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, present and emerging.
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un Extended: Online news, reviews, interviews and discussions

Levent Can Kaya

Modernist Monstrosities or Future? A Review of Sydney Contemporary

Sydney Contemporary 2023, Carriageworks 07 -10 September, 2023 Buyers in Sydney only want one thing – paintings. This is about as much as I knew about the commercial art world before walking into Sydney Contemporary 2023. Admittedly, it is artist-run projects that I naturally gravitate towards. In our current wits-end moment where market deregulation and […]

Ella Howells

Making the Invisible Visible

Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery, Melbourne Gabriella D’Costa, Christina May Carey, Julien Comer-Kleine, Kate Wallace, and Skye Malu Baker Curated by David Sequeira and Hee Joon Youn 1 – 30 September, 2023 The bureaucrat has flown the cubicle, headed oceanside. Artist Gabriella D’Costa is in motion, departing Melbourne’s city grid on a pilgrimage for sediments […]

Vanity Project

un Podcast x Vanity Project: Toothache with Francis Carmody

Gertrude Studio Program Vanity Project Charles and Laura sit down with Gertrude Studio Artist and man who wears many hats, Francis Carmody, in a new commission for un Extended. They dive deep into Francis’ practice, and reveal the man behind the alibi. Francis’ compulsion to curiosity suits Vanity Project just fine, after all we have podcasted from far […]

Philip Brophy

Soda Jerking Pepsi

On the Jump In – Pepsi® Moments, 2017. Prologue to Soda Jerk’s Hello Dankness, 2022. In a Q&A after Soda Jerk’s screening of Hello Dankness (2022) at the Capitol Cinema for the Melbourne International Film Festival, filmmakers Dan and Dom Angeloro posed the rhetorical question: ‘Can there be satire after Kendall Jenner’s Pepsi®ad?’ Ultimately, Hello […]

Gareth Morgan

🐟🥦: big magical mood… what’s narrative to magic

FUTURES, Melbourne. never together Lara Chamas, Matilda Davis, Christopher Duncan, Evangeline Riddiford-Graham, Fiona Williams. Curated by Victoria Wynne-Jones. Looking at the appeal or influence of magic and mysticism in aesthetics today, one wonders why? Especially given that — as Mitch Therieau writes in Vibe, Mood, Energy — the language of mysticism emerged in reaction to […]

Clam & Jackie Bam

un Podcast: The Clam and Jackie Bam Show Ep. #17 w. Georgia Morgan

Gertrude Studio Program The Gertrude Studio Program is one of Australia’s most highly regarded contemporary art residencies. This year, 182 artists applied, eight were selected, and ONE sat down with Clam & Jackie Bam to eat hot chips and shoot the sh*t. Narrm’s resident PC shock jocks were delighted to chat with Georgia Morgan aka @scorpiopork about […]

Digby Houghton

Hit List

Gertrude Projection Festival X Composite Space Hit List: Greatest HitsTim Hardy, Carmen-Sibha Keiso, Gabrielle Skye Nehrybecki, Harry Hughes, Moss Lasica Wood 3rd August, 2023 It seems as though we are living in an aesthetic climate where the old is not old for very long; before style is reappropriated, refashioned and recycled into something resembling “newness”. […]

Diego Ramírez

Much better than millennials who suck more than vampires suck blood

Prompted by un Magazine’s General Manager, I attended a screening of Interview With The Vampire at ACMI with an introduction by critic and historian Dr. Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. In her introduction, Heller-Nicholas contextualised this queer coded film with the zeitgeist of the 90s and the oeuvre of Anne Rice. She also touched on the apocalyptically bad sequel Queen of […]

Paul Boyé

Editorial Feelings

This title, “Editorial Feelings”, rips off the recently published Curatorial Feelings, a collection of texts by Eloise Sweetman and co-edited by Jo-ey Tang in 2021. Tang’s editorial introduction proposes that Sweetman calls ‘out her “curatorial feelings” juxtaposes and unites the two modes of engagement: as a curator and as a sentient being.’[^1] This sentiment produces […]

Maya Hodge

Indigenous Futurisms: Kaiela Arts young creatives are at the forefront of the next generation of staunch storytelling

Kaiela Arts Shepparton Indigenous Futurisms YIRRAMBOI, 4-14 May 2023 The rustling soundscape of trees and birds, accompanied by the rich vibration of the yidaki and the flute, transported viewers into the worlds of the Kaiela Arts young creatives in a new community-led project, Indigenous Futurisms. Led by Dixon Patten, Tammy-Lee Atkinson, and Cienan Muir with […]

Natalie Thomas

Feeling the Pinch: Below the line but up for a good time – RISING on a budget

In the days before you were born, RISING was called Melbourne Festival. A sedate affair, Melbourne Festival was where the dowagers and their corporate captains of industry husbands would celebrate themselves, at exclusive invitation only opening night soirees to the ballet and the theatre. There, the high-net-worth individuals might partake in the schmooze and compare […]

Jeremy George

Good Painting

Sutton Projects Caesar Florence-Howard 27 May – 17 June Earnest pastiche. It seems like a paradox. And yet the paintings in Caesar Florence-Howard’s self-titled exhibition opening at Sutton Projects last week seem to have drawn these terms into a new formal economy. The exhibition consists of three accumulative, large-scale paintings on canvas. The three paintings, […]

daniel ward

very beautiful chemicals that produce very stylish results in people’s mental functions

Gallery: Asbestos Exhibition: very beautiful chemicals that produce very stylish results in people’s mental functions Artists: Edward Dean & Brayden van Meurs the following document is a letter from poet daniel ward written to Edward Dean and Brayden Van Meurs in response to their current exhibition very beautiful chemicals that produce very stylish results in […]

Wen-Juenn Lee

Sometimes holiness is a room; sometimes, a door

Gallery: Arts House Exhibition: Okkoota ಒಕ್ಕೂಟ What I am struck by when I enter Okkoota ಒಕ್ಕೂಟ at Arts House is the darkness.[^1] I mistake black curtains for exits and entry points, stumble into dark corners that lead nowhere. Darkness blankets vision, so that colour is renewed, broken, so that sound becomes sight. This is no […]

Vidya Rajan

Thor: Love and Thunder Costumes

Gallery: ACMI Exhibition: Thor: Love and Thunder Costumes When Runway emailed me on a cold weekday afternoon in May, I was eating a croissant — not literally of course but spiritually.[^1] I was mid-bite, and being really elegant about it too. As if I’d be anything else? Come on, this is me we’re talking about […]

Elijah Money

Movement of Unrest

Gallery: Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery Exhibition: Arthur Jafa, Unrest 7 April – 13 May I am a Wiradjuri guest on the unceded sovereign lands of the Wurundjeri peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nations. This is where I live, work, and am writing from today. I am paying my respects to Elders both past and […]

Emily Kostos

Then Sharply Turns

Gallery: Connors Connors Exhibition: Then Sharply Turns 13 April – 13 May Then Sharply Turns is one syllable short of the final line of a haiku; the prose subtly suggestive of something that has come before. The title of the third iteration of Conners Conners’ showcase of emerging Melbourne-based artists completes a dubious stanza — […]

ANZJA x un Talks

Writing for arts publications 

On the 11th of April 2023, an online conversation hosted by The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art (ANZJA) and un Projects lead a discussion on what it means to write, edit, publish, and read arts writing. Each speaker discussed their respective editorial background and approaches, converging on building shared principles around editorial support, […]

jemi gale

There is No Fire

Exhibition: There is No Fire Artist: Sab D’Souza Verge Gallery 12 – 27 January 2023. cold crying on the internetbroadcastdramatic behaviour emptyfullabsence i can’t see u in the reflection2 i don’t want to leavei want to run away there’s nothing here but my own reflection?? as a mirror missing mirror story — abandoned let down with […]

Francis Russell

Review: Mitchel Cumming at Disneyland Paris

Exhibition: Wardrobing Artist: Mitchel Cumming Gallery: Disneyland Paris In a recent piece for Artlink art historian and critic Tara Heffernan raises suspicions around the ubiquity of care discourse as a subgenre of contemporary art discourse. Heffernan observes that ‘talk of care in the arts—like earlier theories buttressing relational aesthetics—echo the benevolent language that similarly glosses […]

Jessyca Hutchens

Up close, to the edge

Exhibition: Ruu – Examination Artist: Curtis Taylor Gallery: Sweet Pea ‘Ruu is the Martu word for examination, mainly coming from the old Manyjilyjarra language’, explains Curtis Taylor. It means ‘to have a look, reveal something, or to sort of look at miscellaneous things’. It’s the day before the opening and Taylor has just unwrapped a […]

Celine Saoud

Becoming

Artist: Warsan Mohammed Curator: Anna Emina El Samad Exhibition details: SchoolHouse Gallery, 12 – 25 November The walls of SchoolHouse Gallery are painted green and brown. I catch a glimpse of this through the window of the gallery, which looks out onto the SchoolHouse parking lot from where I stand. It is the first time […]

Karl Halliday

“A body with many parts”: An interview with Channon Goodwin of Composite

Be it the embodied performances of Jill Orr and Mike Parr, VNS Matrix’s seminal cyberfeminist interventions, or Lou Hubbard’s ongoing exercises in formal deconstruction, it often goes understated just how crucial an ingredient the moving image has been in the constitution of Australian art history in the past fifty years. Looking towards the future, and […]

Lévi McLean and Chandler Abrahams

Indexed Without Order (first in display… then in  practice… then in theory): The art of the con — conceit, confidence and trickery in co(n?)panionship construction

Exhibition: To companion a companion Artist: Fernando do Campo Gallery: Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts Somewhat negentropically, it takes a moment for the meticulous repetition of motifs and formal logic to register. A tight palette sourced from archive item number 12, ‘Colour Studies’ attributed to James Fredrick Archen, is elaborated throughout the exhibition: from the […]

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