The Potter Museum of Art, Parkville VICNgarn Wa’ngal: Art of the gum tree01.07.26 – 21.11.26 ‘Castrated, broken, a thing wronged’— Oodgeroo Noonuccal, 1960, Municipal Gum This month I was reminded of the folding powers of grief and of its parsimonious insistence that time does not stop in the way that it should; that life, albeit […]

While I am admittedly prone to hyperbole, I do think editing un Extended in 2025-26 could have been the best job I’ve ever had. I asked a dozen authors to entertain and inform readers, while writing about art and artists that I personally wanted to know about. And they did it! The power went to […]

I’m not exactly sure why I was invited by the un Extended editor-in-residence to write on the topic of The Crank in relation to the state of art history in Australia. But it might help to shed some light on a brief exchange I had with another sometimes-art-writer/editor that had left me perplexed; after some […]

Caspar Connolly: Eaves28 February – 1 March 2026Cache After the recent passing of the French minimalist composer Éliane Radigue, I came across an image of her in circulation. Taken in Nice in the late 1950s, Radigue is photographed holding a spikey conch shell to her ear. In a 2011 Frieze interview with the Australian sound […]

It’s been ages since I first worked in the arts but it’s something that I often reflect on. In recent times, it has become apparent how cultural institutions and creative festivals’ main objective is not to benefit the broader public to engage, learn and be creative, but rather, are operated for the benefit of the […]

Gunyang / Midsummer  This is a spell to reverse the night. This is a spell to enter the archive. This is a spell to tell the story – again. On the longest day of the year, when the Sun King was at the end of his youth, I went to the Imaging Service Centre in […]

‘Queer is, after all, a spatial term, which then gets translated into a sexual term, a term for a twistedsexuality that does not follow a “straight line”… The spatiality of this term is not incidental.’Sara Ahmed, 2006. Queer Phenomenology, 67. In rūḥ al-rūḥ – jan-e janān, Ayman Kaake is twisting. His body, projected onto sheets […]

For the past three years, Nunzio Madden’s paintings have played host to one character and one character only. Musclebound and jaundiced, it is a plain anatomy of disquieting features: its head, bald as an egg and tiny relative to its hypermasculine, double-linebacker shoulders, hangs expressionless above a Ken-smooth crotch. Madden’s recent exhibition at KINGS, titled […]

Melbourne Art Ephemera Archive was established by Liam Vaughan in 2020, with a specific focus on collecting and cataloguing materials produced by artist-run, offsite and other non-institutional spaces. These documents consist of roomsheets, flyers, posters, social media posts, essays and so on, which often fall outside the remit of larger institutional collecting practices. Yet these […]

Machine Residue – Curated by Yi Li Trocadero Projects 1 October – 2 November 2025  In the accompanying exhibition text, curator Yi Li writes that Machine Residue, recently shown at Trocadero Projects, ‘does not seek one single narrative, but rather an assemblage of lived and imagined experiences that … disrupt reductive representations, and reveal the complex residues […]

Tera Echo – Daisy Dale CollierBlak Dot Gallery12 July – 3 August 2025 At the gallery entrance I’m greeted by the exhibition title, Tera Echo, underscored with red ochre dragged across the wall, a handwritten epigraph of Country and kin. Beyond the partition wall, the room is painted black like a night sky turned inside […]

On the occasion of Andrea Illés’ performance, no rock, no flower (West Space, 6 September – 25 October 2025), her collaborator Tom Denize reflects on the ungraspable nature of Illés’ work. Illés is a performance artist whose work has been featured at SOFT CENTRE, Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery (NZ), Visual Diary, and more. Her […]

This transcript is taken from two interviews conducted in June 2025 at Yusi Zang’s Gertrude Contemporary studio in Preston South. Born in Beijing, Zang moved to Naarm / Melbourne in 2014 to study Fine Arts at Monash University, and has since solidified a practice across painting and sculpture, exhibiting at an impressive schedule in artist-run, […]

Of Stadiums and Construction Sites (Ne change rien pour que tout soit différent)21 June – 10 August 2025Gertrude Contemporary The videos that A Constructed World (Jacqueline Riva, Geoff Lowe, et al.) made in the mid-00s are considerably more pared down than their earlier and their later ones. There is no speech. The Melbourne-born, Paris-based artist […]

There’s a certain kind of art that insists too much on being art — polished, declared, and coded for legibility. Then there’s Lilly Skipper. Her work operates at a frequency too low for immediate classification, too dry for spectacle, and too structurally odd to be comfortably consumed. And yet, it lingers — not because it […]

The English artist Ti Parks spent almost exactly a decade in Naarm / Melbourne. Arriving in 1964, after a stint in art school he was featured in the Young Contemporaries exhibitions of Swinging London, where generations of bright Brits cut their teeth (the 1963 iteration included both Parks and a young chap called David Hockney). […]

Something like a laboratory, Hugo Blomley has litres of chemicals stacked in the corner of his studio. Two separate workbenches are covered with drills and hardware, screws and nails, discarded moulds, half-opened adhesives tubes and mislabelled plastic bottles. Another bench wraps around the perimeter of the space littered with scales, epoxy, bottles of acetone, a […]

to carry songs: a diary        and thoughts              about language                    in fragments  : reflections from March Meeting 2025: Sharjah Biennial 16  1. Between 4 February and 10 March 2025, I went to Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab […]

I’m on the phone with the artist Edward Dean. He’s supposed to be in German class right now, but he’s ducked out early and is walking through the snow. He finds himself living in Berlin, by way of Lisbon, by way of Melbourne, originally from Albury, NSW. We’re catching up on the state of things, […]

Last November, a banana duct-taped to a wall sold for US $6.24 million. The piece, Comedian (2019) by Maurizio Cattelan, runs in a limited edition of three, the second of which having been sold for much more than its estimated value to Justin Sun, a collector and the founder of the cryptocurrency platform TRON.[1] Sun […]

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 […]