( ) // Signal: Begin with a scene of a faded colonial signal —road sign, farm fence, fuzzy radio broadcast, oxidised inscription. How does this signal connect you to the past? What phantom dispatches does it relay —impossible testimony—what orders make flesh reverb // are they written? Exhumation in brown // red: Imagine the process […]
CIRCULAR / LINEAR / TIME In Te Ao Māori, time is cyclical: both the beginning and end are part of the same phenomenon. The past, present and future are experienced simultaneously. The whakatauki (proverb)‘Ka mua, ka muri’ is the idea that we walk backwards into the future. It tells us that we must look to […]
We would like to acknowledge the sovereign Traditional Custodians of the land on which we live as uninvited guests, in the suburb now known as Coburg – the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Eastern Kulin Nation in Naarm. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung people of the Kulin Nation, who are the Custodians of […]
On 11 December 2023, a group of artists and activists took another step in their ongoing protest at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. The group, called Te Waka Hourua, used power tools and spray paint to alter the text of an English display panel in the museum’s Te […]
Hasib Hourani and Jeanine Hourani in conversation across April – June 2024 HH: What is archive to you? What is something you’ve been doing lately that feels like a process of archiving? JH: I’ve been thinking a lot about the process of archiving recently actually. I’ve been thinking about it within a broader framework of […]
In my childhood home, we had a living room that we used only for when guests visited. It was the untouched section of the house and featured a Persian-style carpet, cream leather couches, a coffee table covered with a small crochet doily, a dining table with a plastic table protector and four mahogany wall units. […]
I don’t live as an artist. Destiny Deacon, 2018 multi-dimensional magick K’ua K’ua Erub/Mer woman funny sharp strong communal history politics radio performance photography video installation Thanks, Sis, for dropping the ‘c’ for us urban Blaks You gave us way to break […]
Like all Indigenous people, I believe unequivocally, that my lands are the most beautiful lands in the world. My Country, Larrakia Country, is so abundant with life and beauty, gifting us astounding moments daily. Gangly legs and knobbly knees, I’m a child standing in our backyard and watching the sky light up with radiant pink […]
Underneath the water, leaves and coins, I suspect there might be more bluestone, sitting on top of a large bed of soil of Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country. I chose to photograph this place as a way to anchor this piece, following an exercise my friend Tim Humphries shared with me earlier this year. Then he […]
The women have always danced until their skin gives out. Barefoot, my aunties lay their heels down for the final song. Their shoes rest under the table with the unclaimed tights someone has taken off. Its flesh belongs to another body of overtax and overburden and oversweat. My cousin will pick it up at the […]
18 August 2024 Dearest Zainab, As my sister Safa and I were rushing down Sydney Road — stuck behind the 19 tram in Brunswick — trying to make it to the last coffee shop open on a Sunday, she mentioned your cousin, Lina. How her visit in January felt like it had just happened, last […]
When reflecting on institutional archives, I found myself simultaneously hopeful and anticipatorily disappointed. Growing up between Kerala and Kuwait during the Gulf Wars as a displaced third-culture child, I must have internalised a stock image of an animated cast of ‘working professionals’, individuals unrestrained by gender, ethnicities, mobility, ability and means, who balanced personal needs […]
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 […]