contemplation on the alphabet of a not-so-distant future: The found debris revealed that the written word was once considered to be a form of digital code.  (data). It existed inside and outside of the computer as a made-up system of discrete differentiable units. When assembled in certain ways, the meaning of alphabetic sequences could […]

To continue, to pick up where something was left off. The prefix ‘re-’ descends from a root meaning ‘turn’ — the return is a doubling, a sitting within the previously inhabited material presence that was left and come back to. Ekphrasis enacts a close reading of an artwork through text, the formation of a double […]

Within the hallowed halls of galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM), Indigenous voices echo with stories that transcend time and space. As an Indigenous person, working within these spaces is a profound exploration into unravelling the remnants of colonial legacies, rediscovering Indigenous perspectives and championing a way to understand our now shared histories. As an […]

Remember how we were a liberation army of two? How this two was framed by a third who ensured our brattishness didn’t _______ even ourselves? How ____ framed that burning year as a performance that could have so easily been another Burning Man fiasco, and that _____ our overinvested will to immolation. That beauty belongs […]

In the nineteenth century, French philosopher Victor Cousins seeded the idea of l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake)[1], a phrase that has echoed into contemporary neo-liberal discourse to negate the need to consider politics in art encounters. However, for bodies that exist within any intersection of marginalisation and oppression, there is an understanding that […]

Walking along refinery drive down the harbourside I find three balls of steel corroded with rust, sweat and sugar. Monumental minor time dial turn anti-ode as antidote to a century and a half ago. Fiona pulls into the harbour carrying her precious cargo hand cultivated raw cane sugar precarious bodies, their coloured labour. Machines refine […]

the following is an excerpt of a poem responding to BIOGRAPHICALITY (2023) curated by Dominic Eichler at Efremidis, Berlin featuring Tony Just, Tamar Magradze, Anne Jud, Marita Liiten, Alex Müller, Xavier Robles de Medina and Stephanie Stein. This text responds to One Night Locked in S036 (1979) a portrait series and performance where Anne Jud […]