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 […]
Diego Ramírez is an artist with dreams, a writer with hopes and a facilitator with beliefs. He is represented by MARS Gallery.
Beau Lamarre-Condon former NSW Police Officer’s writing was first featured at the Born This Way Lady Gaga tour in Sydney 2014 when he threw a letter to her on stage. Remnants of the letter were published in the Sydney Morning Herald that year.1 — Dear Lady Gaga, It’s me again. However it may be some […]
Very often we find in curatorial notes, art institutional manifestos and exhibitionary preambles, a signalling towards the etymological origins of curating in ideas of care since both ‘curation’ and ‘curative’ are drawn from the same source: ‘cura’ or care. In a (non)conclusive note at the end of a ramble that I contributed to an edited […]
On the 196th day of a live-streamed genocide in Palestine, I find that many words have lost their meaning. Words I might have spoken once with seriousness, even reverence. I might once have imagined a word as a portal, humming with futurity. But co-option makes a ghost train out of language. ‘Decolonisation’ is one word […]
As Country was cut, divided, commodified and consumed through colonial surveying, so too were the systems that governed the care of land and kin by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities for over 65,000 years. This disruption to systems of sustaining care was marked by a shift towards individualism and the accumulation of wealth and […]
In April 1972, a discussion group was convened at the University of Sydney. The group was tasked with processing a three-part performance by Tim Johnson, held at the university eleven days earlier at the invitation of Guy Warren for the School of Architecture, as many involved considered the performance works to be anti-social and misogynist […]
Current cultures of care follow a necrophilic impulse, identifying community needs along diagnoses or political ideologies. To express a need that falls outside these predetermined schemas, or worse yet to act on it, is to prove yourself toxic, problematic, dangerous. The parts of life that are messy — when an episode will not yield to […]
Increasingly one might expect a person sensitive to our settler-colonial situation to acknowledge that we are occupying a space that rests and operates within multiple likely unceded territories. That this place has always been [insert place name] a network of intersecting Indigenous movements. If this acknowledgement is performed by one claiming Indigenous ancestry, one might […]
Torsion, Curated by Kyle Weise 9 Dec 2023–27 Jan 2024 Metro Arts, Meanjin/Brisbane In 1993 I was ten years old and wanted for few things except for a pair of Nike Airs. When my classmate, Stephen, intentionally stabbed the point of his compass through the clear window of his red and white Air Max, I […]
I One of the great critiques of ‘philistinism’ — or what today we could call badauderie — is Nietzsche’s four 1873–76 essays published together as Unfashionable Observations. To the surprise of anyone who mistakes Nietzsche — as he so often is mistaken — for a sieg-heiling proto-fascist, we do not find him here proudly marching […]
Unlike the broader associations of horse racing, dog racing is typically associated with the working class due to its lower cost of participation, proximity to urban centres and evening race schedules. Bred specifically for racing, greyhounds possess an innate prey drive that compels their unrelenting pursuit of the lure. Despite their reputation as sporting dogs, […]
In some quarters of the contemporary art market, a ‘genre’ has emerged. Steeped in esoterism, this art is a blend of New Age spirituality, pastel colours, neon, and Frankie magazine aesthetics. It is de-skilled, anti-disciplinary, wonky, cute-yet-nefarious, mischievous and somewhat eerie. It evokes feelings of unease — it would be mistaken to refer to this […]
Now one uses artworks to lure poor, exhausted, and sick human beings to the side of humanity’s road of suffering for a short lascivious moment…— Friedrich Nietzsche (1887) All that is ever put on display is on the pornographic side of things…— Botho Struaß (2007) The image has lost its power. It has been drained […]
The contemporary art world loves to establish a boundary, if only to demarcate the terms of its own transgression. This is particularly evident with regards to the notion of ‘outsider art’. Originated by Roger Cardinal in a 1972 text, the phrase is today used in reference to a vast array of practices, including naïve art […]
In his book The Culture of Narcissism (1979), Christopher Lasch uncannily predicted the perilous state of the contemporary subject. He anticipated a cultural landscape surplus with images of desire rendering the subject beholden to an amalgamation of preexisting material confronting them through the pervasive mediums of photography and the ever-present wallpaper of screen culture.1 In […]
In the flâneur, the joy of watching is triumphant. It can concentrate on observation; the result is the amateur detective. Or it can stagnate in the gaper; then the flâneur has turned into the badaud. — Walter Benjamin. 1 Deborah Edwards, Senior Curator, Art Gallery of New South Wales: Just a point of judgment then. […]
Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become the […]
The popularity of the confessional mode testifies, of course, to the new narcissism.—Christopher Lasch (1979). When people today speak of “real life,” what they usually mean is the global media market. And that means: The current protest against the museum is no longer part of a struggle being waged against normative taste in the name […]
Examining the artist as gawker; with consideration to the migrational history of Lebanese hawkers in Melbourne’s marketplace, Keiso and Peters consider the artistic interplay of production and spectatorship that amounts to a position of becoming entertainers of their own production loop. Here the lost labour movements condition of waiting for work necessitate a certain political […]