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

Lily-rose Pouget

The Sacrosanct Act of Banality

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 Elizebeth and Lonsdale street, cross over. Keep walking. You will see a brown dog near the entrance to the Emporium. It will […]

James Nguyen

Searching for Hàn Mặc Tử

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 […]

Caitlin Dear

Tethering the Ephemeral: Angela Goh’s Body Loss as precedent for the acquisition of dance

Somewhere there is a Siren. Beginning with the utterance of a single note,  she listens for the return of her own voice.  She responds with the same note again,  and again, echoing into an endless chorus,  a swarm, a sea, a body. Her voices  fill the room with an ethereal presence,  escaping into the world, […]

Chris Madden

Modes

In reflecting on the varied approaches to furniture engaged by artists, designers and architects, the cultural and social contribution of furniture is evident. However, architecture’s urge to respond and engage with the modern socio-political conditions has become more present.

Kannitha Lim

Responding to Marion Harper: Restless Encounter

In reflecting on the varied approaches to furniture engaged by artists, designers and architects, the cultural and social contribution of furniture is evident. However, architecture’s urge to respond and engage with the modern socio-political conditions has become more present.

Camille Orel

Returns to Burn — a review of Ian Burn: Collected Writings 1966-1993

In reflecting on the varied approaches to furniture engaged by artists, designers and architects, the cultural and social contribution of furniture is evident. However, architecture’s urge to respond and engage with the modern socio-political conditions has become more present.

Dalton Stewart

The Architecture, Furniture Paradigm

In reflecting on the varied approaches to furniture engaged by artists, designers and architects, the cultural and social contribution of furniture is evident. However, architecture’s urge to respond and engage with the modern socio-political conditions has become more present.

Jake Starr

A Haunted House at the End of the World: Biennale of Sydney at the White Bay Power Station

24th Biennale of SydneyTen Thousand Suns9 March – 10 June 2024White Bay Power Station The twenty-fourth edition of the Sydney Biennale, Ten Thousand Suns, proposes celebration, abundance and joy as a means of challenging ‘Western fatalistic constructions of the apocalypse’. However, within the walls of its central venue – the newly opened White Bay Power […]

Daisy

People who are afforded glass houses shouldn’t fell trees: A response to An Unbroken Surface, Gertrude Glasshouse, Yálla-birr-ang

Dane MitchellAn Unbroken Surface17 May – 8 June 2024Gertrude Glasshouse When experiencing art or participating in spectacle some say everything has the right to exist. It’s ‘subjective’ one might add. Petrochemicals and synthetic olfactories, stinging nostrils, itchy throats and blinking red eyes. More than a few thousand scientifically scented little paper pine trees. A deeply perverted […]

Alice Castello & Is Randell

Everybody Everywhere All at Once

Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, Venice Biennale20 April – 24 November 2024 Everybody Everywhere  Whakapapa refers to genealogy, it can encompass our connection to a source; where we stand in relation to everyone and everything. The prefix whaka is used in conjunction with verbs, it means ‘to cause something to happen’. Papa refers to Papatuuaanuku, […]

Kaijern Koo

First things

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 […]

Tara Grace

tender effacement, become undone

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 […]

Sofia Sid Akhmed

Magnetic Topographies: a conversation with Therese Keogh, Kenzee Patterson and Clare Britton

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. 

Margarita Kontev

Breathing and Chaos

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 […]

Diego Ramírez

Fire Me, Paul

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 […]

Timmah Ball

Archival / Activism

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 […]

Carmen-Sibha Keiso

Inter-Review with the artists in their office-cum-studio-cum-gallery

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. […]

Giles Fielke

Four Decades, Five Hundred Prints

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 […]

Tom Campbell

Alex Hobba – Cockfighter’s Ghost

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 […]

Ren Jiang, Wen-Juenn Lee, Madison Pawle

Language Ecologies 

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 […]

Emily Morel

cobalt goblin

As we walk into the gallery, Kai tells me it’s Car Wash’s fifth birthday this year — a fact I find difficult to believe. Located in West Melbourne, the abandoned-car-wash-turned-gallery has been the site of countless self-organised exhibitions, gigs and parties, while somehow always evading the scrutiny of local council and building owners (if they […]

Skye Malu Baker

A never-quiet looking, an endless pulling

Galleries: Cathedral Cabinet, Gertrude Glasshouse Exhibitions: Victoria Stolz, no external; Francis Carmody, A Relic Remains There is a pull across the mismatched grids of the urban metropolis. From the purpose-built contemporary art space of Gertrude Glasshouse to the appropriated commercial window of Cathedral Cabinet, the allure of myth and meaning is the preoccupation of two […]

Madison Pawle

Flesh Boundaries

Gallery: FUTURES Gallery Exhibition: Sarah Drinan, Flesh Boundaries When I arrive at FUTURES the gallery-sitter is eating a bowl of soup alone at the front desk. It is quiet and I feel awkward about interrupting lunch so I walk straight into the show. In Spring, the first of Sarah Drinan’s paintings I see on entry, […]

Joanna Pope

Emily Cardboard: Tendencies in Female Behavior

Hyacinth, MelbourneCarmen-Sibha Keiso and Emily HansonOctober 13 – 31, 2023 At Hyacinth, I am eyeing the cracked and conspicuously unlatched floor-to-ceiling windows that one could plausibly lean on and fall through, down six floors of the Nicholas Building to certain death – an unfortunately fitting image given the rental precarity of the gallery, as evinced […]