In 2019, Jack Mitchell of Black White and Bluespace and Eliki Reade of New Wayfinders collaborated on Resistance Transmission — ten days of deep listening events on Boon Wurrung Country that aimed to deepen the audience’s relationship with the Maribyrnong river through storytelling, song, poetry and yarning, or talanoa. Held within the Due West Arts […]

What if we made the skilled labour of listening, building relationships, and ongoing maintenance more visible in public pedagogy and socially negotiated art?1 What if we understood such work as forms of caretaking while actively resisting the enabling of broken systems? Community engaged arts work has come under scrutiny for its often misguided ‘good intentions’ […]

Paint pours through a system. Run of the mill white emulsion runs through pipes into canvas, fills canvas, pours out, through a series of neatly cut holes, runs down, is caught, fed into pump, fed into pipes, into canvas, through and round. Natasha Kidd’s Flow and Return (2006) is a cyclical loop of white paint […]

I didn’t notice that his fly was down at first. I thought maybe he was a bit out of it as he leaned on the front window to support himself. I peered at his face from the other side of the glass. He looked serene, beatific even, with a soft, gentle grin on his face. […]

A speculation on speculation, this nonlinear conversation addresses processes of working. It allows for a thematic meander that we hope you can join us on, one perhaps for all the tangential thinkers … Previously, we have moved through moments in sound guided by Assia Djebar’s words on ‘Aphasia,’ ‘Murmur,’ ‘Voice,’ ‘Clamour’ and ‘Whisper’ in Fantasia: […]

Late last year I went up to Bendigo for the launch of Chunxiao Qu’s poetry book at the La Trobe Art Institute. My partner and I decided to stay overnight because we had heard about a huge population of bats that live in a park there and we also wanted to check out a few […]

January 20, 2023Whadjuk Noongar Boodja As an artist, I have a deep and profound respect and reverence for art. The drive to communicate the joys, tragedies and bewilderment of the human experience by creating beautiful things is core to who we are as a species. It must be protected at all costs.It’s what makes life […]

In October 2022, I found myself in India working alongside Gumbaynggirr artist and friend, Aretha Brown. Aretha was commissioned by the Australian High Commission in New Delhi, to create a 122 metre mural, running along the chancery’s perimeter. Hailing from the Gumbaynggirr peoples and language group, the mural’s title, Girrwaawa, translates to ‘come together.’ A […]

In the whenua (land), the art collective Kauae Raro see the potentiality for its use as art material and as cultural and spiritual mediums. Through a broad expanse of experiments more can be uncovered about the state of Te Taiao (the natural world) and how Māori engage with the world around us. Founded in 2019 […]

While most people in the world can understand speech in more than one language, the bilingual speaker is considered exceptional in so-called Australia. I am, to my own dismay, a statistically-average-by-Australian-standards monolingual anglophone despite having two multilingual parents. I write this article in the nascency of my Cantonese learning. Although it is my mother’s lineage, […]

We started HEAVY DUTY in the second half of 2020. The world was in a constant state of clash, but fortunately for us in Boorloo our geographic isolation allowed for a relative sense of ease. People previously living abroad were returning to the safety of the Boorloo dome, bringing with them stories of Covid-19 from […]

Thinking back to my first visit to However Vast the Darkness atJohn Curtin Gallery in March, I now remember that moment as being unusually bookended by the subject of death. In the months prior to seeing the exhibition, death seemed to be a recurring theme in my life; a sequence that I can only describe […]

So far the 2020s have been the decade of the ‘water’ and‘decolonial’ biennial. Everyone’s doing it — bringing togetherIndigenous and non-white artists against the loose themes of‘flows of resistance’ or the like, attempting to make sense in amoment of intersecting and layered crises. Questions aroundinstitutional transformation, curatorial activism, representation,the environment, climate change, equality, and how […]

How can a culture move forward if it does not have access to itspast? For Jasmine Togo-Brisby, a fourth-generation AustralianSouth Sea Islander (ASSI) with ancestral lineage to the Vanuatuislands of Ambae and Santo, artistic constructions of the past create routes and roots to imagine ASSI futurities. Togo-Brisby’s practice recuperates cultural memory to unveil the complex […]

Before we had even met, I had a peripheral appreciation forMossy 333’s work. I knew Mossy to be an artist workingresourcefully within her means to produce boundary-pushingwork across tattoo, painting and performance. Her relocationback to Boorloo from Naarm in 2020 was the latent beginningto a friendship grounded in a mutual witnessing of growth and staunch […]

1. He ate the scone aggressively while his girlfriend viewed theother installations in the gallery. He was unsure how long shewould take to assemble an appropriate amount of material forthe review she was commissioned to write. As he continuedeating, he barely noticed that there was someone watching himin the corner; their white slip dress blended […]

My annotated bibliography contains carefully selected textsand images that, over time, have become crucial to my practice as a writer and researcher. As someone who identifies as an Australian Muslim, many of the works that have resonated with me are those that discuss issues and topics that are close to my heart and my own […]

Walking around the gallery space with an art conservator’s eyesight, I see paintings in a very specific way. I always start with colour. I see warmth or coolness. The vibrations or the movements. The dust, dirt and grime settled atop the canvas’ surface. I see the artists’ choices in the brushstrokes – what is original […]

During severe lockdown in 2020, a group of us formed a Pacific Reading Group comprising Yuki Kihara (interdisciplinary artist who is representing Aotearoa New Zealand at 59th Venice Biennale 2022), Natalie King (curator of Yuki Kihara: Paradise Camp), Ioana Gordon-Smith (Wellington-based assistant curator for the Venice Biennale) and Allan Haeweng (Kanak curator in New Caledonia). […]

Seed CatalogueWelcome to the un Magazine catalogue of flower seeds. Made available within are nineteen beings, each having persisted from the earliest of mail order catalogues through to their last. Each entry tells a plant story in language made possible through their growth and together they could even make a garden. I hope you will […]

Kink is a cross-disciplinary working group researching and formalising a history of queer Australian art. Our work is defined by an interest in publishing, scholarship, advocacy, and public access. We are deeply passionate about generating new and open resources for and about the Australian LGBTQIA+ visual arts community. Below, each of our group’s current members […]

citations for a dream1 And sothe whole thing collapse at the dawn of history2 when tiger look askance on His earthisland possessions riding shotgun the crocodile3 little bunso and kapatid kayak kuyaswing generous-genealogied into the mouth of a dream where wound are apertureand not deep pit to lose oneself down4 deep lore come present itself […]

by Caitlin Franzmann and Amaara Raheem Caitlin and Amaara sit on the quartz sandstone ridges of Karawatha Forest surrounded by Eucalypts. Sinking into geological time, the folding rocks and plant fossils enfold their skin, their senses. The rocks tell of ancient floods and volcanic eruptions. Stories of connection to Country exist both in the landscape […]

The following texts and filmic references were instrumental in the creation of In a World Full of Angels (2022), a short film commissioned by Gertrude Contemporary that is currently available to view online as part of their Digital Commissions program. Channelled by the film’s main character, a pilgrim skydiver, these texts and filmic references have […]